Schulz, Bruno

Schulz, Bruno,

1892–1942, Polish short-story writer and artist. Unrecognized until after World War II, Schulz is now considered the finest modern Polish-language prose stylist and a significant visual artist. His stories are dreamlike reflections on life in the modest Jewish quarter of Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine), where he was born and lived. Both his fiction and drawings are notable for their erotic charge and their acute anticipation of the Holocaust. His style, which has been compared both to KafkaKafka, Franz
, 1883–1924, German-language novelist, b. Prague. Along with Joyce, Kafka is perhaps the most influential of 20th-century writers. From a middle-class Jewish family from Bohemia, he spent most of his life in Prague.
..... Click the link for more information.
 and ProustProust, Marcel
, 1871–1922, French novelist, b. Paris. He is one of the great literary figures of the modern age. Born to wealthy bourgeois parents, he suffered delicate health as a child and was carefully ministered to by his mother.
..... Click the link for more information.
, is elaborately figured, poetic, and tinged with surrealism. Schulz published his first story collection, The Street of Crocodiles, in 1933 (tr. 1963); the second, The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, appeared in 1937 (tr. 1979). Germans occupied his hometown in 1939 and three years later Schulz was murdered on the street by a Gestapo officer. His reputed masterpiece, an unfinished novel entitled Messiah, has never been found. Although most of his works of art have disappeared, in 2001 fragments of a Schulz mural were discovered in a Drohobych building, parts of which were removed by Israeli agents to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

Bibliography

See J. Ficowski, ed., Letters and Drawings (1988), The Complete Fiction (1989), The Drawings (1990), The Collected Works (1998); biography by J. Ficowski, Regions of the Great Heresy (2002); C. Z. Prokopczyk, ed., Bruno Schulz: New Documents and Interpretations (1999).