Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz: With Selected Prose (English and Polish Edition) - Hardcover

Bruno Schulz; Jerzy Ficowski

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060158964 ISBN 13: 9780060158965

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1987

Synopsis

Bruno Schulz (1892 - 1942) was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread. In his brilliant, intensely illuminated fiction, Schulz evoked a glorious world through a magical combination of personal myth, fantasy, and highly sensual language. "If Schulz had been allowed to live out his life," Isaac Bashevis Singer has said, "he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived". This is the first English translation of Schulz's collected letters, and it includes as well 75 drawings and photos and nine pieces - essays, interviews, and narratives - previously uncollected in English. Schulz's letters shed light on the genesis of his small but stunning literary oeuvre. As it stands, this collection, painstakingly gathered by Jerzy Ficowski over a period of four decades, constitutes a remarkable portrait of a remarkable artist.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Polish (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

Schulz's hopeless dream of a renewal of society through inspiration and myth pervades these letters and fragments, mostly written in his native Polish village between 1933 and 1942 as the Nazi threat loomed ever larger. The same tortured spirit permeates his justly famous prose collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. This morbidly shy crafts teacher, who was shot by an SS brute, wrote spiritually questing letters, some of which bear comparison with those of his idol, Rilke. But the most impressive selections are his essay on Kafka, whom Schulz considered deeply religious; his richly beautiful "The Republic of Dreams"; and his rhapsodic meditation, "Fatherland." The 70-odd pencil or ink drawings reproduced here reflect Schulz's neurotic preoccupation with dwarfish male freaks cowed by coy or powerful females.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0060158964
• ISBN 13: 9780060158965
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256