Zakopane. Bruno Schulz meets Adam Ważyk.
Bruno Schulz spends the summer of 1927 in Zakopane, in a guest house run by the mother of Władysław Riff, a poet, prose writer and a friend of Schulz. During his stay, he meets the young avant-garde poet Adam Ważyk, who was also a guest there. The meeting is described in Ważyk’s autobiographical book Kwestia gustu [The Matter of Taste]: “After the afternoon tea, my neighbour at the table, a lawyer from Kraków, invited me to have a look on an album of drawings which a group of men in the next room focused on. The drawings were variations on one theme: a naked, dishevelled, stockinged girl of tainted beauty whipping some bizarre hunching men. It seems there was a second album, too. Anyway, I remember a terrified woman in bed and a stallion charging into it. My neighbour asked me what I thought about those drawings. I never realized that he was fulfilling someone’s wish. I said something about Rops, Aretino and German expressionism. At the same time, a little man with a melancholic look came out from behind my back, and he turned out to be the one who had drawn those drawings; his name was Bruno Schulz”. The album was actually The Book of Idolatry and the illustration described is called “Stallions and Eunuchs”.
On the same day, Ważyk meets Władysław Riff. During the holidays, Ważyk, Schulz and Riff have numerous conversations, the theme of which is, among other things, Riff’s literary work. (mr) (transl. mw)
See also: 25 December 1927*.
