Cinnamon Shops Research Articles

Why Bruno Schulz Did Not Want to Be a Jewish Writer: On the “Erasing” of Jewishness in “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” and “The Cinnamon Shops”

The absence of the Drogobych synagogue in Bruno Schulz’s fiction suggests his strategy of erasing all the traces of his cultural identity. Next to that absence, one can notice his significant choice of names – to realize that, it is enough to compare Schulz’s short stories with Julian Stryjkowski’s novel, “Austeria”. Apparently, Schulz eliminated from his represented world all Jewish connotations. His use of foreign words, borrowed from different languages, may be explained as an effort to make his fiction as cosmopolitan as possible. This refers not just to the represented reality, but to the very structure of Schulz’s imagination and his linguistic sensibility. The writer did not renounce his Jewishness, but wanted it to be only one component of his fiction. Biblical references and the paraphernalia of the Jewish culture were to be just one piece in a multicultural narrative mosaic which tended toward universality.

A Cut-off. Seven Fragments

The text consists of seven fragments which in different ways refer to a central category of separation; in particular to masochism, one of its manifestations. First, however, separation reveals itself in an imaginary act of self-castration (in a dream), described by Schulz in a letter. This act locates the writer beyond the sexes, symbolically excludes him from biological support of the stream of life and directs to art. Schulz considered that irreversible passage from biological reproduction to artistic creation a grave sin. The masochistic separation became a topic of many graphic works and drawings in which the artist, as an icon of himself, paid homage to “la belle dame sans merci.” His literary works are quite different – Schulz’s fiction is marked by shame. The present essay demonstrates how the literary discourse of the Cinnamon Shops generates meaningful gaps. Allusions and silence, all kinds of narrative suspension, were supplemented by Schulz with pictorial representations, according to a principle that what cannot be written about, may be drawn. Many of his graphic works are overt manifestoes of masochism. In the Booke of Idolatry these are emblematic representations, projections of the artist’s own phantasms, based on the visual idiom of the times, while in the compulsive drawings from the 1930s the boundary between fantasy and reality blurs. Schulz’s artistic operations are ostentatious. He never used any disguise, reporting on himself. He was a masochist, but what did it mean? Another fragment is an attempt to find out what it meant to be a masochist in Schulz’s times, and how he defined himself in that context, particularly in an explicit statement made in a letter to a certain psychiatrist: “Creatively, I express this perversion in its loftiest, philosophically interpreted form as a foundation determining the total Weltanschauung of an individual in all its ramifications.” The final fragment presents for the most part some hitherto unknown documents of Schulz’s life, such as a police certificate of decency, men’s second-hand reports on his masochism, and memories of women with whom the writer held various kinds of liaisons.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STORY'S TYPOLOGICAL TRAITS IN BRUNO SCHULTZ'S COLLECTION “CINNAMON SHOPS”

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the typological characteristics of Bruno Schultz’s works. He was the representative of Polish modernism. The autobiographical character of the collection of stories “Cinnamon Shops” is revealed, and the explicit and implicit depiction of reality in the work is determined. The concept of childhood poetry is theoretically substantiated, and its structural components are set forth. The methods of creating the world of childhood were analyzed, and the features of its realization in the works of the named author were revealed. Bruno Schultz is the founder of the idea of the hermetic mythology of a place. Its mundane nature comprises delineating a geographical area with an infinite number of meanings and content. Schultz's classic prose became a generalized expression, a world structure of global significance. His two volumes of short tales, “Cinnamon Shops” and “Sanatorium beneath the Hourglass”, placed him in the canon of 20th-century European literature. Bruno Schultz lived during a period of unprecedented political change when new civilized codes and identities for modern European countries were emerging. In his prose, a rare meta-culture of Central-Eastern Europe emerges through mythology. It is an opportunity to see the enormous possibilities of the past, from which the modern states of the Central European subcontinent emerged. Schultz would probably also be very useful in discussions about postmodernism because of the collage and fragmentary nature of his work and because of the fun he has with myths and parodies – in some places, it fits very well into postmodern practices, and Schultz can be considered one of their forerunners.

Sygnatury tekstowe. Wokół niemieckojęzycznych opowiadań Brunona Schulza

The author of the article searches for an answer to the question whether the stories might have been written by Bruno Schulz from Drogobych, the one who wrote The Cinnamon Shops. Given that the query has not yet been concluded beyond doubt, she tries to find alternative methods of analyzing these texts. She assumes that young Schulz’s style pattern should not be established by analyzing only his mature texts. Schulz wrote many short stories that could not be found, therefore, the question of his literary identity is still relevant. An account of his literary style can be found in the analysis carried out in the 1970s by Piotr Wróblewski. It allows for finding the most common features that distinguish Schulz from other writers. The distinction is crucial for either confirmation or rejection of authorship. The author conducts an experiment to evaluate the stylistic features in German stories and the result is surprising. In reference to The Cinnamon Shops as well as Schulz’s other well-known other works and his early story “Undula,” his authorship proves certain. However, in the German stories examination yields slightly more than half of the positive responses. The author assumes that in each text there are traces of someone’s individual, unique style, calling them metaphorically “text signatures,” the “fingerprints” of the text. In her research, she also uses methods such as forensic linguistics and stylometry. The author deals with the stereotype of Schulz’s literary debut facilitated by the support of Zofia Nałkowska. In the article, she tries to reconstruct Schulz’s first literary steps and wonders what he might have written between the publication of ”Undula” and “The Birds” (and later The Cinnamon Shops), and whether he included his first literary samples in letters to his friends or during the Kalleia’s meetings in Drogobych. The author lists his lost works and ends the article with the question of Schulz’s identity.

Schulz w Roju

After writing Cinnamon Shops, Bruno Schulz faced the need to find a publisher. We know that thanks to the protection of Zofia Nałkowska, he managed to publish his debut book with the Rój publishing house located in Warsaw. However, before it happened, he had been unsuccessfully looking for a publisher willing to take the risk of publishing a sophisticated book by an unknown author. To examine this problem, the author of the article investigates the condition of the Polish book market in the 1930s, examining surviving documentation and memories. He also analyzes what Schulz expected from his publisher and the terms under which his book was released. Finally, he attempts to calculate the benefits and losses that Schulz incurred by publishing the book with the Rój publishing house.

Peculiarities of reproduction of terminological vocabulary in Ukrainian translations of Bruno Schulz’s short story “Cinnamon Shops”

Peculiarities of reproduction of terminological vocabulary in Ukrainian translations of Bruno Schulz’s short story “Cinnamon Shops”

ВІД МІСЬКИХ ЛАБІРИНТІВ ДО ЗАКАМАРКІВ ПІДСВІДОМОСТІ («ВУЛИЦЯ КРОКОДИЛІВ» БРУНО ШУЛЬЦА)

The article examines one of the key stories of Bruno Schultz’s collection «Cinnamon Shops» in the context of the aesthetic originality of the prose of the Polish modernist novelist, his ontology and poetics. Focusing on the whimsical nature of imagery, the word’s ability to creative demiurge, the synthesis of the spiritual and the material quite logically leads to the idea of ​​ Schulz’s ontological borderline. It is from this point of view that the artistic time-space of «Crocodile Street» is interpreted as the compositional and content center of the collection. Emphasis is placed on the multidimensional function of Schultz’s word, which is closely related to autobiography, intergenerational memory, the collective unconscious, and the theory of archetypes. The connection of the word with the poetics of form creation is traced, and the naming is considered from the point of view of the sacralization of the depicted objects, their correlation with the biblical acts of world creation. The phenomenon of «annexation of the subconscious», its influence on words, ideas as constructs of the author’s representation of the world is singled out. The images of a store, warehouses, and a labyrinth are correlated with the subconscious, the most secret recesses of the human soul. No less important is the connection with the cultural space, cartographic images of the Baroque, graphic art and critical self-reflections of the writer. The palimpsest of the urban space, the presence of different cultural traditions and everyday anthropological practices in it are studied. The connection between the images of the story and the typical Schultz concepts of puppetry, marionette behavior, the psychology of mimicry, adaptation to the situation is traced. The ambivalence of the author’s world, built on the game of verbal plans, balancing between the real and the unreal, the sphere of denotations and techniques of representation, is proven.

Dzieciństwo, kicz i manekiny. Magiczne doświadczenia i przeżycia Waltera Benjamina i Brunona Schulza

In this article, presented in July 2005 at the Cerisy-la-Salle symposium on Walter Benjamin, the author attempts to highlight some similarities in thought and inspiration between Benjamin and Bruno Schulz, particularly in their approach to childhood and their fascination with kitsch, knick-knacks, wigs, and mannequins. Marc Sagnol begins by comparing Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood with Schulz’ Cinnamon Shops, noting the importance for both writers of the ‘imperial panorama’ or ‘panopticon’ of their childhood, and of the theater as a metaphysical event that divides the world into an immediate and a fictitious reality. Just as Schulz has a predilection for junk and all things futile, mannequins, wax figure cabinets, and postage stamps from exotic or lost countries, so Benjamin is interested in the nineteenth-century ‘kitsch’, which he theorizes in Passages, collectors, wax figures from the Musée Grévin, automata and curiosity cabinets that he finds in the passages. A troubling example of their intellectual a nities is their shared interest in Anna Csillag, the woman with long hair whom Benjamin thought he saw in a wigmaker’s window in a passageway, while for Schulz, this character discovered in an almanac is like the matrix of the Book itself, in a famous fragment of the Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass.In conclusion, Sagnol imagines a meeting that could have taken place between the two writers, in a passageway or at the Musée Grévin, during Schulz’s stay in Paris in August 1938. Unfortunately, Benjamin was at that time playing chess in Denmark with his friend Brecht.This text partially inspired a literary work, À Paris, égaré, by Dominique Hérody (2019).

Mitologizacja dzieciństwa – "Wysoki Zamek" i "Sklepy cynamonowe"

At the core of Bruno Schulz’s and Stanisław Lem’s imaginary are the same images of magical phenomena and rituals formed in their childhood. These prospections of two children, these two overpast worlds, almost thirty years apart, separated by groundbreaking political events, are surprisingly close to each other. Schulz devoted his writing to a constant interpretation of these primal ideas and “pre-set verses”. Lem deposited this potential in one book, Highcastle: A Remembrance. Lem’s autobiography is connected with Cinnamon Shops not only by the same repertoire of motifs and memories, but also by a characteristic style and metaphorization of language. The Highcastle turns out to be a record of the Lem’s mythology of his Lviv childhood – just like the Cinnamon Shops, the book that mythologizes Schulz’s childhood in Drogobych. The paper is an attempt to analyze these two mythologies, and indicate points of contact as well as references and polemics in Lem’s text.

Modernistyczny oniryzm w dylogii Brunona Schulza i w noweli Jak we śnie Arthura Schnitzlera

A post-psychoanalytic idea of Jacques Lacan that “Other is a lack inside me” helped the author to develop her interpretive strategy of conceptualizing onirism in Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” (Traumnovelle) and Schulz’s stories collected in Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of an Hourglass. In reference to Lacan’s concepts of the Other and the Real, she interpreted the plots, meanings, and the modernist paradigm of narration and the structure of subjectivity in the texts under scrutiny. Freud and Schnitzler believed that dreams and onirism are the most effective ways to make humans’ most intimate desires come true. Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” is a literary confirmation of Freud’s theory of dreamwork: the language of dreams opens up the space for manifestations of the characters’ unconscious and for the fulfillment of the impulses of their libido. Schnitzler’s story presents a sophisticated modernist plot combined with complex composition that demonstrates the dynamic structure of dreams. The borderline between consciousness and the unconscious is blurred, and the intrusion of the latter in the former deeply changes the life of the protagonists. Schulz’s fiction does not provide any answers to questions concerning the text’s idiom which is not a territory for affirming any theories, but is an intentional, pure phenomenon supplied by the senses as a “phenomenological perception” (Edmund Husserl). Schulz’s variant of onirism is not based on any linear order of the plot but remains a free-floating phantasy, a continuous blurring of the borderline separating consciousness and the unconscious, the overt and the covert, the real and the surreal. The language of Schulz’s stories is the unconscious as such, not a space for the realization of an individual unconscious. Referring to Lacan’s categories of the Other and the Real, the author interprets onirism in the Schulzean text as overcoming the trauma of the Real and the dream as trauma.

Ciała Schulza

Bruno Schulz’s first body was flesh and blood. Like any body, it was a place of existence. The events of which it became part can be written out in a calendar. We see them in motion – in birth, in dying, in fatigue, in sex and laughter. The other body of the writer is present in his work. It is the body created by Schulz, reproduced and represented – dispersed in words and images. It is largely published. It becomes an object of aesthetic reflection. It seeks form for itself in the concrete corporealities of the represented world, but also in the unveiling of the style itself – in the heterogeneous, delicate expressions of sexuality and gender. The writer’s first and second bodies do not exist separately. They are not opposites, nor are they fully identical. One does not attempt to cannibalistically devour the other. Rather, they must be seen as two bodies always facing each other, touching, rubbing against each other, differentiating. The essay is taken from a Ph.D. dissertation on Schulz, Differentiating. The First and Second Body of the Writer, defended at the University of Gdansk on October 26, 2022, whose theme was the erotic and mournful bodies of the author of Cinnamon Shops.

Провiнцiйний свiт у творчостi Бруно Шульца як елемент авторськоï концепцiï

Bruno Schulz is one of the most original creators of Polish culture of the first half of the 20th century. Recently, interest in Bruno Schultz’s creative work has been growing all over the world. The literary works by Bruno Schulz clearly confirm that his artistic creativity is characterized by extraordinariness in everything: both in the context of artistic works and the author’s concept and the artistic reflection of reality. The writer chooses such characters, such dramatic situations, which allow him to unravel his creative ideas with the greatest expressiveness and evidence, to realize his author’s concept. The provincial world of Shultz’s works, his “special province”, as an element of the author’s concept, is represented in scientific studies through the lens of several elements: topographical, linguistic, “characteristic” (images of the characters), the element of numerous details, etc. The dilogy of short stories has been chosen as the source base: “Cinnamon Shops” and “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass”, as well as several works that were not included in the first editions of these collections. The analysis of Bruno Schulz’s authorial concept contributes to a deeper and more complete understanding of the features of Bruno Schulz’s creation of a unique, artistic world, as well as the features of the artist’s way of perceiving and mastering real reality with its subsequent transformation into an artistic reality. Bruno Schulz tried to overcome the mediocrity destined for him by fate, to go beyond the boundaries of his “region of heresy”, while remaining himself – a Galician Jew, a classic of Polish literature, a singer of a special Ukrainian “secret” province, the symbolic mystical portrait of which, according to researchers, he had left to posterity.

Jak opisać dawne galicyjskie przedmieścia we współczesnym języku chińskim? Kognitywna analiza przekładów Sklepów cynamonowych Brunona Schulza

The article is an analysis of the description of the garden in Bruno Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe) and its two translations into Chinese. Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka has translated Schulz’s prose from the original Polish, while Lu Yuan’s translation is primarily based on English versions of his work. The analysis employs methods drawn from cognitive poetics and some elements of cognitive theory of translation, especially Elżbieta Tabakowska’s ideas on imagery and translation equivalence. The study helped characterize a complex conceptual blend found in the description and trace structural changes caused by the translators’ specific decisions. The translations are characterized by a relatively high level of equivalence. The conceptual blends they comprise differ from the one created by Bruno Schulz mostly in terms of the described elements’ positions on the empathy scale, which are mainly dependent upon the translators’ manner of using the devices of animation and anthropomorphism.

Język "Sklepów cynamonowych" Brunona Schulza w świetle badań statystycznych

The aim of the article is to present the most important results of the frequency research on the language of the stories "Cinnamon Shops" by Bruno Schulz. The author compares the statistical indicators calculated for the stories and the basic styles of the Polish language. On this basis, he formulates conclusions about the artistry of the language of Bruno Schulz’s prose.

METAMORFOZE PROSTORA I VREMENA U PROZI BRUNA ŠULCA I GORANA PETROVIĆA

The article studies metamorphoses of time and space in the prose by Bruno Schultz and Goran Petrović. The novel entitled Sundries Shop “At The Lucky Hands” (Sitničarnica “Kod srećne ruke”) was chosen due to the typological similarity of its title to the first book of short stories by the Polish classic (Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe)). Shops mysteriously appear and mysteriously disappear, and these are the places where one of the key mysteries of the works’ poetics is hidden. Another Schultz’s place of mystery is the book as a parallel world, as well as oneiric spaces that are difficult to separate from the realms of reality. The writers also have another thing in common – the art of depicting an unusual version of the world, the won- der of textual space, levelling the boundaries between reality and sleep. The article investigates the functions of Schultz’s places of mystery (shop, garden, Book) in Goran Petrović’s Sundries Shop “At The Lucky Hands”. Examining Schultz and Petrović’s places of mystery we conclude that their secret is con- nected with the mystery of time, which flows according to special laws. We are looking for a possible answer in the Serial Time Theory by the English soldier, aeronautical engineer and phi- losopher John William Dunne, presented in the study entitled An Experiment with Time (1927).

Realność artystyczna i koneksje literackie. Bruno Schulz w Umarłej klasie Tadeusza Kantora

The inspiration that Tadeusz Kantor drew from the works by Schulz can be seen in many of his theatre performances. Like he did with Gombrowicz, Kantor never used one specific work to be staged in his theatre. The Dead Class is a piece where one can find influences by Witkacy, Gombrowicz and Schulz – probably the three most important writers for Kantor. In this article, I discuss the way Schulz, with his short story A Pensioner, is handled in the ‘Cricot 2’ performance. Even though many studies concerning this performance have been written and the connections between Kantor and Schulz seem to have been covered, I have not found any study of Dead Class which would indicate any specific references to A Pensioner. In the bruno schulz w umarłej klasie tadeusza kantora article, the following questions are explored: Can Schulz’s protagonist be recognized in the senile, childlike old people from Dead Class? Which passages of the short story were used by Kantor? How differently is the notion of death treated in the short story and in the performance? And finally, why – having been so fascinated with The Cinnamon Shops at a young age – did Kantor come back to Bruno Schulz’s writings only as a mature artist? In the article, I also discuss the strategies utilized by Kantor to adapt the non-theatrical prose for the stage.

Bio/biblio-graficznie

The easiest option would be to ask the author of The Cinnamon Shops whether it was him who many years ago wrote in German and published in the Montenegro periodical Cetinjer Zeitung two stories: “Du bist Staub” and “Pfennig mit dem Auge.” Had he said “yes,” these two unusual narratives would be included in the oeuvre of Bruno Schulz. His literary identity would have been upheld (enhanced) and confirmed. But what is the literary identity? We know full well that the foundation of an individual identity is memory which selects and integrates the particles of a particular existence. There is no identity without memory. This, however, does not apply to the literary identity, deprived of that natural basis of each identity, both individual and collective. Its foundation is congruence, i.e. the coherence, harmony, and appropriateness of its components. Trouble begins when all of a sudden we come across a text signed with a name that already exists in the literary space, and this is exactly what happened when after one hundred years two German language stories from the Cetinjer Zeitung have been retrieved. An automatic inclusion of the stories in the literary identity signed “Bruno Schulz” seems risky for many reasons. First of all, because some stranger may invade the space occupied by the son of a Drogobych cloth merchant, the actual author of The Cinnamon Shops. Let us then defend the Schulz of Drogobych from the Schulzes who come from different parts of the world, and they are many. In the first three decades of the 20th century those were, e.g., Karl Richard Bruno Schulz (1865-1932, professor of architecture), Bruno Claus Heinrich Schulz (1888-1944, oceanographer), Bruno Schulz (engineer, fleet officer), Bruno Schulz (1890-1958, psychiatrist, genetician), Bruno Kurt Schultz (1901-1997, anthropologist, in the Third Reich an SS “race” expert), and Bruno Schultz (1894-1987, economist).

Głos Schulza

The aim of the article is to answer the question of what Bruno Schulz’s voice might have sounded like. Only a few witnesses mention it, and their reports are sometimes contradictory. In the prewar Polish press many radio programs are listed, some of which mention that the Polish Radio broadcast Schulz’s reading of his short story “Dodo.” Thus, it is believed that the author of The Cinnamon Shops was actually on air, and perhaps more literary programs devoted to Schulz have been broadcast as well. It still seems possible to find the archival materials on which Schulz’s voice might have survived.

Poprosiliśmy pięcioro schulzologów… Ankieta redakcji

Finding by Piotr Szalsza two German language stories signed with the name “Bruno Schulz” could not be ignored by the editors of Schulz/Forum. Not yet recovered from the shock caused by the 14th issue, we are again facing a possible revelation. Unlike, however, in the case of the story titled “Undula” of 1922, which leaves no doubt that it is an early work by the author of The Cinnamon Shops, even if he preferred to use a penname, the question of the authorship of the two stories published in the Cetinjer Zeitung in 1917 and 1918 seems much more complicated. Perhaps without more research in the archives its resolution will be impossible. We asked four Schulz scholars for their opinions about the texts: Stefan Chwin, Włodzimierz Bolecki, Jerzy Jarzębski, Rolf Fieguth, and Katarzyna Lukas.

Imagination and reality

To Wallace Stevens the artist is determined by his relation to the "pressure of reality." When the artist erases or evades the pressure reality is absorbed by the imagination so that the interdependence between reality and imagination is aesthetically metamorphosed by a process of abstraction, and the artist's power is measured by his ability to abstract himself and to withdraw reality with him into his abstraction. Here, Stevens has formulated nothing less than a poetics of abstraction. In this essay the significance of his poetics will be examined by applying it to modernist fiction, embarking from a reading by Stevens' own poem "The Snow Man” (1921), where the aural sense, listening, prevents and excludes a fanciful attachment to the unreal and allows for the interdependence and the merging of imagination and reality, a poetic abstraction that is embedded in nature itself. In Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel Jealousy (1957), Haruki Murakami's short story "TV People” (1993), and Paul Auster's novel 4321 (2017) we find a problematising, even a denigration of vision as the characters are drawn to petrified images that obviate perception and insight. Bruno Schulz' novella "Cinnamon Shops” (1934) forms an exception in that the experience of illumination and expansion, taking place in winter, is precipitated by a unifying of the senses, aural, visual and tactile. The first-person narrator abstracts himself and abstracts reality by placing it in the imagination, to use Stevens' phrase.