19 January 1935, Saturday

(A) Warsaw. Bruno Schulz meets his brother Izydor.

(B) Warsaw. In the third issue of the “Pion” magazine, there is an article by Antoni Rączaszek “Urbanizacja jako problem kultury w Polsce”, in which Bruno Schulz is mentioned.

(A) This is the last meeting of the brothers before Izydor’s death. On the same day, Izydor returns to Lviv, where he unexpectedly dies the next day1. Bruno Schulz mentions their last conversation in a letter to Zenon Waśniewski2.

See also: 28 November 1934, late December 1934 – 19 January 1935, 22 January 1935, 23 January 1935. (ts) (transl. mw)

(B) In this article devoted to the bad state of Polish provincial towns, Schulz’s name appears in the margin. A columnist for “Pion” states that the author of The Street of Crocodiles brilliantly expressed “the hopelessness of small-town reality”, creating “a suggestive picture of the mental deformities that people undergo in these conditions”3. The author of the article is excused: he was not a literary critic and his misinterpretation could have been influenced by the information that Schulz belongs to the “Przedmieście” literary group (see also: 29 July 1933, 6 August 1933). (pls) (transl. mw)

  • 1
    Nagły zgon dyr. Schulza, “Chwila” 1935, no. 5687, p. 5.
  • 2
    Bruno Schulz, Księga listów, collected and prepared for printing by Jerzy Ficowski, supplemented by Stanisław Danecki, Gdańsk 2016, p. 83.
  • 3
    Antoni Rączaszek, Urbanizacja jako problem kultury w Polsce, “Pion” 1935, no. 3, pp. 1. More on this subject: Piotr Sitkiewicz, Bruno Schulz i krytycy. Recepcja twórczości Brunona Schulza w latach 1921–1939, Gdańsk 2018.