(A) Drohobych. Bruno Schulz writes a letter to Romana Halpern.
(B) Gazeta Polska publishes a review of Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass written by Marian Piechal, entitled “Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą”.
(A) Schulz informs the addressee that his multi-week efforts to receive foreign currency for a trip to Paris (Halpern has a certain share in it) “seems to be successful”. The biggest obstacle seems to have been removed. However, it is not in Schulz’s favour now. The reason he provides has already been formulated more than once. “In Paris”, he writes, “the dead season, everyone is leaving. If I go, it is probably for the sake of consistency and so that so much effort will not be wasted”. There is something else that is keeping him from leaving. Schulz broke through the writer’s block that had lasted for months. “I started to write”, he confides in a friend. “It is going very hard and slowly. If I had four months of free time, I would finish my book. This is also the reason why I don’t feel like going”. (sr) (transl. mw)
See also: August 16, 1936, September 19, 1936, September 30, 1936, [October 1936], [beginning of November 1936], November 15, 1936, November 29, 1936, December 5, 1936, April 30, 1937, July 24, 1937, August 3, 1937, August 16, 1937, [between August 20 and August 26, 1937], August 30, 1937, September 29, 1937, October 13, 1937, November 16, 1937, January 12, 1938, January 18, 1938, January 23, 1938, February 6, 1938, [around mid-February 1938], February 21, 1938, March 3, 1938, March 10, 1938, March 20, 1938, March 31, 1938, April 17, 1938, May 19, 1938, May 28, 1938, June 8, 1938, [after June 12, 1938], August 29, 1938, 13 October 1938, October 29, 1938, December 26, 1938, January 21, 1939, [June 1939*]. (bt) (transl. mw)
(B) Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass differs from Schulz’s debut collection of short stories mainly in that the author writes less about his father and more about himself. According to the reviewer, Schulz’s works are macabre jokes in the style of Edgar Allan Poe or Hanns Heinz Ewers, smelling of “heavily weathered Witkacy* and Apocalypse”. However, he achieves the “strange existence” without the use of absurdity, enigmatism or diabolism, and “all monstrosities happen mostly in a funny way”. Moreover, the deformation of reality never exceeds the limits of probability, even if it was the probability of a dream (as we can see in the story The Pensioner). At the same time, he is not looking for the weirdness and the extraordinary, but for the ordinary and commonplace, which he strips of cliché, giving it the features of supernatural. According to Piechal, Schulz’s main goal is “to show every reflex of existence that he could be beyond his will and imagination”, and thus to create a world that defies the rules of logic. He is protected from the absurd by “extraordinary insight”, that is, a philosophy that justifies every extraordinary and “unusually beautiful language”, especially the metaphor that reflects the essence of the matter. The book is provided with illustrations that are not only decorations – they constitute “the final commentary on the work”, add to what words cannot express, and confirm that Schulz, like Stanisław Wyspiański, is a painter who strayed into literature. (pls) (transl. mw)
