SCHULZ, BRUNO

SCHULZ, BRUNO (1892–1942), Polish author and painter. Born in Drogobycz, Galicia, Schulz trained as an architect and during the years 1924–39 taught art in the high school of his home town. Księga Bałwochwalcza, a volume of his collected pictures, appeared in 1922–24. He first made his mark as a writer with reviews published in 1933 in Wiadomości Literackie. The two surviving works of fiction which Schulz produced were Sklepy cynamonowe (1934) and Sanatorium pod klepsydrąá (1937), both volumes of short stories. He set his tales in a small town, much like his own, though bereft of local color, combining authenticity with fantasy and myth. Like kafka , whose novel The Trial he translated into Polish (1936), Schulz was a literary pioneer of the magical and absurd and he mingled personal recollections with visionary fantasy. Mesjasz ("The Messiah"), a novel which he wrote shortly before World War II, remained unpublished and has been lost. In 1938 Schulz was awarded a prize by the Polish Academy of Literature for his two published works, which were accompanied by his own illustrations. Schultz' two collections were translated into English by Celina Wieniewska and published in the Penguin series "Writers from the Other Europe," edited by Philip Roth. The first collection to appear was The Street of Crocodiles, followed by Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1979) consisting of 13 stories, partly re-creations of childhood memories. Isaac Bashevis Singer called them "the work of one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived." V.S. Pritchett called The Street of Crocodiles "a masterpiece of comic writing: grave yet demented, plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving…" Cynthia Ozick's Messiah of Stockholm is an imaginative fable about the search for Schulz's lost manuscript. During the Nazi occupation Schultz was murdered by the S.S. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Ficowski, Regiony wielkiej herezji (1967); I. Witz, in: Nowa Kultura, 39 (1962). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Ficowski, Introduction to The Street of Crocodiles (1977); idem, Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz – a Biographical Portrait (2002); Cz. Z. Prokopczyk, Bruno Schulz, New Documents and Interpretations (1999); J. Updike, "Schulz's Charred Scraps," in: Odd Jobs (1991), 751–56; V.S. Pritchett, "Bruno Schulz: Comic Genius," in: Lasting Impressions, Essays 1961–1987 (1990), 128–32. (Stanislaw Wygodzki)