13 November 1934, Tuesday

Drogobych. Schulz writes a letter to Tadeusz Breza.

In a letter to Tadeusz Breza, a writer and editor of Warsaw’s Kurier Poranny*, Schulz begins with an apology for his long silence, excusing himself for health reasons: “I spent the whole holiday in bed: sick, discouraged and bitter”1. Then he asks Breza how he feels. Developing the imagery of disease, he coins a quasi-medical neologism for describing an ailment – uncontrolled consumption of time – which Breza confessed to in one of his last letters (missing): “Are you angry with me for this silence, Sir, or does the ‘chrono-phagocytosis’2 still bother you, snatching the best pieces of time from you, together with the best intentions that you are full of?”3. At the end, Schulz plans a longer stay in Warsaw* provided that he gets a paid leave for continuation of his literary work, which he is applying for at the Ministry of Religious Creeds and Public Enlightenment*. (jo)

See also: 21 June 1934, 2 December 1934.

  • 1
    Bruno Schulz’s Letter to Tadeusz Breza of 13 November 1934, [in:] Bruno Schulz, Dzieła zebrane, volume 5: Księga listów, collected and edited by Jerzy Ficowski, supplemented by Stanisław Danecki, Gdańsk 2016, p. 52.
  • 2
    “Chrono-phagocytosis” here can literally mean a chronic absorption (from “phagocytosis,” the process of absorption and processing of foreign matter by specialized cells of the body) of time (from “chronos”).
  • 3
    Bruno Schulz, op. cit., p. 52.
Letter to Tadeusz Breza of 13 November 1934
Letter to Tadeusz Breza of 13 November 1934