Warsaw. Maria Dąbrowska reads Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.
Among the publishing novelties received by Maria Dąbrowska from Towarzystwo Wydawnicze “Rój”, there is Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, and a monograph by Jeremi Wasiutyński called Kopernik. Twórca nowego nieba (Copernicus. The Creator of the New Sky). Dąbrowska records in her Diary her impressions from reading both books, paying more attention to Schulz’s work. On 25 December she writes briefly: “An interesting experiment in the realism of phantasmagoria [!]; despite its morbid strangeness, not devoid of poetry – the deformation of life as in a dream and artistically justified”. Dąbrowska writes a longer commentary on Schulz’s stories in the context of Bolesław Leśmian and Janusz Korczak on 28 December: “Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass – a novel undoubtedly composed of dreams that one dreams when sleeping with a full stomach, pressing on the heart – is interesting and not devoid of a poetic quality. His blending of the human and the inhuman into some macabre deformed metaphysics of matter resembles Leśmian a bit, and his senile and infantile moods – Korczak. Since I learned that Schulz is a Jew, it seems there are some specific features of Jewish work – indeed quite interesting and reaching deep into the irrational deposits of the psyche and capturing the identities of various antinomies well”. (mr) (transl. mw)
