Drogobych/Warsaw. The breaking off of the engagement between Bruno Schulz and Józefina Szelińska.
The reason for such a decision was most probably a different vision of their future together and a somewhat different attitude to their relationship.
It is worth citing Szelińska’s* motivation in extenso: “If previously I wanted a life together in Warsaw, if in order to achieve that I undertook a boring office job, deadly in its dullness, it was exactly because I wanted to contribute to the material foundation of our life […], which was simple and possible – this is how e.g. the Wittlins lived […]. I could not live in such a provisorium, condemned to work […] I hated it, it lost all its meaning, being hellishly monotonous, poorly paid and deadening. I went to work in despair, in despair I started the day. On the other hand, how can one ground one’s peace, or the other person’s peace, a person so dear and close, knowing his tendency to depression, his, or rather our, taedium vitae states in which we intoxicated each other. […] Yet I could not live in such a struggle and a serious illness came to the rescue, a great escape. […] I returned to life fully transformed from the illness. I drifted miles away from Bruno. I did not feel anything, all the rapture in which I was stuck for almost four years disappeared”.
In another letter to Jerzy Ficowski* she described Schulz as a man, “to whom (generally) nothing human was close, because the only reality was for him the sphere of his work. The artist absorbed the human in him”.
In turn, from Schulz’s letters it transpires that the breakup with Szelińska provoked in him ambivalent emotions: on the one hand, regret and sadness, and on the other, relief. In April he writes to Romana Halpern*: “between me and Juna relations are broken off or at least (as I delude myself) suspended for an indeterminate time. I feel sorry for her, I don’t know what she is doing after such difficult experiences, she does not reply to my letters. I feel sorry for both of us and all our past doomed for destruction. I will not find another one like her”[[4].
To Tadeusz and Zofia* Breza he will confess: “my relationship with Juna is completely shattered. She became disheartened with my hopeless situation, difficulties with moving to Warsaw, which she ascribed – she was right after all – to my helplessness. I do not even know where she is now as she even broke off our correspondence. I am going through hard times”.
He will admit to Zenon Waśniewski*: “My fiancée and I have just split up. My acquaintance with her was filled with suffering and hard times. At last I feel relieved that she broke it off, finally. […] Even though I should be glad about the break-up, now I feel a terrible void and nothingness of life. I cannot do anything, I cannot pick up any book, because I become nauseous and horribly bored. […] I do not recognise myself. Me, who always had a head full of questions, problems, always excited about various ideas, I drag myself around empty, thoughtless, languid, and I have a feeling that this is the end of everything. I have not been writing for months, I am not capable of writing even the shortest article. Even writing a letter costs me an enormous effort to surmount my condition’. For a long time, I have not received letters and I do not write to anybody. I feel that all this is not only the result of my heart problems, but that I have entered some new phase in my life, the dominant theme of which is intense, fundamental disappointment: the nothingness of life”.
Thus, Schulz’s life crisis did not result solely from the broken engagement with Szelińska. (rb) (transl. ms)
See also: end of 1932*, spring 1933*, summer 1933*, end of summer 1933*, December 1933*, end of 1935 / beginning of 1936*, 8 February 1936*, mid-January1937*, 22 January 1937*, first quarter of 1937*, 1940*, 11 July 1991*.
