Bruno Schultz article by Irish author Paul R. Hyde. Bruno Schultz: The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass.

Bruno Schulz

"Poetry is the short-circuitry of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth." Bruno Schulz.

"One of the most remarkable writers who ever lived ... He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached." Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The excessively shy art teacher from Drohobycz in the south-eastern provinces of pre-war Poland could never have imagined that the stories he wrote in his lonely spare time would many years later be published and admired all over the world, adoringly reviewed in major literary papers, that his brief incandescent fictions would be praised by literary VIPs and that his work would be compared to that of major authors.

Schulz was a true baroque master of the marvellous and his fictions haunt the ghostly border between dream and memory. Schulz's only two books reveal an imagination of such power that he can be compared with only the very greatest of literary artists: The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass are masterpieces.

Although essentially a repressed solitary, Schulz enjoyed an immensely rich inner life and his intense imagination was capable of transforming the tedium of daily habit and minor eccentricity into scenarios of perfectly credible operatic madness on a cosmic scale. His fiction brings to mind the world of Marc Chagall.

In one of his shortest pieces, Mr Charles, (little over two pages) Schulz reaches into zones of experience where few writers have ever gone. No plot, no dialogue, no characters: simply a man alone in a room drenched in the very static of time, sweating out the futility of his existence. And then the silent 'voice' of the mirror watching him as he turns to leave. Possibly it is the greatest and simplest story ever written about the enigmas of time and the mystery of identity.

Schulz was certainly a remarkable 'metafictionist' although he very probably would not have known the term 'metafiction'. He did not need to. He was an artist who fully merits his belated fame and if the word 'genius' still has some meaning, then that residual meaning is greatly enriched by the extraordinary achievement of Bruno Schulz.

Schulz, despite his chronic timidity and his isolation, belonged fully to the modern in Western literature which articulates a breakdown in coherence, a radical disjunction, which deals with madness and tedium and a profound sense of exclusion and solitude.

Bruno Schulz was murdered in his hometown by an SS officer in 1942.

Further reading:

Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz edited by Jerzy Ficowski. Fromm Publishing, NY. 1990.
Regions of The Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a biographical portrait by Jerzy Ficowski. Norton, NY 2002.