June 1939

(A) Truskawiec, Drogobych, Borysław. Bruno Schulz meets Zofia Nałkowska.

(A) Starting with 14 June 1939, Zofia Nałkowska* is staying in Truskawiec* on holiday. On one of the last days of June1 Nałkowska meets with Schulz. In the spa park, Schulz reads Nałkowska his article – unknown to us today – (see 8 August 1939*). Nałkowska writes in her Diaries: “excellent conversations with Bruno Schulz. – In the beautiful, farthest part of the park, wild and meadowy like London parks, on a bench hot from the sun, I listened to this text, full of rightness and, moreover, of all mental finesse”2. Nałkowska and her companion Maria Gizela Lesell-Heyligers3 also visit Schulz’s house in Drogobych*, and then all three go on a trip to Borysław*, where they visit the oil shafts and meet Schulz’s friends from Vienna*, who work in the oil industry. Zofia Nałkowska describes these encounters: “An astonishing visit at Schulz’s in Drogobych, finally a trip to Borysław, gasoline boiling at touch, an icy temperature of liquefied gas. An older pretentious gentleman, a visit in his rich villa, a grey wife”4. Lesell-Heyligers, in a letter written years later to the editor of the Diaries, Hanna Kirchner, recalls: “Bruno also introduced us to his friends from Vienna (but they spoke Polish), oil industrialists, ZN was interested in it and he took us to (I think so?) Borysław. The shafts. We saw them all up close. Dinner was also there. It bored us a bit, because like most big industry, these (rather nice) people (whose names I do not remember) were boring. With relief, we returned to Truskawiec”5. Lesell-Heyligers also mentions (in a letter to Hanna Kirchner of 23 July 1969) that on the day of departure Bruno Schulz said goodbye to Nałkowska with a huge bouquet of flowers and a cake prepared by his sister for the occasion. “He appeared from the nearby home-town of his, Drogobych, with a giant – so provincial and pretty – bouquet and some amazing cake baked by his elder sister, a sad and serious lady (or a maiden, but rather looked like a widow – ah, in the interieur of their house in Drogobych, dark, gloomy, almost empty, it would be to describe, but who else might be interested and who asks about it) – the train we had to wait for and we talked, not feeling at all that we were never to meet again”6. (mr) (transl. mw)

See also: 26 June 1939*, 6 August 1939*. 

  • 1
    The journal entry on this meeting is dated illegibly (? VI 1939). The previous entry, on the other hand, is dated 26 June.
  • 2
    Zofia Nałkowska, Dzienniki IV: 1930–1939. Część 2 (1935–1939), opracowanie, wstęp i komentarz Hanna Kirchner, Warszawa 1988, p. 417-418.
  • 3
    In Zofia Nałkowska’s biography, Hanna Kirchner writes briefly about Maria Gizeli Lesell-Heyligers née Birbaum (1897–1982): “An in-spe translator who adhered to the writer as a fierce admirer” (Hanna Kirchner, Nałkowska albo życie pisane, Warszawa 2011, p. 471). Maria Gizela’s sister was a school friend of Nałkowska’s sister, Hanna. After the First World War, Gizella (as Nałkowska called her in the Diaries) went to Switzerland, where she performed office work for various institutions. In 1926, her parents moved to Nice, where she remained (with some periods abroad) until her death. In the 1930s, she was married to Michel Lesell, a Russian of French origin, and then a “white” emigrant from Soviet Russia, who died of tuberculosis in 1936. As a young widow, she lived briefly in Warsaw; before the outbreak of the Second World War, she returned to Nice. During the war she worked in the administrative office of the Polish government in Angers, and after the war she worked at the headquarters of the Polish Red Cross in Paris. Her second husband was the Dutch painter Henry Heyligers, and this marriage lasted from 1955 until Heyligers died in 1968. Gizella was friends with Jerzy Stempowski and the Russian akmeist poet George Adamowitsch, and she also maintained close relations with Karol Szymanowski and his relatives. See: footnote 1 to the entry of 22 December 1937 in Zofia Nałkowska, op. cit., p. 270–271.
  • 4
    Zofia Nałkowska, op. cit., p. 418.
  • 5
    Quote from Maria Gizela Lesell-Heyligers’ letter to Hanna Kirchner of 20 August 1969 for: footnote 1 to the entry of? June 1939, [in:] Zofia Nałkowska, op. cit., p. 418.
  • 6
    Quote from Maria Gizela Lesell-Heyligers’ letter to Hanna Kirchner of 23 July 1969, qtd. In footnote 1 to the entry of [?] June 1939, [in:] Zofia Nałkowska, op. cit., p. 419.