Warsaw. A short story by Bruno Schulz, Birds, is published in the 52nd issue of the weekly magazine Wiadomości Literackie. This is his first literary publication under his own name.
The short story was placed on the third page of the weekly (next to a fragment of Józef Wittlin’s Sól ziemi [The Salt of the Earth] and a poem by Bolesław Leśmian), and was also preceded by an editorial note: “In the coming days, a novel [sic!] by Bronisław [sic!] Schulz, The Cinnamon Shops*, will be published in Rój. We take the following excerpt from this novel”. The publisher of the book, Marian Kister*, operating on the market very efficiently and in a modern way, took care of the presentation of the novice author among the readers of Wiadomości Literackie* (in the same issue, on the advertising pages, many other announcements about the new releases of Rój were published). There were, however, some mistakes. Birds were published with the wrong name “Bronisław”, “polonised”, as Jerzy Ficowski suspects, by Mieczysław Grydzewski*, editor of the weekly. The note also contains erroneous information about the upcoming book by Schulz, which in the strict sense is not a novel, but a collection of related stories.
The text of Birds* published in the weekly differs in many places from the book version, which is probably the result of the work of the editorial office of Wiadomości Literackie, who unceremoniously corrected Schulz’s Polish by eliminating words that sounded too foreign or incomprehensible and changing the order of words. There are several dozen of such interventions in the text. The weekly version of Birds was also enlarged by the first six paragraphs of the story Mannequins*, violating the compositional integrity of Schulz’s works. Therefore, it is difficult to consider such a tainted version of the story as the actual literary debut of the writer. The publication in Wiadomości Literackie was rather an advertisement of The Cinnamon Shops, which appeared on the market, indeed, a few days later.
In one of the last public statements, Schulz, responding to a survey by Wiadomości Literackie, revealed some of the circumstances of the composition of this work: “The first source of Birds was a certain glimmer of wallpapers, pulsing in the dark field of view and nothing more. This glimmer, however, had a high potential of possible content, enormous representativeness, antiquity and a claim to express the world with itself”.
See also: December 11, 1933, April 16, 1939 (sr) (transl. mw)
