Warsaw. The second issue of Tygodnik Ilustrowany features Dodo by Bruno Schulz with the author’s illustrations.
The story has been provided with an editorial annotation, “Drawings by the author”. Schulz prepared as many as seven illustrations for this publication. Earlier, probably in the autumn of 1934, he had to arrange it by correspondence with Wacław Czarski*, the then editor of Tygodnik Ilustrowany*. It is possible that Schulz took the illustrations for the story to Warsaw, where he and Józefina Szelińska* spend their holidays, and handed them personally to Czarski. He must have had a good opportunity to do so then. Recalling years later her stay in Warsaw at the turn of 1934 and 1935, Szelińska wrote to Jerzy Ficowski*: “We made a lively contact with the direct and kind Wacio Czarski, who promised to get me a job in Warsaw”. Anyway, the story appears on January 13th with Schulz’s original illustrations. It is his first publication in Tygodnik Ilustrowany, a magazine with a long tradition that had been published since 1859 and played an important role in literary life in the second half of the 19th century. The impact of Tygodnik Ilustrowany was much smaller in the1930s. At that time, the magazine was run by Zdzisław Dębicki and was not related to any political or artistic movement; it was then a popular literary magazine. In the following years, Schulz would work closely with it, publishing several of his own short stories and book reviews.
The story Dodo would be included by the author in the volume Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass* (1937). There are only two illustrations in the issue. They repeat the themes known from Tygodnik but in a different way. In both cases, Schulz also used a different drawing technique. In the magazine, it is a free pencil draft, in the book – a synthetic pen drawing, in the same convention as the other illustrations from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Many more (nearly forty) differences between the two editions can be found in the text of the stories. They are usually editorial stylistic corrections, which Schulz did not transfer to a later edition of the book. Schulz wrote about several stories, including Dodo, in a letter from March 16, 1935 to Zenon Waśniewski, “these are all the older things”. Older, that is, from the 1920s. (sr) (transl. mw)
