Ojczyzna jako „fragment większej całości” Brunona Schulza
The Motherland as Bruno Schulz’s “Fragment of a Larger Whole”

Summary/Abstract: “Fragment of a larger whole” is a footnote, which Schulz placed at the very beginning of his story: Ojczyzna, published in the 59th issue of “Sygnały” (1938). Although nothing appears to indicate that this footnote was to refer to the very conceit of the motherland its possible ambiguity makes it possible to understand the titular concept as part of a larger and more complex whole. With total premeditation the author referred the word: “homeland”, which the Schulzian protagonist does not use to describe his native land, to the town of exile situated on this antipode. Since it was exactly in this work that Schulz constructed a narration whose very title indicates an intention to write about the motherland and to render the latter a prime theme, as has never been the case in his works, and although already its first reading might astonish and not correspond to the reader’s earlier moulded visions, it is worth listening in good faith to what the narrator and, simultaneously, the protagonist has to say and to ponder which “larger whole” could become the motherland in this story, one of Schulz’s last.

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