(B) Janów. Józefina Szelińska hides letters from Bruno Schulz.
(B) Szelińska* hides nearly two hundred letters under a rafter in her family house in Janów, to which she will never return. The building survived the war, for some time it functioned as an orphanage, then it was demolished.
Asked by Jerzy Ficowski* many years later, Szelińska, reminisces: “They were the masterpieces of epistolary art, which has gone out of fashion. He wrote them not in order to communicate – he was insufficiently human for that – but from the need of an artist who treated them as a laboratory, a certain margin of his work. Often, even as a rule, he treated the letters as rough notes. Even the letters he wrote to me”.
Possible suspicions about Szelińska’s truthfulness regarding the missing letters may arise if we consider the fact that when she was fleeing Janów, she took with her much bigger things more difficult to transport and store, such as Schulz’s portraits, sketches and drawings. (rb) (transl. ms)
See also: end of 1932*, spring 1933*, summer 1933*, end of summer 1933*, December 1933*, end of 1935 / beginning of 1936*, 8 February 1936*, mid-January 1937*, 22 January 1937*, February/March 1937*, first quarter of 1937*, 11 July 1991*.
