October 1942

Warsaw. Jerzy Ficowski reads The Cinnamon Shops and writes a letter to Bruno Schulz.

Jerzy Ficowski* repeatedly described the beginnings of his interest in Schulz. The most detailed report is a memoir entitled Mój Bruno Schulz, presented on air in Polish Radio Channel II as Zapiski ze współczesności in 2002. 

In October 1942 (that is, one year before imprisonment at Pawiak), an eighteen-year-old student of the secret trade high school1, Jerzy Ficowski gets a book from his colleague, Jan Gałkowski, who was to later become a poet and a songwriter2. It was The Cinnamon Shops. After a few days, he begins reading, and is tremendously impressed: “I reached for this book and began to read. And all of a sudden, I feel like something on the verge of insanity and admiration is working on me like some kind of weird medication, drug, alcohol. [...] Anyway, I felt that I was just sick, and it was unbearable”3.

In his interview with Wojciech Wiśniewski, Ficowski mentions that he tried to promote Schulz’s work among his colleagues. “Yes, I tried to infect my peers, colleagues in conspiracy, with the reading of Schulz. Many of them would later develop a taste in these books because I also got the Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. They probably read his fiction differently than I did, but they were enchanted with it”4. Through Adam Pawlikowski, one of his friends interested in Schulz, Ficowski gets three letters from Schulz to Andrzej Pleśniewicz*. After reading the correspondence, he writes a letter to Schulz with expressions of admiration and gratitude, sending it to the address the letters to Pleśniewicz held5 (Floriańska 10, which in 1942 was already incorrect). It was only in the spring of 1943 that Ficowski learns about Schulz’s death*, as suggested by Ficowski’s letter to his sister Krystyna with the later date of 19426. 

Ficowski’s juvenile experience of reading Schulz would become the beginning of a lifetime fascination, which resulted in many years of work on Bruno Schulz’s biography and oeuvre. (mr) (transl. mw)

See also: 1943*, June 1967*, 1993*. 

  • 1
    See: “Piszę dla moich bliskich dalekich. Z Jerzym Ficowskim rozmawia Wojciech Wiśniewski”, [w:] Wojciech Wiśniewski, Lekcja polskiego, Warszawa 1993, p. 39.
  • 2
    See: Malwina Wapińska, “Bruno Schulz – mistrz, inspirator czy literacki ojciec Jerzego Ficowskiego?”, Annales Universitatis Pedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia Historico-Litteraria XVI, p. 134.
  • 3
    Mój Bruno Schulz, record of the broadcast from the series Zapiski ze współczesności, prepared in 2002 by the Polish Radio II Program, http://ninateka.pl/audio/moj-bruno-schulz-zapiski-ze-wspolczesnosci-3-4 (access date: 16 January 2018).
  • 4
    Piszę dla moich bliskich dalekich..., p. 35.
  • 5
    Mój Bruno Schulz...
  • 6
    Jerzy Kandziora, basing on an analysis of the preserved letter by Jerzy Ficowski to his sister (J. Ficowski’s letter to K. Ficowska, b.d., with a later note by Ficowski’s hand saying: “(1942)/J. Ficowski’s letter”; Ossolineum collection, Correspondence of Jerzy Ficowski. Letters, notebooks and copies of letters to the following, folder A-Ł, accession No. 165/83), concludes that “the first information about the date of Schulz’s death, which reached Ficowski, was very late and imprecise (in fact Schulz died on 19 November 1942) and that Ficowski’s letter to Schulz was sent after the death of the writer” (Jerzy Kandziora, “Jerzy Ficowski o Schulzu – między rekonstrukcją a retoryką. (Refleksje nad ‘Regionami wielkiej herezji’)”, Schulz/Forum 2014, no. 3, p. 46 and 49, footnote 5).