Paris. The Parisian monthly Kultura publishes an excerpt from Fragment z dziennika by Witold Gombrowicz on Bruno Schulz.
The inspiration for writing the text led to the first extensive edition of Schulz’s fiction in French, tittled Traité des Mannequins, which was a selection of short stories from The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. For Gombrowicz it was a moving experience, as he writes in a letter from that period: “The meeting with him after all these years at Julliard’s moved me, I was close with him and he was the first one to make a lot of noise around Ferdydurke”. The French translation of Schulz’s short stories was for Gombrowicz like a return of a long-forgotten friend, whose work began to gain acclaim in the literary world. “There is something strange and maybe a little moving in that we are again a pair – this time in the wide world”.
Despite such declarations, Gombrowicz did not intend to strike a nostalgic note when he was writing the part of Diary devoted to Schulz: “I will write in a rather shocking manner about Bruno because I do not want to fall into the convention of these «memoirs»”. In the Diary Gombrowicz does not try to idealise the past – quite the opposite; provocatively, he extracts some petty things or embarrassing details of their friendship. He introduces himself and Schulz based on a stark contrast – not only in artistic ways or regarding issues to do with worldview, but also when it is a question of looks and social background. He stresses the intellectual generosity of Schulz, who addressed Gombrowicz’s work with selfless admiration, and at the same time he shows a dilettantish approach to his friend’s works: “Have I ever honestly read, from beginning to end, any of his short stories? No – they bored me”. Despite many differences, Gombrowicz considers himself, Schulz and Witkiewicz the “three musketeers” or “three madmen”, connected by formal experiments. (ts) (transl. ms)
