Drogobych. Bruno Schulz meets Józefina Szelińska.
Aleksy Kuszczak*, science teacher and Schulz’s friend mediates in the meeting, asking Szelińska* on behalf of Schulz to pose for a portrait. “Which Madame Bovary would refuse an artist” – as she will admit in later years.
Szelińska almost perfectly fit Schulz’s physical ideal of female beauty which we know from his artworks: tall, portly, black hair knotted in a bun, pronounced features, prominent lips, and also elegant, commanding, appearing to dominate.
Soon afterwards their sessions began, as much devoted to painting as friendly talk on literature and art. “These sessions at my place [...] – as Szelińska will recall in a letter to Jerzy Ficowski* – and then charming walks across the meadows behind the house, to the birch wood, all in spring, gave me a foretaste of wonderfulness, inimitable experiences, which happen so rarely in life. It was the essence itself of poetry”.
Between Schulz and Szelińska there forms an intimacy, which with time will change into a relationship. (rb) (transl. ms)
See also: end of 1932*, summer 1933*, end of summer 1933*, December 1933*, end of 1935 / beginning of 1936*, 8 February 1936*, mid-January 1937*, 22 January 1937*, February/March 1937*, first quarter of 1937*, 1940, 11 July 1991*.
