Jerzy Ficowski Research Articles

Bruno, Son of Franz

Already the first reviewers of Bruno Schulz’s exhibitions and stories compared him to Franz Kafka, pointing at clear resemblances of imagination and motifs. Those analogies were later noticed also by literary scholars who either tried to prove that Schulz was inspired by the work of the Prague writer, or – on the contrary – demonstrated that all the correspondences between their literary worlds were accidental or determined by the times. Analyzing the reception of Kafka and Schulz in Poland before World War II, and the arguments used by both parties, the author makes an attempt to establish whether Schulz was indeed Kafka’s follower. It transpires that even though Schulz most likely knew Kafka’s novels and stories already before 1926, and one may find a number of links connecting not only their works, but also biographies, in terms of their idiom and worldviews the two writers were dramatically different. This, however, does not mean that there is no connection between them. On the contrary, the author realizes that it was actually Kafka who encouraged Schulz to write and ultimately made him an artist, so that Schulz’s writing may be considered a kind of response addressed to his literary progenitor. The picture of Schulz as an imitator of Kafka was largely influenced by the first postwar critics of his work, who promoted it abroad and looked for analogies with that of another Jewish writer active at approximately the same time and in the same geographical area. The ultimate step toward a firm belief in the literary affinity of Schulz and Kafka was made by Jerzy Ficowski who, even though he rejected analogies, created Schulz’s legend using the same methods as Max Brod – with similar merits as well as errors.

Schulz and Mourning. About the Writer’s Second Body

The paper addresses the problem of the mourning cult of Bruno Schulz. The presented approach is critical of its excess in the Schulzean biographical discourses as well as literary and artistic references to his life and work, but it is by no means provocative like that of Janusz Rudnicki, who in the 1990s mocked the “hagiographic” idiom of Jerzy Ficowski. Analyzing archive records and testimonies, the author attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of Schulz’s death in possibly the minutest details. Comparing contradictory pieces of information with the official version made popular by Ficowski, he shows how profoundly it has been marked by the unperformed work of mourning over Schulz and the Holocaust – both the failed work of Ficowski himself and of his postwar correspond- ents whose letters determined the form of The Regions of Great Heresy. Using the idiom of thanatology and taking the role of a necrographer rather than that of a Schulz specialist, the author supposes that the dynamic of loss in the case of Schulz reaches far beyond the act of the writer’s execution on the street to include also the posthumous annihilation of his corpse and grave. This particular kind of necroviolence, perhaps the most hateful from the vantage point of the Jewish tradition and the heritage of Western culture in general, which consists in removing the material remains of the deceased has been called by Holocaust scholars “necrocide.” The absence of material traces and the “mourning objects” that usually help to cure the semiotic crisis which is death makes writers and artists commemorate Schulz with lyrical and artistic epitaphs. Their function is to restore the bodily identity of the dead person by creating his other body, told about and imagined in effigie, existing not beside but instead of the missing “mourning object.” However, the expansion of those elegiac narratives, particularly those produced outside Poland, often results in unintended reductionism. As a human being, writer, and artist, Schulz has been reduced in them to an emblem of the Holocaust, while such obituaries ignore the history of his archive. The other, historical and material body of the writer consists of his manuscripts, drawings, graphic works, and official documents. It exists, drawn and quartered, in archives, to be put up for auction for tens of thousands of dollars, exposed in museums and art galleries, and hoarded by collectors as precious relics.

Heterotopia Jerzego Ficowskiego w „Niepamiętniku czyli podróży do Gorczakowa i jeszcze dawniej“

The subject of the article is Jerzy Ficowski’s Niepamiętnik czyli podróż do Gorczakowa i jeszcze dawniej [Non-diary in Other Words the Journey to Gorczaków and More Formerly], published in 2019. In it the poet reached for experiences of the past time, to his family roots located in distant Ukraine, deeply rooted in the culture of the Borderlands, in the space of the Gorczaków wilderness. The creator of the Non-diary considered them to be a space of his pre-childhood due to the natural inheritance of the memory of the land of his ancestors, their deeds, thoughts and reflections, which finally accumulated in the inner self of the author. They entered into his life according to his convictions that we are older than our lives and that “the sources of our memory / are further […] than within us.” In the text an attempt was made to analyse the process of the transformation of the “Ukrainian family nest” of the Ficowski family into a specific form of heterotopia – into the “Land of Holy Oblivion”. This different space was created thanks to the infiltration of what is real and concrete, “through what is imagined”.

Schwarze Katze – podwójna biografia Karin Wolff w świetle badań nad tłumaczką

The aim of the above article is to reconstruct the biography of Karin Wolff, a distinguished translator of Polish literature in Germany (more than 90 translations), who was active in the opposition in the GDR and the Polish People’s Republic. The author presents Wolff’s activities to popularize Polish culture (including the organization of a Polish literate salon in Frankfurt/Oder), her contacts with Polish poets (e.g. Jan Twardowski, Jerzy Ficowski) and her numerous publishing initiatives.

Anna Frajlich: Departures, Returns, Memory

Anna Frajlich: Departures, Returns, Memory

The Works of Marc Chagall in Polish Poetry (from the 1950s to the 1980s)

The article presents a profound and artistically very successful phenomenon of the reception of Marc Chagall’s works in Polish poetry form the 1950s to the 1980s. Different from the reception of Chagall in other “Western” literatures (examples discussed in the article derive from French poetry), the Polish reception is marked first of all by the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust. As during the war almost all material and cultural traces of the Jewish presence in Poland were annihilated, the works of Chagall became a point of reference for many poets (e.g. Jerzy Ficowski, Joanna Kulmowa, Janusz S. Pasierb, Tadeusz Śliwiak), enabling them to express a part of Polish culture which was tragically deprived of its own forms of expression and existence.

“I think that poets and, more broadly, all artists have some certain cognitive impatience in them”

The interview covers the subject of Stanisław Barańczak and his works. Pondering on the way the poet pictures the existence of God in his poems is an important part of the text. Another crucial subject is the way Barańczak deals with his illness and portrays it in his poetic works. In the interview Jerzy Kandziora – an exquisite reasercher of the poetry written by Barańczak and Jerzy Ficowski − mentions his private relationship with both Barańczak and his wife.

„Panowie! Za co nas będziecie wybijać?”. Wołyńskie wspomnienia rodziny Krzyżanowskich w relacji Jerzego Ficowskiego

The article presents wartime memories of the families Krzyżanowski (after the war: Dębicki), Wajs, and Siwiak that were written down by Jerzy Ficowski in the late 1940s and early1950s, and subsequently reprinted in consecutive versions of his monographs on Polish Romani people (Cyganie polscy. Szkice historyczno-obyczajowe and Cyganie na polskich drogach) and in his memoirs entitled Demony cudzego strachu. Wspominki cygańskie [The Demons of Other People’s Fears. The Gypsy Reminiscences]. The discussed narratives relate to experiences from Volhynia of the years 1942–1945. The article’s aim is to indicate the type and scope of alternations that Ficowski made while editing the memoirs in consecutive publications. A handwritten copy kept in archive is treated by the author of the article as the base version. The differences between the successive versions were divided into four groups: stylizations, fictionalizations, erasures and additions, ethnographical issues. What results from the conclusions of the presented analysis is the memoirs published by Ficowski no longer enjoying its status as a historical source relating to/pertaining to the wartime events in Volhynia. To the contrary, they are a testimony to the selfcensorship mechanisms implemented by Ficowski, who kept in mind the specificity of majoritydominated society members being the primary readership of his books on the Romani people.

Literature and Memory: The Correspondence between Marc Chagall and David Lazer

Abstract The present article explores the decades-long correspondence between Marc Chagall and David Lazer. Born in Kraków, Lazer was the son of a Hebraist who edited a respected Jewish journal. Following in his father’s footsteps, David was the editor-in-chief of the Nowy Dziennik, a Polish-language Zionist weekly. After immigrating to Palestine, he co-founded the Israeli newspaper Maariv and served as the editor of its literary supplement. The journalist had a true passion for literary journeys, which were the backdrop for many of the works he penned. Some of these pieces were devoted to the cultural heritage of European Jewry, including the life and enterprise of Marc Chagall. In the pages ahead, we will take stock of the relationship between these two figures. The paper also unfurls the story behind Jerzy Ficowski’s “A Letter to Marc Chagall” as well as the painter’s illustrations for this harrowing poem. In addition, we unveil the original manuscript of a speech that Chagall gave at the dedication of his stained-glass windows for the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem.

Bruno, syn Franciszka

Already the first reviewers of Bruno Schulz’s exhibitions and stories compared him to Franz Kafka, pointing at clear resemblances of imagination and motifs. Those analogies were later noticed also by literary scholars who either tried to prove that Schulz was inspired by the work of the Prague writer, or – on the contrary – demonstrated that all the correspondences between their literary worlds were accidental or determined by the times. Analyzing the reception of Kafka and Schulz in Poland before World War II, and the arguments used by both parties, the author makes an attempt to establish whether Schulz was indeed Kafka’s follower. It transpires that even though Schulz most likely knew Kafka’s novels and stories already before 1926, and one may find a number of links connecting not only their works, but also biographies, in terms of their idiom and worldviews the two writers were dramatically different. This, however, does not mean that there is no connection between them. On the contrary, the author realizes that it was actually Kafka who encouraged Schulz to write and ultimately made him an artist, so that Schulz’s writing may be considered a kind of response addressed to his literary progenitor. The picture of Schulz as an imitator of Kafka was largely influenced by the first postwar critics of his work, who promoted it abroad and looked for analogies with that of another Jewish writer active at approximately the same time and in the same geographical area. The ultimate step toward a firm belief in the literary affinity of Schulz and Kafka was made by Jerzy Ficowski who, even though he rejected analogies, created Schulz’s legend using the same methods as Max Brod – with similar merits as well as errors.

„Cinnamon Shops” 1963

The article presents the paratextual framing of the first English edition of Bruno Schulz’s short story collection: Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories, published in 1963 in London by McGibbon & Kee. It describes the book cover and blurb, and offers a brief commentary on Celina Wieniewska’s Translator’s Preface, setting it in the context of its time. Naive and error-ridden as it seems today, Wieniewska’s short introduction, largely based on Jerzy Ficowski’s early findings, reflects the state of knowledge about Schulz prior to the development of Schulz Studies as we know it, and it is worth scholarly attention as the first English-language text of this kind. Interestingly, despite being out of date, it has been reprinted without revision in almost all subsequent editions of Wieniewska’s translation, up until the most recent one, from 2012.

Wokół wystawy w Borysławiu. O dwóch debiutach Brunona Schulza

Most Schulz experts assume that while working on The Booke of Idolatry, he did not start writing fiction yet. It has been generally believed that his literary talent surfaced rather late, although Jerzy Ficowski thought that Schulz might have tried writing some time earlier. In the critic’s opinion, the beginning of Schulz’s literary talent dated back to his correspondence with close friends in 1925–1926, but since all letters from that period have been lost there is no way to validate that claim. Jerzy Jarzębski supposes that Schulz’s fiction came into being rapidly, at once fully mature and perfect. Władysław Panas also points at Schulz’s magisterial literary debut, The Cinnamon Shops, when the author was already about forty years old. And yet, the present essay puts those hypotheses to test. Having searched the holdings of the Vasyl Stefanyk National Academic Library in Lviv, Ms. Khomych has demonstrated that Schulz made his debut in the early 1920s almost simultaneously in two fields: in art, with a one man show in the town of Boryslaw in 1921, which has been commonly known, and in literature in 1922. Ms Khomych discovered in the 25–26 no. (January 15, 1922) of the bi-weekly Świt, sponsored by the oil officials of Boryslaw, a short story titled “Undula,” signed with a penname “Marceli Weron.” A critical analysis of this story demonstrates a number of affinities both with Schulz’s art, and with his later fiction. The name of the title character, Undula, is the same as that of the main figure of the graphic works included in The Booke of Idolatry. Other similarities include masochistic eroticism and some characters and motifs typical of Schulz’s later stories: a child, a dream, a chambermaid named Adela, the Demiurge, a crab, and a cockroach. Moreover, the stylistic and lexical features of the text leave no doubt that Schulz must have been its author. Imitation by anyone is impossible since in the early 1920s none of his other literary works was available in print. Thus, one may assume that “Marceli Weron” was Schulz’s penname and “Undula” was his proper literary debut.

Spotkanie we Lwowie (do którego nie doszło). Bruno Schulz i Henryk Vogler

The paper presents unknown details concerning Bruno Schulz, found in the memoirs of the Cracow critic, writer, and poet Henryk Vogler (1911–2005). Vogler wrote quite a long article, “Two Romantic Worlds. On Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz” [Dwa światy romantyczne. O Brunonie Schulzu i Witoldzie Gombrowiczu], published in 1938 in Skamander. Both writers thanked him in letters, which initiated their correspondence that continued till the outbreak of World War II. Schulz exchanged with his younger colleague opinions about literature, evaluated his attempts to write fiction, and described his dreams. They resumed writing letters to each other in 1940 during Vogler’s stay in Lviv – he actually invited Schulz to pay him a visit. Their meeting, however, never took place: already on his way, Schulz returned home. That situation may be considered in the contexts of similar events from Schulz’s life and an interpretation of his fiction and art proposed by Jerzy Jarzębski, who saw in both a “record of … an encounter realized in many different ways.” This encounter almost never brings about a harmonious connection, but instead leads to “pain, shame, comedy, and irony.” On his correspondence with Schulz, lost during the war, as well as on Schulz’s influence on his own work and the meeting in Lviv that did not take place, Vogler wrote in his Self-Portrait from Memory [Autoportret z pamięci] – three volumes published in 1979–1981. In his autobiography Vogler also mentioned the first postwar publication of Schulz’s fiction in 1957 by Wydawnictwo Literackie, of which he was editor-in-chief. Still, his account does not explain the details of a conflict between Artur Sandauer and Jerzy Ficowski, which began on that occasion and continued for many years. The closing part of the paper focuses on the traces of Schulz in Vogler’s novel, The Man Who Was Dreaming [Człowiek, który śnił], written before the war but published with some revisions in 1960.

Schulz i żałoba. O drugim ciele pisarza

The paper addresses the problem of the mourning cult of Bruno Schulz. The presented approach is critical of its excess in the Schulzean biographical discourses as well as literary and artistic references to his life and work, but it is by no means provocative like that of Janusz Rudnicki, who in the 1990s mocked the “hagiographic” idiom of Jerzy Ficowski. Analyzing archive records and testimonies, the author attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of Schulz’s death in possibly the minutest details. Comparing contradictory pieces of information with the official version made popular by Ficowski, he shows how profoundly it has been marked by the unperformed work of mourning over Schulz and the Holocaust – both the failed work of Ficowski himself and of his postwar correspondents whose letters determined the form of The Regions of Great Heresy. Using the idiom of thanatology and taking the role of a necrographer rather than that of a Schulz specialist, the author supposes that the dynamic of loss in the case of Schulz reaches far beyond the act of the writer’s execution on the street to include also the posthumous annihilation of his corpse and grave. This particular kind of necroviolence, perhaps the most hateful from the vantage point of the Jewish tradition and the heritage of Western culture in general, which consists in removing the material remains of the deceased has been called by Holocaust scholars “necrocide.” The absence of material traces and the “mourning objects” that usually help to cure the semiotic crisis which is death makes writers and artists commemorate Schulz with lyrical and artistic epitaphs. Their function is to restore the bodily identity of the dead person by creating his other body, told about and imagined in effigie, existing not beside but instead of the missing “mourning object.” However, the expansion of those elegiac narratives, particularly those produced outside Poland, often results in unintended reductionism. As a human being, writer, and artist, Schulz has been reduced in them to an emblem of the Holocaust, while such obituaries ignore the history of his archive. The other, historical and material body of the writer consists of his manuscripts, drawings, graphic works, and official documents. It exists, drawn and quartered, in archives, to be put up for auction for tens of thousands of dollars, exposed in museums and art galleries, and hoarded by collectors as precious relics.

Schulz poetów „ośmielonej wyobraźni” (preliminaria)

The paper addresses the popularity of the person and work of Bruno Schulz in one of the trends in Polish poetry, represented by the generation born in the 1970s, placing it in the context of the writer’s earlier reception (e.g., in the works of the poets of older generations, such as Marian Jachimowicz, Tadeusz Różewicz, Jerzy Ficowski, Anna Frajlich, and Jarosław Gawlik). This trend has been usually referred to with a metaphorical term “bold imagination” and called “imiaginativism”, and its main representatives are Roman Honet, Tomasz Różycki, Radosław Kobierski, and Bartłomiej Majzel. Close to that group are also Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, Dariusz Pada, and Mariusz Tenerowicz. All of them consider Schulz, who called the entire genuine literature “poetry,” their mentor and patron, both as a writer and a graphic artist, whose heritage includes also the works that are unfinished or lost, and as such, they encourage continuing his ideas (such as the novel Messiah). For them, he is also the founder of a “trend” based on the primacy of imagination, visions, the mythicization of reality, and a creative approach to cultural traditions. The poets have been also inspired by Schulz’s literary legend whose elements are his double Polish and Jewish identity, the family and erotic psychodramas, life in a provincial and multicultural Galician town as well as the necessity to combine a literary career with the humdrum teacher’s job and his tragic death in the Holocaust. Referring to the motifs drawn from Schulz’s life and work, the imaginativists, poets and fiction writers, write apocrypha and elegies in which Schulz continues his “posthumous life.” The author considers all the modes of his presence in the poetry of the “bold imagination”: as a literary precursor, as the favorite master, as an emblem of the Holocaust, and as a protagonist of a biographical legend. She interprets the programmatic statements of Honet, Majzel, and Różycki, where Schulz figures prominently, right before other highly appreciated poets, writers, and artists: Rilke, Kafka, Trakl, and Schiele. Then she interprets the early poems by Honet, Kobierski, Nowakowska, and Pada, which include the characteristic motifs of Schulz’s fiction: a sanatorium, a phantasmagoric town, the Book, a comet, and the realities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the belle époque. It has been stressed that the later Schulzean “biographical apocrypha” of the imaginativists (Tomasz Cieślak’s coinage), which develop the alternative versions of his life, are rooted in the projects of alternative histories (“side courses of time,” the “thirteenth months”) to be found in his fiction, as well as the visionary ways of prolonging life of the dead (particularly in “The Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass” and the “Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies”). The Schulzean poems of the imaginativists are full of biographical details – their authors, imitating the poetics of their master, quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing his texts or referring to his life experience and vicissitudes, write first of all about themselves. Schulz’s biography and work turn out to be an unusually flexible medium, a figure of the contemporary (particularly Polish) artist, and a mirror for the writers of late modernity, who get a chance to understand themselves and perhaps confirm their own poetic calling.

Etnolog i pisarz. O autokreacji w romologicznej spuściźnie Jerzego Ficowskiego

Etnolog i pisarz. O autokreacji w romologicznej spuściźnie Jerzego Ficowskiego

W archiwum Jerzego – przestrzenie pamięci, przestrzenie rozproszenia, zakamarki interpretacji. Recenzja książki Jerzego Kandziory, „Poeta w labiryncie historii. Studia o pisarskich rolach Jerzego Ficowskiego”, Fundacja Terytoria Książki, Gdańsk 2017

Jerzy Kandziora w swojej książce Poeta w labiryncie historii. Studia o pisarskich rolach Jerzego Ficowskiego podjął próbę całościowego spojrzenia na twórczość autora Ptaka poza ptakiem. Głównymi kategoriami interpretacyjnymi zaproponowanymi przez badacza stały się czas, labirynt i historia. Pozwoliły one autorowi na typ lektury przekrojowej – począwszy od opisania życia przedpoetyckiego Ficowskiego, przez jego literackie i artystyczne fascynacje Schulzem, Wojtkiewiczem, Tuwimem, światem codziennym, aż po doświadczenie pogranicza, tego dosłownego i poetyckiego. Tą eseistyczną, fragmentami również syntetyczną forma opisu, Kandziora zaznacza nowy nurt odczytań twórczości poety, zwraca uwagę zwłaszcza na wpływ społecznego imaginarium w funkcjonowaniu poety we współczesnym literaturoznawstwie.

Porządek kalendarza, porządek wyobrażenia. W stronę biogeografii Schulza

The paper proposes an approach to Schulz’s life in terms of biogeography. The author criticizes the stereotype of Schulz’s biography as that of a settled, provincial man who hardly ever left his hometown, and when he did, he suffered from anxiety and the sense of failure. That stereotype was created by Jerzy Ficowski, who brought into being the figure of Schulz as a weak, shy, hypersensitive, and anxious artist, who in his art found shelter from everyday reality. The paper presents some aspects of Ficowski’s approach to Schulz’s spatial experience (decontextualization, negligence of social life and the urban experience) to show how a critique of that approach may lead to a new, biogeographical version of the writer’s life.

Łódzkie obrachunki, czyli cztery ekslibrisy Brunona Schulza

The author disagrees with a popular belief the Schulz’s bookplates have been made with the cliché-verre technique. He reconstructs the reasons for this misrecognition promoted by Jerzy Ficowski and Michał Kuna and the common association of Schulz’s graphic art with the Booke of Idolatry only, but in the first place makes a detailed analysis of the known bookplates, which allows him to claim that the techniques used were zincotype, drypoint, and heliogravure. The paper includes reproductions of four known bookplates by Schulz, with full descriptions made by the author.

Schulz nasz bliźni

When in 1947 Pierre Klossowski called the Marquis de Sade his „neighbor,” in fact he did it on behalf of an entire generation of French intellectuals, writers, and artists, for whom the „divine Marquis” became emblematic both as a source of philosophical inspiration, and as an existential figure. Soon the author of 120 Days of Sodom would be taken into consideration by Bataille, Blanchot, Camus, and de Beauvoir, and then by Barthes, Ricoeur, Lacan, Deleuze, and Kristeva, to mention only the French. Now, after several decades, it is clear that the twentieth-century humanities made his writings one of their permanent points of reference, either negative, or positive. Therefore, Sade became a neighbor of every one of them. Still, Klossowski did not only mean rational and “structural” kinship when he called the author of Juliette his “neighbor.” His statement seems to have reached much deeper, at something most intimate and dark that remains beyond the pale of reason – Schulz called it the “basic capital of imagination,” the “roots of individual spirit,” the “mythic core.” Just like de Sade, Schulz has many devotees – commentators who also are his “neighbors.” Schulz Studies stem from a statement by Jerzy Ficowski, “I have found the Authentic.” He was then followed by many scholars who were similarly dazzled and seduced, ready to „engage in discoveries.” There are more and more of them nowadays, but Schulz, like the „divine Marquis” in the 20th century, has become for us, overwhelmed by the less and less intelligible and more and more grotesque reality of the 21st century, also a point of reference and an emblem of a certain intellectual and aesthetic identity. With his new materialism, non-anthropocentrism, and the ethic of care, Schulz seems now a harbinger of a new paradigm of Polish culture, which is emerging under our eyes. Perhaps soon enough someone will claim on behalf of a whole generation of post-humanists: Schulz, our neighbor. Will it be true? For now, we are in abeyance, relying only on ourselves. In a trembling voice, with a premonition of something intimate and dark in ourselves, each of us repeats in his or her own name: Schulz, my neighbor.