A short life of the author
Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was born on 12 July 1892 in Drohobych, a small town in Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine). He studied architecture in Lwów and spent his adult life teaching drawing at a gymnasium in Drohobych. He was murdered by a Gestapo officer, Karl Günther, on 19 November 1942 during a Nazi Aktion in the Drohobych ghetto.
Life and Career
Schulz was a provincial drawing teacher who produced, in his spare hours, two of the most remarkable works of fiction in any language. The Street of Crocodiles (Sklepy cynamonowe, literally “Cinnamon Shops,” 1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą, 1937) are collections of interconnected stories set in a fictionalised Drohobych, narrated by a boy whose merchant father is undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis — growing birdlike, retreating into closets, becoming increasingly estranged from the human world.
Schulz’s prose — even in translation — is hallucinatory, baroque, and ecstatic. His Drohobych is a place where reality is unstable, where matter is alive with secret meanings, where the boundary between the animate and inanimate dissolves. He has been compared to Kafka, but the comparison is misleading: Kafka’s world is austere and bureaucratic; Schulz’s is lush, sensual, and overflowing with imaginative excess.
Major Works and Themes
Schulz wrote about the transfiguration of ordinary reality by imagination — about the way childhood perception, unconfined by adult categories, reveals the miraculous within the mundane. His father’s transformation is the central myth: the decline of patriarchal authority, the metamorphosis of the human into the animal and the material, the persistence of wonder in a world of commerce.
His visual art — drawings and paintings with strongly masochistic and erotic themes — is also significant and has been exhibited internationally.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Schulz has been championed by writers including Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Grossman. His influence on magic realism and fantastical fiction is considerable, though his work resists assimilation into any tradition.
Key Works
- The Street of Crocodiles (1934)
- Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937)
Collecting Schulz
Polish first editions are museum-quality rarities — virtually unobtainable. The English translations by Celina Wieniewska — The Street of Crocodiles (1963, Walker and Company, New York) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1978, Walker) — are the standard collected forms in English: $50–$200 each. Schulz was murdered in 1942; no signed copies are known to exist on the market.