Grazyna Furman

    The University of Chicago

    Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages

    Chicago, IL

The Concept of Marginality in the Biography and Literary Works of Bruno Schulz

Writing Sample

Imagine a young teacher, sensitive and extremely modest, living in a small, peripheral town. He spends his days teaching students how to draw and then, in the evening, withdraws from social activities in order to pursue his passion for writing. He leads a modest social life and the majority of his friends are men. His only involvement with women takes a form of a passionate correspondence. The young teacher is a loner, a person who in our contemporary world would make friends, or exchange ideas over the Internet, as it would enable him to maintain physical distance from others.  A potential observer may describe such man's life as monotonous, uneventful, unsuccessful and far from glamorous. However, only his pupils are aware of his extraordinary gift: The young art teacher is a wonderful storyteller. At school, his students often cause the electricity failure in order to light the candles and listen to his stories. The usually loud class suddenly becomes so silent that on one occasion, the school principal makes an appearance to check whether they showed up for the class.

When the teacher starts telling a story, suddenly, his body and mind undergo metamorphosis. The students, mesmerized by their teacher's words slowly leave the realm of reality and travel to distant places. They obediently follow their skilled guide, whose words come out as naturally as the air in and out of their lungs. He speaks as if he were making music out of his words with his voice dancing with the candlelight. The teacher often helps his students visualize the story by drawing on the blackboard with a different-colored chalk. The pupils’ emotions are heightened and the curiosity increases from one minute to the next. The heroes of the story are now being pursued by a dragon and find their safety in the Carpathian Mountains. Unfortunately, the school bell rings and the students are abruptly awakened. They "return" to reality of the classroom and unwillingly start packing their belongings. Some of them feel disappointed, some insatiated, as they have not reached the end of story.  Sometimes they walk their teacher home in order to extend the magical journey and hear the end of his stories. He fascinates and puzzles them.

Such man, Bruno Schulz, present in their classroom many years ago, is present with similar intensity in the mind of the contemporary reader. Bruno Schulz, the storyteller, whom Isaac Bashevis Singer described as someone more talented than Kafka[1], was a solitary man with incredibly rich inner life, full of dreams and memories of his childhood. His vivid imagination, acute perception of the physical world and the depth of his mental experience could only be represented to the outside world in the works of art. He resented boredom, triviality and found the world around him mundane. His contemporaries described him as a person who was not afraid of dying and often welcomed the thought of parting with his life. One of the Polish translators, Celina Wieniawska, compared him to a “volcano smoldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town”[2]. He lived through his imagination and as beautifully and powerfully as Marc Chagall painted his childhood memories of Vitebsk in Russia, Bruno Schulz invented his poetically- prosaic language, writing about his hometown, Drohobycz [3].

Artists and writers create realms alternative to the world they live in, in order to transport both the artist and viewer from the actual to the invented, and to help to see the world in a new way. In creative works, the towns, memories and heroes become magically reincarnated through the artistic medium of paint or language.

Bruno Schulz was not only the artist searching for means to describe the world seen through his eyes. He was a profound thinker whose feelings of alienation and inadequacy had “tinted” or overshadowed his work[4]. Schulz, like his other contemporaries, for example, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, feared the mechanization of the human thought. He was not a conformist, and according to his critics, he did not fit into the societal definition of “normalcy”. His literature was self-centered and dissociated from reality and humanity. He was, and still is considered to be a marginal writer.

The definition of a margin or a marginal entity operates on several assumptions. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the etymology of the word marginal comes from Medieval Latin word marginalis. It defines something placed or written on the borders of a page that is not of a central importance. A marginal person, for example, can be described as someone who incorporates the habits and values from two divergent cultures, but by incomplete assimilation in either, is excluded from the existing mainstream of society. The concept of a margin in a book evokes an image of a blank space on the edge of a page, located outside the main text and used for notes, scribbling or explanation. Similarly, the marginal literature refers to the works created outside of the official rules of composition. In other areas of knowledge, such as in psychology, the concept of a margin is used to describe a bridge between the conscious and the subconscious. Such marginal area is composed of psychic elements neither completely conscious nor subconscious. In social psychology, what is known as marginal personality refers to the individual who has grown between two different cultures and his or her cultural duplicity created an intra-psychic struggle. In sociology, people and groups who fail to integrate with general social structures are described as marginal. In political theory, marginality refers to a situation of people who are excluded from the economic benefits, power and political influence.

Throughout the history and in literary works, marginal individuals consisted of the mentally ill, unemployed, social outcasts: all of which violated the commonly adopted rules of co-existence with other members of their community. Foucault in the essay Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology[5], describes the concept of madness as an alienating factor in human social life. Throughout the history of the humankind, with the exception of primitive societies, the mentally ill individuals have always been ostracized. In addition to the mentally ill, prostitutes, gravediggers, rural folk and convicted criminals, the minstrels- poets were also considered marginal. The minstrels, for example, lacked permanent home and roamed from place to place to perform their craft. They were perceived as the corruptors of the “healthy” body of the society, considered dangerous and demonic. They were excluded from their communities and subjected to repression. In the 13^th century, the church declined them holy sacraments and finally excommunicated them. The historical data supports the notion that the middle Ages created a clear distinction between the pious and the “grotesque” members of the society and since then, the position of the madmen in the community has not fundamentally improved.

The concept of human “sanity” is still closely related to human social interactions and can be defined in terms of a successful participation in the following five categories: Labor (employment and economic growth), sexuality (family and reproduction of the society), communication (language and speech), ludic activities (games and festivals), and observance of symbols (religious and secular). The madmen were unable to participate in all, or in majority of these social spheres. Every major society defines human abnormal behavior as contradictory to the culturally established and acceptable behaviors. Abnormal individuals are then ostracized and placed on the “margin” of the “mainstream”. Sigmund Freud defined a madman as a person who could neither work or love. Therefore, the madman would neither be able to carry an employment, nor establish a mutually fulfilling romantic relationship.

Bruno Schulz’s biography strikes a reader with similarities to Freudian definition of a madman. He exhibited a high level of contempt towards his regular employment and avoided personal relationships with women. He never established his own family and his body language communicated social inaptitude and preference for a solitary lifestyle. He was terribly modest and afraid that already famous people would ignore him or ridicule him. His shyness almost carried an element of narcissism, as he believed that the way he looked and acted was truly important to people around him.

 Foucault describes the 17^th century Europe as a place where the presence of the madmen was tolerated. However, with the formation of the industrial society their existence was no longer justified. The sick, the unemployed, the elderly and the mentally ill were forced to confinement. In France, at the end of the18th century, Philippe Pinel gave freedom to the mentally ill and at the same time in England, Samuel Tuke created the first psychiatric institution. In the realm of European literature, the concept of a margin began to emerge during three historical periods: In the 16^th century, the themes of the chivalrous novels began to exhibit contempt for the structures of the society (Erasmus’ “The Praise of Folly”, works of Tasso, or the Elizabethan drama).  Also in France, during that period, the literature of madness started taking a prominent place. The second period, at the end of 18th century and beginning of 19th century favored the themes of madness in the poetry of Holderlin, Blake, and later of Raymond Russel. With the development of a literary thought and supported by the opinions of Nietzsche and Baudelarie, it became crucial to realize that in order to establish new fields in literature, one must imitate madness or actually become mad. 

Bruno Schulz was a marginal person and a marginal writer. His natural predisposition to psychological unrest and sensitivity placed him outside the mainstream of his society. He was born in 1892 in a small town of Drohobycz in Galicia, in the Austro- Hungarian monarchy, where the culture had a considerable level of autonomy. Mixed Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian elements of the community enabled the ethnically distinct groups to follow their own cultural tradition[6]. Schulz spent fifty years of his life in Drohobycz, and despite his occasional trips to Warsaw or Paris, he showed little inclination to leave his hometown permanently in order to inhabit cultural centers of Europe. Even when a possibility of escaping on false identity papers was presented to him, he refused to leave Drohobycz[7]. His job as an art teacher provided him with a moderate financial support. However, he saw his employment as a waste of time he would have rather spent on creative writing. He despised the idea of sacrificing his passion for the sake of making a living. However, his situation left him without any alternative. Subsequently, his pessimistic attitude towards life alienated him from his family, and he closed himself more and more in his own private world. Schulz’s nephew, Jacob Schulz remarked in his memoir that his father often mentioned his unaccomplished brother who had difficulties supporting himself. He characterized Bruno as a timid individual who was afraid of any physical and psychological upsets, particularly terrified of bruises and cuts.

 When asked to review another writer’s work, Schulz avoided any negative comments in order to prevent any upsets. Regina Silberner in her memoir “Strzepy Wspomnien,” mentioned an encounter she had with Schulz’s brother Lulu. The image of a successful and handsome Lulu loudly clashed with Bruno’s bird-like posture. She was amazed having noticed how much Bruno differed from his brother or from anyone she had known[8]. Bruno was perceived as an extremely sensitive and compassionate individual. Once, when he was a little boy, his mother Henrietta found him in his room feeding grains of sugar to flies that had survived the cold autumn. When she asked him why he kept giving them sugar, he answered, ‘So they will last the winter’[9].

His creative writing period happened to coincide with important changes in the structure and function of Polish literature of the early 20^th century. After 1918, during the process of rebuilding the independence from the foreign powers, a large number of polish writers adopted a literary style devoid of any artistic themes. The emphasis on such non-artistic literary style provided grounds for the origination of a  “center” and the “margins” in Polish literature. The literature of the “center” assumed a role of a guide for the society: it was supposed to strengthen the spirit of the nation, promote unity, stability, and raise the society’s conscience. The literature of the “margins” on the other hand, stayed outside of the social “page”. It continued to cultivate the artistic expression and removed itself from the new ideology. The marginal literature was saturated with frivolity, parody, irony, eccentricity and monstrosity. The language promoted by the “center” meant to be universal, sacred in nature (“logos” descending directly from God), and in terms of communication, expected to be serious, official, coherent, standard (reproductive) and monological. Only such language could provide a realistic and consistent representation of the world. On the contrary, the marginal language was heterogeneous: situational, relative, non-determined, original, novel, colloquial, secular, improper, whimsical, comical, obscene, abusive, offensive, blasphemous, dialogical and polyphonial.

Bruno Schulz’s work as well as works of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz consisted of marginal and monstrous elements. The creation of a monster in literary works was an act of rebellion against the definite forms induced by the literary style of the mainstream. As artists, Schulz, Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz resented the arid daily existence.  Monstrous elements were carefully crafted in order to come to life in the eyes of the beholder (reader) and their existence was justified by the aesthetic experience they provided. According to Montaigne, the body of work can be called a monster if it appears to be devoid of proportion, order and structure. The monstrous text is pieced together from homogenous parts by pure chance, and its elements vary in their character, continuity or shape. Montaigne and later Shklovsky[10] defined and applied a concept of defamiliarization of an object for the purpose of changing the perceiver’s habitual perception of reality. Defamiliarization created the feeling of estrangement to the familiar objects and helped to see them as anew.

There are two distinct examples of monstrosity that can appear in the work of art. The first one is structural, in which the monstrosity is defined on the basis of its heterogeneous components. The second is hermeneutical where the monstrosity is seen as unexplainable or non- understandable entity which cannot be understood in terms of any pre-established concepts. Since there is no language or a concept to describe the radically new phenomenon, it cannot be readily recognized or accepted by the viewer.  Monstrosity in literature serves as a tool of resistance against the automatization that takes place in the world.  In Schulz’s works, it helped to awake the senses, and provided the reader with a ‘fresh’ look on what was familiar and habitual. By rejecting the mainstream, the monstrous elements gave room for reflection on the purpose of one’s identity, rejuvenated the sense of individuality since only one-on-one relationship with a monster could take place.

In addition to the monstrous elements, Schulz’s work carries elements of alienation. He embarked on a journey of the “mental” and emotional “exile” from his community. His great intelligence and restlessness prevented him from following the footsteps of his contemporaries. At the same time, he felt too awkward to abandon his hometown and seek a more inspirational community.  One may wonder whether his inflexibility to move to the more culturally diverse and stimulating environment was halted by some underlying psychological disturbances. Perhaps, it was the notion of the world as being unfriendly and difficult to adjust, regardless of the geographical location. At least having remained within familiar surroundings enabled him to focus on his passion for writing.

Schulz was inspired by the fiction of three international contemporaries: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. The hypothesis that he was a disciple of Kafka is virtually universal among the critics, especially German, who often call Schulz “the Polish Kafka”[11]. Bruno Schulz published two literary works: “The Cinnamon Shops” in 1934, and “The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” in 1937. The narrative presented in his works was not based on the assumptions of the traditional psychology. Human emotions were hinted and presented to the reader as subtle clues, digressions and allusions. His language was full of metaphors, aphorisms, and marginal comments. Krzysztof Stala in his book “Na Marginesach Rzeczywistosci”[12] described the controversy that originated from the attempts to decipher Schulz’s literary style. Schulz’s style was called “Schulz’s enigma”, since no one could pinpoint to what made it so successful. His language was formed of many contradicting elements. It showed excessive wordiness but the same time, the words revealed a high level of organization. He mixed poetic language with a concrete language, and was on one hand creative and innovative and on the other, replicating and building on mythological themes. The concepts of periphery, marginality, digression and pretext were frequently present in his writing. He fit the description of an outcast writer whose solitude became his biggest allay: offering him creative powers in order to transform ordinary events into extraordinary art[13]. His work and style enabled him to enter the center stage with two other famous marginal writers: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz. The three of them were named the Polish literary “Holy Trinity.”

Bruno Schulz appears to be a marginal artist among other artists. Georg Simmel, in his essay On Individuality and Social Forms suggests a correlation between being artistic and being adventurous. To Simmel, the adventurer and the artist have a “profound affinity”, and the artist is marked by an attraction to adventure.  Art and adventure converge because the very idea of an adventure is that it is something “alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary”, and that it lacks “reciprocal interpenetration” with “life-as-a-whole”. Because both the artwork and the adventure are removed from daily reality, because they “stand over against life”, they are “analogous to the totality of life itself.”[14]  Artists and adventurers, or artists as adventurers, seek a way to retain or totalize the epiphanic experience. This adventure transgresses national space, challenging the boundaries of the nation with the imagination.  The artistic wandering turns the artist into a stranger who is seen as “other” and is at once marginalized by the society.

 Bruno Schulz did not pursue the traditional bohemian lifestyle. When he visited Warsaw, he was overwhelmed with the city life. In contrast to a passionate Marc Chagall, who ran away from his hometown Vitebsk in order to establish himself as a painter in a major city, Schulz remained confined to the provincial Drohobycz. Historians described Chagall as an explorer and a passionate lover while Schulz was characterized as a timid, modest, and fearful- of- women individual.

The issue of artistic identity within the sociology of culture has often been analyzed from the perspective of a generation gap. Younger generations’ rebellion against the economic and social orders of their parent societies contribute to the birth of bohemian and avant garde movements. Karl Manheim in his essay on Sociology and Knowledge analyzes the concept of artists’ replacement within the society. According to Mannheim, there is a continuous withdrawal of participants in the cultural process accompanied by a continuous influx of new participants. Members of one generation, due to lifespan, can only participate in a historically limited section of the cultural process. A generation exists only where “a concrete bond” is created between members of a generation and by them being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic destabilization. The convergence of displacement in the physical world with the imaginative rupture of creative experience carries the possibility of a unique type of radical innovation. Radical creativity is an experience of innovation so powerful that it uproots stagnant ideas and experiences[15]. Schulz work was new, radical and powerful enough to uproot the traditional literary tradition. He was able to implement the idea of “fine art” granted on a premise of art as pleasure contrasted with art as utility. Based on such premise, fine art finds its ultimate being in its own form, since the aesthetic experience takes place without mediation on the basis of the pre-established concepts. Beauty has no purpose outside of itself and one needs to withdraw from his or her cognitive assumption in order to “feel” rather than to “recognize”. Only the act of pure contemplation, “gazing out of one’s mind” can provide the observer or reader with satisfaction. Conceptual thinking transforms the perception of beautiful objects into a cognitive experience and therefore, it limits the observer’s metaphysical experience. In order to experience art, one must divorce art from knowledge[16]. Kant in the Critique of Judgment presents a similar view. He claims that the aesthetic judgment should be free from any concepts. Instead, the concept of “beautiful” is based on free play of the powers of representation[17].

 Schulz distinguished between two distinct forms of language: mundane and literary. The function of a mundane language is to convey information in an every-day speech. The literary language on the contrary, is based on particular conventions specific to one’s generation.  Schulz’s creed as a writer was to adhere to the principle of reinvention. He believed that as a writer, he was responsible for re-creating what had been forgotten. He saw the role of literature as means of replicating the mythological themes present in every human culture. As God created the first word, God himself was the primeval creator of “human stories”. Similarly, the writer is endowed with creative, God-like powers and continues to re-create the first “word” in his or her own stories. The role of the word is crucial in the creative process and it undergoes subsequent changes in order to be powerful enough to make changes in the world. The world needs to reflect the words and the language ought to precede reality. To Schulz, the reality did not have an adequate definition. He called it a “universal disillusioning”. According to Schulz, people and objects continuously underwent subsequent transformations.

The recurring theme in Schulz’s work is a motif of a mask. The reality is compared to the universal masquerade in which the stage of life constantly undergoes a shift; the actors shed their masks only to exhibit inner layers of disguise. Objects and individuals are made of homogeneous characteristics and can never be defined in linear manner. Schulz was moreover, enchanted with mythology and often used mythological themes in his work. To him, being a writer meant finding a place among other writers and their stories. There are two mythological elements that strike a reader: In “The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”, the father is a direct creator of life who possesses and reveals the sacred text. For Schulz’s hero, the task upon maturity is to find his male parent again, to discover his origins and discover his mission or status in life. The father possesses godlike, supernatural powers, reflected both in early life with his son and his final years of desperate battle against the bankruptcy of his business, sickness and death. Another mythological motif is the mixed parentage of a God-like father and a “normal” human mother, who is irrelevant to the initial father–son relationship. The physical contact between the mother and the son is perceived as a form of seduction. The mother intrudes on an intimacy between the father and the son and the boy is unable to related to her. In such way, Schulz has reversed the normal order of child affinity[18].

Bruno Schulz is a marginal writer within his cultural background. He was a descendant of Galician Jews and became a Polish writer by choice. He attended Polish schools and had chosen to write in Polish. He did not openly identify himself as a member of Jewish Diaspora. His full realization of being a Jew took place when Hitler’s race laws had become imposed on him[19]. Schulz’s work has been analyzed from the point of view of the Holocaust interpretation. According to Gillian Banner, Schulz writings have no direct, explicit relationship with the Holocaust. However, while he engaged in the process or trying to recollect and render a domestic, mundane and not explicitly threatened past, he produced representations of a shocking, fearful, violent and dislocated future[20]. In those elements, his work offers insights into the atrocities that took place in Europe. In the majority of literary reviews, there is little explicit reference to his Jewish heritage. This may reflect the fact that in Schulz’s work, the Jewish heritage remains encrypted. Stanislaw Baranczak described one of Schulz’s photographs in the following manner:

[…] Show his face invariably at a peculiar angle, strangely foreshortened,

as if he were glancing coyly upward from some humble, kneeling position

[…] His sunken eyes hide uneasily under his prominent, almost simian

eyebrows. He looks like the facial epitome of an inferiority complex, or

introversion[21].

Schulz was not only a marginal individual in the Polish - Ukrainian community of Drohobycz. He represents another stereotype, a despised Jew of the Diaspora. Assimilated to his surroundings, seeking to be Polish or European, rather than Yiddish or Jewish writer, Schulz is apparently estranged from his Jewish persona[22].

His narrative is marginal in its style and may be compared to the narratives of the war survivors. Such stories are characterized by the absence of sequence, lack of coherence, meaning, predictability and certainty. The fragmented reports and the shattered identity of survivors was a result of the moral disarray and chaos imposed upon them under the traumatic experience. The experience of trauma challenged the meaning and interpretation of the survivor’s world.  Schulz’s writing exhibits the disconnection and the “distilled memory” devoid of chronology, purpose, meaning or closure[23]. What to the reader may appear to be clumsy shifts in the plot, in Schulz’s work, they serve a purpose of de-familiarizing and de-stabilizing in order to disturb the reader and challenge his or her sense of chronology. The reader is left with a feeling of alienation, despite the fact that Schulz’s language is poetic.

Schulz’s work has been consistently criticized throughout his lifetime. Two of the most prominent literary critics Kazimierz Wyka and Stefan Napierski called  “The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” the book written for readers who lack artistic imagination. Their accusations included obsessive focus on time and meticulous fragmentation. Kazimierz Wyka named Schulz the second-rate artist, imitator, and the “writer of unborn stories who came too late”. Wyka pointed out the lack of the main theme in the book since the actual plot was only a digression. Such themeless book had no linear structure and defied the widely accepted convention of literary expression. According to the concept of the temporal impressionism, words in Schulz’s writing play a role of color stains similar to colors used by painters on canvas. The fragmented narration exemplifies the usage of particular words over the value of a sentence as a whole. To Schulz, the sentence is not a prime goal. Instead, the words are meant to achieve their autonomous status. According to Wyka, Schulz’s work lacked interest in humanity and focused on objects. The atmosphere of chaos was supported with the decadent style, useless ornamentation and descriptions that took up space but did not present any merit (“Swierszcz wypruwal cierpliwie z ciemnosci zludne szwy swiatla, nikly scieg, od ktorego nie stawalo sie jasniej”).“The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass” was called a hybrid, heterogeneous in origin that lacked artistic value, did not carry any universal message, and would not withstand the test of time. Stefan Napierski added to the criticism saying that Schulz’s descriptions evoked an image of a lawless junkyard or an abandoned museum. He accused him of cadaverous interests, weirdness and charlatanry. He despised Schulz’s perverted attitude towards objects and accused him of fetishism. He indicated that the book emanated with the author’s low self-esteem. The writing was labeled as evasive, monstrous, “impossible to digest”, written for snobbish but primitive town-folk.

To the contemporary readers and critics, Schulz’s writing appears to be very exclusive and unique. For the Polish-English translators, the greatest obstacle lies in the assumption that Schulz’s work can be characterized in any known way: poetic, painterly, lyrical, fantastic, surreal, fairytale-like, Chagalesque or Kafkaesque[24]. If one tries to define his style in such terms, he or she is doomed to conventionality. His uniqueness has to do not with the use of poetic description of the world but rather with reinventing the world through poetry. He applies the concept of “voluntary autoelimination” in which the poet, the author disappears and gives initiative to the words themselves[25].

Bruno Schulz’s work has been analyzed and praised posthumously. For example, John Updike analyzed his work in reference to Borges, Proust, Kafka, and Danilo Kis. James Joyce learned Polish language in order to read Schulz’s fiction in the original. Every year, his reputation and the claims for his work grow, in same cases as fantastically as the vegetation in his lushest depictions[26]. David Grossman has given a beautiful description of his own feelings on Schulz’s work.

Bruno’s power is not only in having written beautifully. He was not

merely an aesthetician enchanted by a rich and opulent language

Rather he shows us in every line what is “good”, noble, worth longing

for. Of course his language is magnificent: but it is mainly a road

map, an arrow pointing to the real language behind it, a new language,

a grammar, a lure to the freedom of all infinite possibilities. 

Once you have read Schulz, if you are willing to keep an open mind,

to take his invitation – you not only adore the entire world view

of this Galician who rarely left his shtetl, but almost against your

will you begin to see the world through his eyes. You feel the

fortified walls of the void closing in on you. You choke. You use

him to gasp a bit of fresh air. To expand the lungs of your

consciousness. He throws you a grain of sugar, that that you

will last the winter with him[27].

As a reader, I am fascinated and inspired by his marginality. In the world of changes and uncertainty, it is comforting to learn about the individual whose talent persevered regardless of all the obstacles he had to face. His sensitivity and acute perception of reality may not have been valued among his contemporaries. Nonetheless, he remained devoted to his gift and pursued writing with great passion. His belief in himself made him immortal. Nowadays, his books occupy the shelves of prominent libraries and his “marginality” is a gem placed on the crown of the exquisite literary collections. I continue to wish that I would be able to share his vision of seeing the world as anew and continue being inspired by the beauty around us. I thank you, Bruno.  

Bibliography

Banner, Gillian, 1956- Holocaust literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the memory of the offence. London; Portland, Or.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000. 

Beckett, Sr. Wendy (2000). Sister Wendy's American Collection. New York: Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 2002.

Braranczak, Stanislaw, 'The Faces of Mastery', The New Republic (2 January 1989), pp.28-34.

Brown, Russell E. Myths and relatives: seven essays on Bruno Schulz. München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1991.

Bruno Schulz: new documents and interpretations/ edited by Czeslaw Z. Prokopczyk. New York: Peter Lang, c1999.

Ficowski, Jerzy,  Regions of the great heresy: Bruno Schulz, a biographical portrait; translated and edited by Theodosia Robertson. New York: W.W. Norton, c2003.

Ficowski, Jerzy, Okolice sklepów cynamonowych: szkice, przyczynki, impresje. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1986.

Foucault, M., Madness and Society, in: M. Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited By J. D. Faubion, The New York Press, New York, 1998.

Gombrich, E. H., The Story of Art. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1992.

Great Artists of the Western World II - Fantasy and Surrealism. London: Marshall Cavandish Corporation.

Hodge, N & Anson, L. (1995). The A-Z of Art: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1998.

Kant, I., The Critique of Judgement, par. 1-17 (many editions).

Karkowski, Czeslaw, Kultura i krytyka inteligencji w twórczosci Brunona Schulza. Kraków: Wydawn. Literackie, 1980.

Mallarmé, S. Crisis in Poetry, in Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, translated with an introduction by B. Cook, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press 1956, p. 34-43.

Mannheim, Karl, "The Sociological Problem of Generations," in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge.  Routledge.  1952.  p. 303.

Moritz, K. Ph., From Preliminary Ideas on the Theory of Ornament (1785) in: The Theory of Decorative Art.

Anthology of European & American Writings, 1750-1940, ed. By I. Frank, Yale University Press 2000, p. 30-34.

Prokopczyk, C., The Bruno Schulz: new documents and interpretations. New York: Peter Lang, c1999.

Roth, Philip, Shop talk: a writer and his colleagues and their work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Schulz, B., The Book, in: The Fiction of Bruno Schulz, p. 127-139.

Schulz, B., Spring, in: The Fictions of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles &Sanatorium under the Sign of Hourglass, translated by C. Wieniewska, Picador 1988, p. 150-207.

Schulz, B., Mythologizing of Reality, in: Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz with Selected Prose, ed. by J. Ficowski, Fromm International Publishing Corporation, New York 1990, p. 115-117.

Schulz, Bruno, 1892-1942. Letters and drawings of Bruno Schulz: with selected prose / Edited by Jerzy Ficowski; translated by Walter Arndt with Victoria Nelson; preface by Adam Zagajewski. New York: Harper & Row, c1988.

Schulz, Bruno, 1892-1942. Listy, fragmenty: wspomnienia o pisarzu / Bruno Schulz; zebral i opracowal Jerzy Ficowski. Kraków: Wydawn. Literackie, 1984.

Shklovsky, V., Art as Technique, in: Russian Formalist Criticism. Four Essays, ed. By L. T. Lemon, M. T. Reis, University of Nebraska 1965, p.  3-24.

Silberner, R., Strzepy Wspomnien. Przyczynek do Biograffi Zewnetrznej Brunona Schulza. Oficyna Poetow I Malarzy. Londyn 1984. p. 18.

Simmel, Georg, "The Adventurer," in Kurt Wolff, Ed.  Georg Simmel, 1858-1918. Ohio State University Press.  1959 and Georg Simmel, "The Stranger", in On Individuality and Social Forms.  University of Chicago Press.  1979. 

Stala, K., Na Marginesach Rzeczywistosci. O Paradoksach przedstawiania w Tworczosci Brunona Schulza. Instutut Badan Literackich, Warszawa 1995, p. 7.

Studia o prozie Brunona Schulza, redaktor Kazimiera Czaplowa. Katowice: US, 1976.

Taylor, C.M., 'Childhood Revisited: The Writings of Bruno Schulz', The Slavic and East European Journal, 13:4 (1969), p. 456.

Wieniewska, Celina., Cinamon Shops and Other Stories, 1963 Translator Preface. Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1979.

Wyskiel, Wojciech, Inna twarz Hioba: problematyka alienacyjna w dziele Brunona Schulza. Wydawnictwo Literackie Krakow, 1980.

Curriculum Vitae

Main

Contact: gfurman@uchicago.edu