11 July 1933, Tuesday

The beginning of Schulz’s acquaintance with Zofia Nałkowska* coincides with the vanishing of her feelings towards the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža. Nałkowska met Krleža in 1932 through Julije Benešice, a Croatian translator of Polish literature, who had invited Krleža to Warsaw. Nałkowska edited the Polish (allegedly quite awful) translation of Krleža’s play U agoniji (in Polish translation entitled Baronowa Lenbach) for Arnold Szyfman, and in 1933 she published¹ in Gazeta Polska an essay entitled “Miroslav Krleža”. On 23 February 1932, the Croatian writer met Nałkowska; the meeting developed into a mutual fascination, which, though Krleža was married, soon turned into an affair. As Hanna Kirchner writes: “Nałkowska seems fascinated primarily with the grandeur of this man, the format of his personality, and sees in him an authority and an ideal [...]. She also had grounds for feeling a sense of community with this Slavic and European author. Despite the artistic differences between them, they both had the same literary patrons, and both transformed the realist novel through elements of essayistic and philosophical narrative. [...] Krleža was for our Nałkowska a model of a militant leftist writer who also made sure that the doctrine would not control his creative vision”². There is an entry in Nałkowska’s Diaries that compares Krleža’s writing and letters with Schulz’s literary and epistolary output. “Isn’t it strange that the author so great writes such poor letters whose emptiness is not in any way explained by how poor his French is? Bruno Schulz, an inferior writer, grants me a vast richness not only of bizarre “adoration”, but of creative, deep and thin thoughts. [...] Such words: ‘When God said You, he already said me within You. Why did I say myself again, why did I commit this pleonasm?’ Or, ‘How am I supposed to understand the fact that you’re a woman? What did you mean by that?”³. (mr) (transl. mw)

See also: June 1933*, 19 July 1933*, August 1933*, 10 May 1934*, 19 May 1934*.