Schulz is “a writer without an archive”. His works and the documents of his life have been largely destroyed or – as we would like to believe – merely dispersed around the world. Hoping that behind this belief there is solid evidence, we are hereby opening a list of lost works and documents: literary texts, letters, drawings, all which are believed to have existed. Perhaps they have survived, perhaps they still lie in hiding, forgotten.It is high time to retrieve them. And so:
Anyone who hasheard about the fate of Schulz’s lost works and knows of the place where they are kept is asked to come forth, as it will help us reconstruct Schulz’s archive.
The mythical Messiah opens the list, followed by minor works and documents. It does not mean that the list is closed. To begin, we selected ten most thoroughly researched problems. More soon.
P 001. Messiah
The searcher should begin from Jerzy Ficowski’s essay “W oczekiwaniu na Mesjasza” (Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice. Bruno Schulz i jego mitologia, Sejny 2002, p. 375–386) (“Waiting for the Messiah” from Regions of the Great Heresy). More directions are to be found there.
P 002. Schulz’s letters to Stefania Dretler-Flin
The addressee of these letters informed Jerzy Ficowski of their existence in 1947. Dretler-Flin repeated the information in a published conversation with Jan Kurczab in 1956: “Between 1927 and 1932, and even after that[Schulz] wrote to me twice or three times a week. The letters were eight pages long […], they got lost, I left them on my desk when I left home and never returned. Were there a lot of letters? Maybe… several hundred. They filled the drawer to the brim” (“Cień Xięgi bałwochwalczej”, Życie Literackie 1956, no. 44, p. 5*).
P 003. A copy of The Cinammon Shops with a dedication to Józefina Szelińska
After the book was published Schulz gave it to his fiancée, with a dedication: “To Juna Sz., a great person, a close companion met on the paths of life, with a request to remember me”. The dedicatee mentions it in a letter to Jerzy Ficowski from 5 September 1967. As the letter reveals, the copy of the book was still in Szelińska’s hands at that time.
P 004. Schulz’s letters to Józefina Szelińska
There were about 200 letters in total. According to Szelińska, she hid them in 1940 behind a rafter in the attic of her family home in Janów near Lviv. After the war the building served for some time as an orphanage, then was destroyed in a fire, and afterwards it was demolished. Did the letters burn down together with the house? Perhaps they survived. It is possible that Szelińska took the correspondence with her and until her death in 1991 she kept the letters in her apartment in Gdańsk.
P 005. Schulziana from the Maksymilian Goldstein collection
As we learn from the description of his collection, Maksymilian Goldstein had in his possession Schulz’s engravings and drawings as well as two different ex libris marks designed by the artist. More details ina book titled Kultura I sztuka ludu żydowskiego na ziemiach polskich, published in 1935 in Lviv.
P 006. Schulz’s letter (or letters) to Henry J. Wegrocki
Schulz was in touch with Wegrocki, an American psychiatrist with Polish roots, in the mid-1930s, when he stayed in Warsaw. In his article, “Masochistic Motifs in the Prose and Drawings of Bruno Schulz,”published inPsychoanalytic Review (1946, no. 33, p. 154–164), Wegrocki mentions a letter (or letters), which he received from Schulz. It is possible that they survived and remain in Wegrocki’s archive. The article has recently been published in the Polish translation in issue number 7 of Schulz/Forum (pp. 197–204)*.
P 007. A drawing of a cab, which Schulz did for Henry J. Wegrocki
In the afore-mentioned article, Wegrockiwrites:“Bruno Schulz był na tyle uprzejmy, że naszkicował dorożkę, o której wspomina”[the original?].[Bruno Schulz was kind enough to sketch the cab that he mentioned.] Indeed, in the article published in 1946 the text is complemented by a drawing titled Dorożka (A Cab).
P 008. Three portraits of Schulz done by Witkacy over the years
Cf. the entry in Kalendarium for 1 January 1935*.
P 009. A copy of Sanatorium under the Sign of Hourglass dedicated to Jan Brzękowski
The dedicatee mentions it in his book titled W Krakowie i w Paryżu. Wspomnienia i szkice (Warszawa 1968, p. 79).
P 010. A notemade by Schulz after reading Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophy of Art
Cf. the entry in Kalendarium concerning the 1930s*.
