Bruno Schulz

This remarkable prose stylist and artist lived a life outwardly uneventful to the point of drabness, but inwardly incandescent. His writing is the window into that inner life. Poetic, magical, irridescent, obsessive, and often wildly funny, Schulz’s language is the virtual obverse of the stifling reality of the shtetlach – the provincial centres of Jewish life in Eastern Europe whose imminent obliteration he seems uncannily to have sensed.

 

Schulz was born, lived and died in Drohobych, in the province of Galicia. He studied architecture in Lvov, returning to Drohobych to work as a school teacher from necessity rather than inclination. His writing was slow to achieve recognition – unsurprising, given its subversion of all the rules of narrative. Recognition nevertheless came towards the end, and it is said that James Joyce learnt Polish in order to read Schulz in the original.

 

When the Nazis occupied Poland, Schulz as a Jew was confined to the ghetto of Drohobych, but found a patron of sorts in the form of a Nazi officer, Felix Landau. When Landau murdered a Jew similarly protected by another officer, the latter revenged himself by killing Schulz.

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer said of Schulz: “He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached”. 

 

This selection of readings from Schulz is taken from The Street of Crocodiles, and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. It broadly tracks the passage of the seasons from the end of summer into the depths of winter, beginning and ending with train journeys.

 

Please click on each of the following photos to view the corresponding video.