(A) Warsaw. The 29th issue of Tygodnik Ilustrowany features a short story by Bruno Schulz, The Republic of Dreams.
(B) Warsaw. Schulz’s critical draft, A Novel about Friendship, is published in the 31st issue of Wiadomości Literackie.
(C) Warsaw. In the 72nd issue of Nasza Opinia there is an article by Schulz about the song by Debora Vogel, Acacias Bloom.
(A) No documents related to this publication has been preserved. When The Republic of Dreams was published in Tygodnik Ilustrowany*, Schulz had already published several works, such as the illustrated edition of Dodo and Edzio. This time the text was published without the author’s drawings. Photographs of the Zaświat sanatorium in Korostowo were used as illustrations. One cannot exclude the inspiration of Schulz, who portrayed the founder of the centre, poet and entrepreneur Jerzy Reitman (1888–?) as Blue-Eyed. In a letter to Romana Halpern* from March 10, 1938, he wrote about him: “A few miles from Drohobych there is a beautiful sanatorium for convalescents, where a visionary organised an asylum for ‘troubled souls’. Such was his intention. The execution differed from it, but there is a beautiful mountain slope in complete solitude, covered with a park of tens of thousands of roses and fields of carnations. There is a hotel decorated with a mixture of Hutsul lands, empire and biedermeier styles, a beautiful hall, a dining room, something like a forester’s lodge and a Polish manor house. It is inexpensive, the host is kind and there are only a few guests during the spring season. I would come to you because it is nearby and I know the owner: Reitman from Korostów near Skole. You have to somehow get money to go there. Your own electrical switchboard and post office, in a word, a fortress in a mountain seclusion”.
The Republic of Dreams was not included in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass* (1937). The story was first published in book form only in 1964 in the volume Prose, which was “an attempt to show the fullest possible literary output” of Schulz. (sr) (transl. mw)
(B) This is a review of the Polish translation of Bernhard Kellermann’s novel Songs of Friendship (Lviv 1936). Compared to the heroic optimism of Knut Hamsun in Growth of the Soil, in the optimism of Kellermann, who drafts a schematic and uncritically simplified vision of the post-war Germany development, Schulz sees only the author’s “unforgivable obtuseness”. The reviewer evaluates the artistic form of the novel slightly more favourably, because in his opinion, it does not go beyond the exploited patterns of evoking the reader’s emotions and whose “images of love” prove “typically German triviality”. (mw) (transl. mw)
(C) In this review, the writer emphasises the originality of the genre form in Vogel’s work, the de-realisation of the presented world, the deprivation of individualistic features of literary characters, the surreal creation of a constructivist and deterministic vision of a world populated by an “anonymous crowd of dolls, mannequins from hairdresser’s exhibitions, passers in stiff bowler hats, manicurists and waiters”. The suggestions towards the author about an analogy between her work and Cinnamon Shops are countered by the reviewer, who states that Vogel’s book “results from completely different and original worldview foundations”. Contrary to the traditional fictional prose, depicting the dynamics of the alternating world, Vogel’s narrative evokes a reality frozen in motion, mechanised, tragic in its ossification. (mw) (transl. mw)
