Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz - Softcover

Jerzy Ficowski; Walter Arndt; Bruno Schulz

4.25

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9780880641180: Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0880641185 ISBN 13: 9780880641180

Publisher: Fromm Intl, 1990

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Book by Jerzy Ficowski, Walter Arndt, Bruno Schulz

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Review:

In this volume, Ficowski presents what remains of Schulz's voluminous epistolary writings, some 108 letters to a variety of Polish literary figures, interspersed with 30 photographs and 42 of the writer's pencil drafts, ink drawings, and engravings. Three miscellaneous prose pieces are also included. The letters detail Schulz's emergence as a writer of major importance; his at first tentative forays into the literary circles of inter-war Poland resolve into gradual acceptance as his work gains wider currency. Drawing upon the literary surrealists, and steeped in both the terrifying and the deadpan techniques in Kafka's tales, Schulz's stories explore a metaphorical world, tangential to physical reality, where the narrator, invariably a child, lives an idiosyncratic version of events, replete with the embarrassments and misunderstandings of any child's interpretation. The geography of Schulz's fiction is, in his own words, "that misty region of early childhood fantasies, forebodings, anticipations, terrors which is the true spawning ground of mythical thinking. The drawings, many of which were made to accompany Schulz's fiction, are clearly fragments representational of another, more ominous level of the same consciousness. The atmosphere is closed, claustrophobic; the perspective skewed. Small naked men with oversized articulated heads wobble on spindly bodies. Distorted figures stand, kneel, or lie in such tortured relation to each other as to suggest scenes of extreme sexual degradation, shame, and bewilderment. In the several attempts in these letters to explain his literary and graphic art, Schulz always harks back to the decisive influence of images and texts preceived in earliest childhood: "It seems to me that all the rest of one's life is spent interpreting these insights, breaking them down to the last fragment of meaning we can master." Schulz's art, much of it fragmented, some of it lost, is the stuff of collective memory, resonant yet troubling, palpable yet elusive. "The secret," as he wrote, "stays in a tangle." -- From Independent Publisher

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," reported PW , noting that "some of his spiritually questing letters bear comparison with those of his idol, Rilke."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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