Warsaw. The 16th issue of Wiadomości Literackie publishes a short story by Bruno Schulz entitled Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass with six illustrations by the author.
The publication of another story by Schulz in Wiadomości Literackie less than three months after publishing My Father Joins the Firefighters proves that the writer must have gained favourable reader opinions. The cooperation would develop with an equal intensity in the coming years, but little is known about its background. Apart from an open letter to the head of the weekly, Mieczysław Grydzewski*, no correspondence between Schulz and the editorial office has survived. Insight about the kind of cooperation the author enjoyed with the editors can be drawn from the changes that the editors introduced in the text published in Wiadomości Literackie. In Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a short story of about twenty pages, there are, if compared with the book version from 1937, almost two hundred changes, which proves the editors’ intensive work on the text. It is not known whether such practices met with Schulz’s objections. He must have considered them inevitable, since on the pages of Wiadomości Literackie (and also Skamander, led by the same team) he would publish a few more stories and a lot of reviews over the next few years.
Six illustrations complemented the magazine version of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. There would be twice as many illustrations in the book edition and only four of them would repeat the themes from the first edition. Schulz drew several dozen illustrations for this story. Some of them were the first sketches with many variants, others took the form of synthetic pen drawings, as if ready-made materials for printing. (sr) (transl. mw)
