Author Not Fully Defined? Cover Image

Autor nie w pełni zdefiniowany?
Author Not Fully Defined?

Author(s): Stanisław Rosiek
Subject(s): Editorial
Published by: Fundacja Terytoria Książki

Summary/Abstract: With Schulz we are always in trouble. Specifying his literary identity is often not so easy. It is as though he was still not fully defined, which, however, does not mean that he is an author “without qualities.” On the contrary, it is enough to read two sentences and one is absolutely sure – they must have been written by “Schulz.” Perhaps the ambiguity of his image has been caused by his alleged timidity and complexes – as a human being, Schulz often used disguises and took misleading routes. In result, he misled his contemporaries and then the subsequent generations of scholars. Since he concealed his actual literary debut behind the penname of Marceli Weron, for almost a century those who wrote about The Cinnamon Shops were obliged to believe in a more or less mythologized version of his apprenticeship as a writer. The discussions about Marceli Weron, author of the newly found short story “Undula,” are not over yet and new questions and dilemmas have appeared. The name and surname of “Bruno Schulz,” printed under two German language stories from 1917 and 1918, found by Piotr Szalsza in a periodical titled Cetinjer Zeitung, leaves no doubts but still we do not know to whom it belonged: to the future author of Cinnamon Shops or perhaps someone else? Weron dissimulated – his name referred to personal emptiness, by no means leading to the son of a Drogobych cloth merchant. A connection between the text and the author could be established only thanks to the unmistakably “Schulzean” style, but both war stories signed with the name “Bruno Schulz” do not anticipate the pattern we know from “Undula” and then The Cinnamon Shops. We have the first opinions of experts and they are not unanimous. No wonder. It is impossible to resolve the question of authorship only in reference to the text. Indeed, the stories are signed by “Bruno Schulz,” which means that some Bruno Schulz must have written them, but to whom did the signature belong?

  • Issue Year: 2020
  • Issue No: 15
  • Page Range: 3-4
  • Page Count: 2
  • Language: Polish