28 February – 1 March 1934, Wednesday to Thursday night

Zakopane. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz reads The Street of Crocodiles.

At the end of February, Witkiewicz borrows The Street of Crocodiles1. Exhausted, he goes to bed at 9 p.m. and starts reading. He cannot stop reading for the next four and a half hours. He falls asleep at 1:30, sleeps for three and a half hours, then wakes up and goes back to reading. At eight o’clock, Witkiewicz puts away the book and heads to his daily activities. At 9 p.m., he goes for a walk and then feels growing “diabolical fume from the escaping cinnamon residue from last night”. His soul seems to him “poisoned by the monstrous drug of Schulz’s cinnamon”. He hears cinnamon gibberish within him, “an extract of inarticulate Schulz venom” that renames everything he has known, presenting the world from a completely different perspective. It is a distorted and strange view and the reality begins to resemble a madman’s nightmare. Finally, “a Schulz-like pre-word pulp” floods the brain of Witkacy, who sees an ordinary forest in Antołówka “through the eyes of ‘the King of Cinnamon’ and ‘High Priest of the Temple of Women’s Legs’. Seeing the world from Schulz’s perspective makes Witkiewicz feel “scared and even more wonderful”2.

Shocked, Witkiewicz returns home and probably then adds an annotation in the margin of his letter to his wife: “The Street of Crocodiles is wonderful. If Szulz [!] described the whole world in this way, and not just one corner of it, he would be the most bri[lliant] wri[ter] in the world”3. He shortens the last words because there is no more space on the full sheet of paper. Witkacy would repeat his opinion on 9 March 1934* in a letter to Mieczysław Choynowski and in April 1935 in the second part of the article “Twórczość literacka Brunona Schulza”4.

See also: 3 March 1934, 9 March 1934, 11 March 1934, 11 April 1935, 24 August 1935. (ts) (transl. mw)

  • 1
    Stefan Okołowicz speculates that it could have been Michał Choromański’s copy (see Stefan Okołowicz, List do Brunona Schulza 1938, [in:] Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Listy II (vol. 2, part 2), edited and annotated by Janusz Degler, Stefan Okołowicz, Tomasz Pawlak, Warszawa 2017, pp. 245.
  • 2
    See Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Twórczość literacka Brunona Schulza, [in:] idem, Pisma krytyczne i publicystyczne, edited by Janusz Degler, Warszawa 2015, p. 407–408.
  • 3
    Idem, Listy do żony (1932–1935), prepared for publication by Anna Micińska, edited and with annotated by Janusz Degler, Warszawa 2010, p. 198.
  • 4
    Idem, Twórczość literacka Brunona..., p. 421.