End of December 1934 – 19 January 1935, Saturday

Warsaw. Bruno Schulz and Józefina Szelińska spend Christmas holidays in the capital, where Schulz meets prominent figures of Polish literature.

Schulz and Szelińska* meet in Warsaw. After losing her job in 1934 in the Private Female Teachers’ College in Drogobych, Szelińska moved to Janów near Lviv. This was one of the few opportunities when the couple could enjoy each other’s company. “Since I left Drogobych in 1934 our correspondence began, interrupted by few and usually brief periods of seeing each other […]. We met in Warsaw – during Christmas holidays – among close friends, fascinated with Bruno: Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, and the Brezas,”1 wrote Szelińska many years later.

In Schulz’s correspondence the subject of a trip to Warsaw returns, but only in one letter to Zenon Waśniewski* there is a brief remark about the reasons for the trip: “I deeply regret that we will not meet this time either as I decided to go to Warsaw where a certain person is waiting for me, whom I cannot disappoint”2. For Schulz, the relationship with Szelińska is an intimate issue, so he is keener to write about people from the literary circle whom he meets in Warsaw, including Witold Gombrowicz*, Józef Wittlin*, Józef Czechowicz* and Tadeusz Breza3, with whom he corresponded before4, as well as Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz*. The latter, with whom Schulz then renews friendship, devotes a good deal of attention to him. In letters from that period, Witkiewicz admits that “taking care of Schulz consumes a lot of time”5. During one of the meetings, he sketches Schulz’s portrait6. (ts) (transl. ms)

See also: 31 December 1934*, 1 January 1935*, 28 April 1935*. 

  • 1
    Józefina Szelińska’s letter to Jerzy Ficowski, qtd. in: Jerzy Ficowski, Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice. Bruno Schulz i jego mitologia, Sejny 2002, p. 325.
  • 2
    Bruno Schulz, Dzieła zebrane, volume 5: Księga listów, compiled and edited by Jerzy Ficowski, revised by Stanisław Danecki, Gdańsk 2016, p. 81 (letter to Zenon Waśniewski, I 38).
  • 3
    Ibidem, p. 83 (letter to Zenon Waśniewski, I 39).
  • 4
    This was Bruno Schulz’s first meeting with Tadeusz Breza after their epistolary friendship began in 1934.
  • 5
    Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Listy II, vol. I, edited by Tomasz Pawlak oraz Stefan Okołowicz, Janusz Degler, Warszawa 2014 (letter to Maria and Edmund Strzelecki no. 64).
  • 6
    The portrait was painted on 1 January 1935. See Jerzy Jarzębski, Schulz, Wrocław 1999, pp. 47 and 232.