The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center

Introduction

Wychowany na gáuchej prowincji, w podkarpackim miasteczku dawnej Galicji, w czasach, gdy wylot stamtąd graniczyá z fantazją nieoczekiwanych przypadków, znajdowaáem w jego ksiąĪkach moje tĊsknoty i nadzieje, bodĨce i zachwyty, miáoĞü i urodĊ Ğwiata, pierwsze sny o potĊdze i pierwsze odjazdy w marzenie. (WierzyĔski 1990: 91) (Having been raised deep in the provinces, in a Subcarpathian town in what was then Galicia, at a time when departure from there seemed almost unimaginable, an unexpected event, I discovered in his books my longings and hopes, stimulation and delight, the love and beauty of the world, my first dreams of greatness, and my first excursions into dream.)

In the above passage from a speech delivered to the Polish Academy of Literature in 1939, Drohobycz-born writer Kazimierz WierzyĔski focuses on his own roots in Poland's southeastern provinces as he pays homage to one of Poland's most well-known Galician writers, a man he called, using the language of apprenticeship, his mistrz 'master craftsman'. The author he is referring to is Leopold Staff, a native of Lwów, who WierzyĔski also describes as helping to shape "the spiritual world from which I emerged" ("duchowy Ğwiat, z którego wyszedáem"; 92). His lofty praise of Staff is hardly surprising, since contemporary literature. A great tournament of poets, musicians, and painters, daily from 9-11 p.m. Young Varsovian artists, unite!!!)

The notice's proclamatory tone of address and allusion to The Communist Manifesto echoed the language of leftist political slogans and manifestos of the day. Among these was a manifesto issued on November 7, 1918, by the Provisional Government of Poland in Lublin, which began: "To the Polish People! Polish Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers! Above a bloodied and tired humanity, a dawn of peace and freedom is rising!" ("Do Ludu Polskiego! Robotnicy, WáoĞcianie, i ĩoánierze Polscy! Nad skrwawioną i umĊczoną ludzkoĞcią wschodzi zorza pokoju i wolnoĞci!"; Kumanicki 1924: 130). The mock-revolutionary language used by the Skamander poets is indicative of how their call to create Polish poetry anew overlapped with their active support for the building of a modern nation state in newly-independent Poland. A key indicator of this engagement was their support for Piásudski and his politics, evidenced in the group's close relationship with the Marshall's aide-de-camp Gen. Bolesáaw Wieniawa-Dáugoszowski, and in Grydzewski's work as a government press officer. 3 Not long after the opening of the Cafe Pod Picadorem, the Skamander poets settled into a more permanent home at Cafe ZiemiaĔska, where they and Grydzewski had a special table reserved for themselves and their guests. Writers from various parts of Poland's literary scene paid visits to the cafe, a sign of the Skamandrites' openness to artistic exploration. Visitors included avant-gardist Adam WaĪyk, Futurist Aleksander Wat, and Young Poland legend Stefan ĩeromski, as well as two writers of modernist prose often associated with Bruno Schulz, Stanisáaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz (Shore 2006: 10-11). 4 As the Skamander poets evolved in their aesthetics during the 1920s and 1930s, they continued their association with figures from across the literary spectrum, as well as with journals run by Grydzewski, who as founder and editor of both 3 Wieniawa was a regular at Cafe ZiemiaĔska as well as Skamander-affiliated cabarets such as Quid Pro Quo (GroĔski 1978: 36). 4 In their anti-programmatic "manifesto", the Skamandrites equate their literary project with Columbus' voyage of discovery, noting that the explorer guided "his galleons by the pale stars in order to extra-programmatically discover America" ("jaki byá program Kolumba, wiodącego swe galeony przy bladych gwiazdach, aby nadprogramowo odkryü AmerykĊ"; Lam 1969: 105).

Skamander and WiadomoĞci Literackie (Literary News) would carry the Skamander torch right up to the outbreak of the Second World War. 5 The cosmopolitan Warsaw-based literary establishment described above does not appear at first glance to share much in common with Bruno Schulz and his prose. As a focal point on one pole (no pun intended) of the Warsaw-Krakow axis around which the Polish interwar literary scene revolved, Cafe ZiemiaĔska and its artistic milieu contrast sharply with the Galician provincial town of Drohobycz, in which both Schulz and his literary world had their roots. Yet, Schulz did share much in common with the Skamander poets. Among these commonalities are features often used by critics as markers of Schulz's place on the margins, including his origins in Drohobycz (shared with WierzyĔski) and his Jewish heritage, shared by three of the movement's founders (Tuwim, Sáonimski, LechoĔ) and Grydzewski. The connections, however, extend much further. As this article aims to demonstrate, both Schulz's literary career and certain thematic aspects of his writing were closely tied to the birth and maturation of the Skamander center of Warsaw's -and to a great extent Poland's -interwar literary milieu.

Schulz's links to the Skamander group are present in all three objects of study that have dominated Schulzological criticism: the writer's biography, his fiction, and his essays. In terms of Schulz's life, Skamander writers and publications were among his greatest supporters and were key in providing him with venues for publication. In his fiction, the arrival of the Skamandrites onto the Polish literary scene is echoed in Schulz's "age of genius", especially in 'The Republic of Dreams', where he utilizes a Piásudski-like figure to depict a mythic hero. In Schulz's essays, the link is two-fold. First, three of these essays explore the Piásudski legend, including reviews of two works by writers with links to the Skamander group, Kazimierz WierzyĔski's WolnoĞü tragiczna (Tragic Freedom, 1936) and Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski's Pod Belwederem (At Belweder, 1936). Secondly, the reviews he published in Skamander journals provided Schulz with exposure and financial support, both of which he sought as he carried out plans (which were ultimately unsuccessful) to physically move himself into this Varsovian literary center. What all these levels of inquiry reflect in common is a direction in Schulz's life and work after 1933, when he deliberately moves his writing beyond the world of his fiction, rooted in family biography and the local topography of Drohobycz, in order to better establish himself and his work within Poland's and Europe's literary milieux. Although Schulz's ultimate ambitions were to reach audiences beyond Poland's borders, the outbreak of World War Two abruptly cut short his literary project. In spite of this, during the five-year period from 1934 to 1939, Schulz's connections with the Skamandrites and their journals helped him successfully enter into the community of Poland's leading modernist literary voices, from which he received a generally enthusiastic reception, as well as recognition that grew over time, culminating in his receipt of the Záoty Wawrzyn Polskiej Akademii Literatury (Gold Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature) in 1938.

Schulz in the Skamandrite Center

Although Schulz's place in the Skamandrite Varsovian center has been underrepresented by critics, it has not been ignored. For example, in his introduction to the 1989 edition of Schulz's stories, letters and essays, Jerzy JarzĊbski notes that after the publication of Cinnamon Shops, Schulz became a public figure with the "doors to the Warsaw literary and artistic world" ("drzwi do warszawskich Ğrodowisk literacko-artystycznych") open to him although the attention he received from critics, the public and other artists "had scant effect on him during his lifetime" ("zaszczyty spáywaáy naĔ za jego Īycia skąpo"; 1989: xi). Rather, he adds, it was Schulz's humdrum life as a school teacher in the provinces that provided both the foundation for the milieu of his stories, as well as the "conditions for shaping the personality and psyche of the author" ("zespóá uwarunkowaĔ ksztaátujących osobowoĞü i psychikĊ pisarza"; 1989: v). These claims are undoubtedly accurate if we limit our understanding of Schulz's literary production to his stories, which are, indeed, best understood, as JarzĊbski notes, as a whole with "'layers' of meaning running through all his texts simultaneously" ("'warstwy' znaczeniowe, przebiegające przez wszystkie teksty jednoczeĞnie"; 1989: iv); this, he says, is how Schulz's prose has been studied critically for years. Running counter to this dominant paradigm is the fact that every chronology of Schulz's literary career, as well as his own comments in letters, indicates that after the release of Sklepy cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops, 1934), he made the decision to actively cultivate this career, dedicating more resources to his writing than to his visual art and maintaining an active presence on the pages of Poland's most prominent literary journals. And while his success and limited fame may not have gone to his head, it did embolden him to become active in public literary discourse, even to the point of taking on an ego like Gombrowicz's in public, using a voice that was much more self-confident and assertive than his relatively deferent private epistolary self.

To better understand Schulz's links to Poland's literary center, we need to begin in Warsaw in the first months of 1934, following the publication and unexpected positive reception of Cinnamon Shops. The book's release was promoted by the publication of the story 'Ptaki' ('Birds') in WiadomoĞci Literackie in December of 1933, which marked Schulz's literary debut. The book was positively received by the Varsovian literary world, and with the help of his patron Zofia Naákowska, Schulz soon began developing relationships with major literary figures in it, including Cafe ZiemiaĔska regulars such as Julian Tuwim, Adam WaĪyk, and Aleksander Wat. He also received letters of praise from a number of established writers, among which were Stanisáaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (the two had become acquaintances years earlier in Zakopane), Leopold Staff, Bolesáaw LeĞmian, Wacáaw Berent, and Józef Wittlin (Ficowski 2003: 214-15).

Schulz had been hungry for a chance to engage other writers, as evidenced by his enthusiastic and detailed response to Stefan Szuman in 1932 after receiving a self-published collection of poems from the psychology professor. In the letter, Schulz speaks of how he values "being accepted into the family of creative spirits, feeling that [his] world borders, touches other worlds, that on these borders these worlds mingle and intersect" ("przyjĊcie do rodziny twórczych duchów, […] poczucie, Īe Ğwiat mój graniczy, dotyka siĊ z innymi Ğwiatami, Īe na tych granicach Ğwiaty te przenikają siĊ i krzyĪują" ;Schulz 2002: 33). Having fostered a career as a visual artist from his home in Drohobycz for more than a decade with only limited success, his shift toward becoming a writer in 1934 increased his incentive to pull up his roots in the provinces. As a visual artist, Schulz could build a reputation around a smaller audience of patrons and collectors, and required of the city merely access to other artworks and galleries; as a writer, he had to maintain regular contact with Warsaw's literary milieu, not only to be among kindred spirits, but also because he needed its publishers and their journals and presses to reach a wider reading public. Living in Drohobycz made it hard to keep in contact with the Varsovian literary scene -which largely revolved around socializing in cafes and parties -so in spite of his generally reserved nature and meager financial resources, from 1934 through 1938, Schulz made numerous trips on the long and relatively poor rail connection with Drohobycz and spent most of a six-month leave of absence in 1936 in Warsaw (Ficowski 2003: 217). 6 During that long stay in the capital, Schulz redoubled his efforts to move to the city, a decision that can be attributed not only to his desire to be with his fiancé, Józefina SzeliĔska, who had moved to Warsaw, but also to further develop his relationship with other writers there.

Intertwined with all of these journeys to Warsaw is an immense amount of correspondence between Schulz and Varsovians, including in particular Józefina SzeliĔska and Romana Halpern, as well as with numerous individuals from the literary elite. Although his correspondence with SzeliĔska has been lost, Ficowski describes him as sending "letter after letter" ("list za listem") to her (in Schulz 2002: 16). Schulz's letters to Halpern, which begin after the writer's return to Drohobycz in mid-1936 and continue into 1939, is the most numerous collection of extant correspondence to a single recipient, totaling thirty-nine letters. Their close friendship and her role in arranging matters in Warsaw for him played no small part in the frequency of his letters. Her living in the cultural center provided him with a permanent dependable contact in the city as well as a friend with whom he could swap gossip about his interactions with others in the literary world. During the years of their correspondence, her help in maintaining contacts with this world was frequent and often productive, even if Schulz was ultimately unsuccessful in his goalfor both personal and professional reasons -of moving to the capital city himself.

Other correspondence further illuminates Schulz's growing familiarity with Warsaw and its literary mileu. In sheer numbers, at least nine of Schulz's 24 addressees in KsiĊga listów (The Book of Letters) lived or worked in Warsaw, outnumbering the number of fellow Galicians. But more significant are his comments in letters to and about other writers and, especially, his publishers, which in general, show his growing familiarity within this community. One such example are Schulz's letters to Ludwik Lille, a painter he had met in Paris. These show that by 1938 Schulz felt at home in the role of a Warsaw insider who could provide tips on how to deal with publishers in the city. In one letter from 1938, he expresses himself in a surprising cavalier manner in his discussion of Wacáaw Czarski, the editor of Poland's most prestigious literary journal, Tygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly). In his advice to Lille on how to get payment for a previously published article, he writes:

Niech Pan jednak jeszcze nie upomina i poĞle dalsze artykuáy, moĪe wywiady z róĪnymi osobistoĞciami, choüby fikcyjne (kto to skontroluje?). Potem bĊdzie Pan musiaá mieü kogoĞ w Warszawie, kto te pieniądze wyegzekwuje od Czarskiego (Schulz 2002: 124).

(Stop reminding them and send more articles, perhaps interviews with various personages, even if they are made up (who will check?). Then you will have to have somebody in Warsaw to collect the money from Czarski.)

In two letters to Czarski himself, one from early 1936 and another from 1938, Schulz engages the editor himself in a familiar, jovial tone. This ranges from joking about his pupils in the first letter to calling Paris a "real Babylon" and recommending the editor publish Lille's articles in the second, sent from the French capital.

Dreams of the Republic

But it is much more than Schulz's social networking that ties him to the Varsovian Skamander center. Throughout his prose, readers are introduced to fantastical notions of time, among which is a mythical past time, an "age of genius". This archetypal chronotope can be tied down in many cases to a time in the narrator's youth, a time whose outward form appears to have been inspired by the Messianic moment of Poland's rebirth and heroic rise of Piásudski, a time that coincided with a magical moment in Poland's literary history. Anchoring Schulz's mythologizing in the real-life realization of a century's worth of prophesizing Poland's re-birth provides another common tie between Schulz and the Skamander group, which was closely linked both to the initial enthusiastic reactions to Polish independence and the rise of modernist poetry following the end of the First World War. While both share a fascination with the legendary Piásudski at the time of his death in 1935, it is the Piásudski-inspired Skamander poetic world that appears to in part power Schulz's "age of genius".

It was in these early postwar years that Schulz became actively engaged in artistic work, joining an artistic circle called Kalleia (Greek for "beautiful things") and beginning work on his art (Ficowski 2003: 209-10). In 1918, when the Skamander poets made their debut as the youthful hope of Polish literature's future, Schulz was twenty-six, just two years older than Tuwim, WierzyĔski, and Iwaszkiewicz, and three years older than Sáonimski. Schulz looked back to these years in his written response to a letter from Tuwim praising Cinnamon Shops in 1934. In it Schulz says a reading by Tuwim in the early 1920s "intoxicated me, gave me a feeling of superhuman strength" ("dawaáy upojenie, przeczucie nadludzkich triumfalnych siá") inspiring a feeling of a past, mythical "age of genius", when "one took in the whole sky, with a single breath, like a gulp of pure ultramarine" (1990: 51; "caáe niebo wcháaniaáo siĊ jednym westchnieniem, jak haust czystej ultramaryny"; 2002: 46). He credits Tuwim's verse with educating him on the power of mythmaking in poetry to inspire profound metaphysical experience:

Pan mnie nauczyá, Īe kaĪdy stan duszy, dostatecznie daleko Ğcigany w gáąb, prowadzi poprzez cieĞniny i kanaáy sáowa -w mitologiĊ. Nie w zastygáą mitologiĊ ludów i historyj -ale w tĊ, która pod warstwą nawierzchnią szumi w naszej krwi, plącze siĊ w gáĊbiach filogenezy, rozgaáĊzia siĊ w metafizyczną noc. (2002: 46-47) (You taught me that every state of the soul, pursued to sufficient depths, leads through the straits and canals of the word -to mythology. Not in the frozen mythology of people and history -but to that which under the surface layer rumbles in our blood, gets tangled up in the depths of phylogeny, branches out into the metaphysical night; 1990: 51) Schulz's flattery may have been overblown, but it ties Tuwim's recital to a concept introduced in 'KsiĊga' ('The Book'), the first story in Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1937), which serves as a conceptual compass for navigating the rest of the book: "Have we to some extent prepared the reader for the things that will follow? Can we risk a return journey into our Age of Genius? […] In God's name, then -let's embark and go!" (2008: 128; 7 "Czy przygotowaliĞmy w pewnej mierze czytelnika do rzeczy, które nastąpią, czy moĪemy zaryzykowaü podróĪ w epokĊ genialną? […] W imiĊ BoĪe tedy -wsiadamy i odjazd!"; 1989: 120). 8 This call to the reader, which marks the end of the chapter, is reminiscent of similar entreaties in the early work of the Skamandrites, in which readers were brought into worlds, not so unlike those of Schulz's prose, where the mythical and everyday came together in a distinctively literary space with just enough reference to the external world to express a timeless relevance. Tuwim's most famous early work, 'Wiosna' ('Spring', 1918) illustrates another thematic link between Schulz and the Skamander poets: a shared thematic focus on life forces and sexual energies, the vital impetus (élan vital) of Bergson's L'évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution, 1907). Among the Skamandrites, this was often expressed in the form of the dithyramb, a poem to Dionysus best evidenced in early works like Tuwim's 'Spring' or WierzyĔski's 'ĝpiew dionizyjski' ('Dionysian Song'). Schulz's prose, in contrast, teems with images of vegetative growth, reproduction energy, "degenerated" life, and vital forces.

Although it is unclear exactly when most stories in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937) were originally written, a number of stories that were not included in the collection were clearly written after 1935, including 'Republika marzeĔ' ('The Republic of Dreams'), which begins in Warsaw, and 'Ojczyzna' ('Fatherland'), which describes an artist's exhaustion after having been working to succeed as an artist for a number of years. In addition, three essays concerning Piásudski were clearly written after his death in 1935. All of these are connected with Schulz's relationship to the notion of "homeland", which as will be made evident, leads him to reflect upon both universal and national questions. These links to the Polish nation and its recent independence are linked not only to his wider aesthetic aims concerning myth and poetic language, which overlap with those of the Skamander group, but also with Schulz's desire to establish a place himself in the Varsovian center of modern Polish social and artistic circles. 7 All further references will be given as SC. 8 All further references will be given as Op.

The first line of 'The Republic of Dreams', published in Tygodnik Ilustrowany in 1936, places the reader in the heat and urban din of a sweltering summer day in Warsaw, but quickly moves via the imagination to a distant realm, a "self-contained microcosm" ("samowystarczalny mikrokosmos") set in a landscape that is both concrete ("that lone spur sticking up among swarthy Hungarian vineyards"/"ta odnoga wsuniĊta samotnie miĊdzy smagáe wĊgierskie winnice") -almost certainly part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire -and fantastically abstract ("an anonymous plain […] nameless and cosmic like Canaan" / "anonimowa równina […] bezimienna i kosmiczna, jak Kanaan"). The description then moves from this Biblical chronotope to a fully mythological one, and then to a town that has "regressed into essence" (SC 315-16; "zstąpiáo w esencjonalnoĞü"; Op 325-26). Following these paradoxical images, Schulz asks rhetorically "How to express this in words?" ("Jak to wyraziü?"). The answer is to go progressively deeper into the realm of myth through poetic language. He begins by moving just beneath the surface to where events "have roots sunk into the deep of things and penetrate the essence" (SC 316; "mają korzenie w gáąb rzeczy i siĊgają istoty"; Op 326). He describes how lush weeds have spread and overgrown the landscape of the town. The narrator and his family take flight and head out of town. Suddenly the narrative reframes the setting as a time far off in the past and describes the political and artistic program of a group of boys to proclaim a "republic of the young" ("republika máodych"):

Tu mieliĞmy ukonstytuowaü prawodawstwo nowe i niezaleĪne, wznieĞü nową hierarchiĊ miar i wartoĞci. Miaáo to byü Īycie pod znakiem poezji i przygody, nieustannych olĞnieĔ i zadziwieĔ. Zdawaáo siĊ nam, Īe trzeba tylko rozsunąü bariery i granice konwenansów, stare áoĪyska, w które ujĊty byá bieg spraw ludzkich, aĪeby w Īycie nasze wáamaá siĊ Īywioá, wielki zalew nieprzewidzianego, powódĨ romantycznych przygód i fabuá. (Op 329) (Here we would form an autonomous legislature, erect a new hierarchy of standards and values. It was to be a life under the aegis of poetry and adventure, never-ending signs and portents. All we needed to do, or so it seemed to us, was push apart the barriers and limits of convention, the old markers imprisoning the course of human affairs, for our lives to be invaded by an elemental power, a great inundation of the unforseen, a flood of romantic adventures and fabulous happenings; SC 318-19).

The aim of the boys is, in essence, to build a republic based on the same principles as those promoted by the Skamander poets, who also felt "the torrent of the fabulating element, this inspired onrush of historical events, [were] carried away by its surging waves" (SC 319; "temu strumieniowi fabulizującego Īywioáu, natchnionemu przypáywowi dziejów i zdarzeĔ i daü ponieĞü siĊ tym wezbranym falom"; Op 329). The narrative, however, moves further from reality into the boys' imagination. They travel out to the countryside, where they abandon their adult guardians and proceed to build an imaginary kingdom constructed from the fables, novels and epics from which they have gleaned the material of their imaginations. The children's play is a gothic adventure full of wolves, bandits, mysterious strangers; they are joyously self-aware as they "brood over romantic entanglements" ("deliberowaliĞmy nad romantycznymi zawikáaniami"). They are living in a world without a clear dividing line between reality and fiction, where "the plot spun from these stories jumped out of the narrative frame and stepped among us, live and hungry for prey" (SC 320; "intryga przenikająca te opowiadania wystĊpowaáa z ram narracji, wchodziáa miĊdzy nas"; Op 330-31). Numerous critics and Schulz himself have commented on his use of his own youth as a major source of inspiration for his stories. In the passages above, the boys in the "republic of the young" are inspired to set up a parliament within their imaginative landscape. If we understand "young" to represent youth rather than childhood, then in the case of Schulz it would have occurred either during or shortly after World War One. Given the radical differences in Schulz's wartime and postwar environments, it does not seem unreasonable to equate this era with that when Tuwim's poetry gave him a "feeling of superhuman strength".

The differences between these two literary landscapes bring to mind Vico's division of his two ages of the imagination into an Age of Gods and an Age of Heroes (1968 [1725]). The first being a source of myth and metaphor, and the second a time in which these values direct the course of life through poetic language. The third of Vico's ages, the Age of Man, ushers in the reign of reason and philosophical abstraction, where law and civic culture replace a more authentic sense of community. Both Schulz and the Skamander poets implicitly look back to an Age of Gods as a source for their project to introduce an Age of Heroes. The difference between the two is that Schulz's Age of Gods is not the ancient world and its metaphors, but the worlds found in dreams and gothic romances, the progenitor of the modern novel. Schulz also lacks the naiveté required to unironically call for society to join him in ushering in this age of literature-as-life. The reader learns as much when the narrator leaves these "labyrinthine convolutions" to re-enter the world of the "present", noting, as if snapping out of a waking dream:

Nie bez przyczyny powracają dziĞ te dalekie marzenia. Przychodzi na myĞl, Īe Īadne marzenie, choüby nie wiedzieü jak absurdalne i niedorzeczne, nie marnuje siĊ w wszechĞwiecie. W marzeniu zawarty jest jakiĞ gáód rzeczywistoĞci, jakaĞ pretensja, która zobowiązuje rzeczywistoĞü, roĞnie niedostrzegalnie w wierzytelnoĞü i w postulat, w kwit dáuĪny, który domaga siĊ pokrycia. (Op 331) (Today those remote dreams come back, and not without reason. The possibility suggests itself that no dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe. Embedded in the dream is a hunger for it own reification, a demand that imposes an obligation on reality and grows imperceptibly into a bona fide claim, an IOU clamouring for repayment; SC 320) What follows is the reification of the dream. This time we are in a Republic of Dreams led not by an autonomous parliament of young boys, but by a blue-eyed man who speaks with the voice of Noah and is capable of acting in harmony with a grand design rooted in the workings of nature, a "director of cosmic landscapes and sceneries" (2008: 321; "ReĪyserem krajobrazów i sceneryj kosmicznych"; 1989: 332). Schulz returns in this final section to the Biblical topoi with which he began the story. In heralding "the Blue-eyed One" ("BáĊkitnooki") as the embodiment of the mythic, Schulz emphasizes the shared, dynamic nature of his project, which invites us to join in, to "keep working on, fabricating, jointly creating" (2008: 322; "do kontynuacji, do budowania, do wspóátwórczoĞci"; 1989: 333). This final scene offers the inverse of the Skamander aim of remaking society by giving it a (re)newed poetic voice; Schulz's vision for renewal is to recover through language Vico's Age of Gods, the point from which the poetic voice and an authentic metaphysical relationship with art originate.

'Ojczyzna' ('Fatherland', 1938) offers another angle on poetic return to youth: a longing look back from an adult present in which artistic ambitions and prosaic life comforts pull at a narrator who is worn down by years of struggle. The description of his situation feels eerily like that of Schulz late in his career:

Nie byáo niemal czasu na dziwienie, wraz z tą pomyĞlną passą moich losów przyszedá zarazem jakiĞ pogodzony fatalizm, jakaĞ báoga biernoĞü i ufnoĞü, która kazaáa mi poddaü siĊ bez oporu grawitacji wypadków. Zaledwie odczuáem to jako zadoĞüuczynienie dáugo niezaspokajanej potrzeby, jako gáĊbokie nasycenie wiecznego gáodu odtrąconego i nieuznanego artysty, Īe tu wreszcie poznano siĊ na moich zdolnoĞciach. The setting of the story is neither a metropolis nor a provincial backwater, but rather a tourist town with an impressive cathedral towering over it from just beyond its residential districts, and therefore just barely physically beyond the borders that mark the domain of the citizenry's domestic lives. The sublime image of the ancient cathedral with jeweled stained glass, crafted over generations, is contrasted with the petty-bourgeois townspeople, living easy lives selling sugar and tourist trinkets, including kitschy porcelain with images of the cathedral painted on them by girls studying at the local art school. In 'Fatherland', the tension between art and markets is played out on a physical landscape that embodies the limits of transcendence in an affluent capitalist society. Greatness is reduced to common kitsch in order to provide a commodified experience to the masses. The story ends with the narrator first retreating from a party to contemplate peace in death, and then finally arriving home with his wife to his own castle, his personal fatherland, an apartment he knows well enough to maneuver in the dark to settle onto his bed, where he holds his spouse's hand, communicating in the silent language of utter familiarity. What makes 'Fatherland' unique is that the story takes the reader far from the youthful perceptions that power most all of Schulz's prose, instead offering a world rooted in maturity, experience, compromise and acceptance. While it contains themes common to many of Schulz's stories -including dreamscapes and landscapes dense with significance -it is stripped of vitality, offering a narrative counter-point to the bulk of his oeuvre. The story provides a good example of how his artistic journey, and especially his experiences among Warsaw's literary world, filtered into his creative output.

Critical Center: Literature and Myth

In agreeing to Grydzewski's proposal to become a regular contributor of reviews in WiadomoĞci Literackie, Schulz expanded his role as a critic, one he had adopted earlier to present himself to Poland's literary circles. Over a period of five years (1934)(1935)(1936)(1937)(1938)(1939), Schulz signed his name to 27 pieces in the journal (including seven of his stories), more than WierzyĔski himself. If one adds Schulz's contributions to Poland's oldest and most prestigious literary review, Tygodnik Ilustrowany, in which he published three of his stories and several reviews, including the three on Piásudski, the Drohobyczan writer could be found every second or third month in one of the two journals, each of which had a circulation of ten to fifteen thousand. He also published his stories and essays in the Warsaw-based Skamander and Pion, as well as in Studio, Sygnaáy (Signals), and Kamena.

Schulz's desires to establish a place in the literary center can be seen in the kinds of reviews he wrote in WiadomoĞci Literackie and Tygodnik Ilustrowany, which were arbiters of literary tastes, comprising the heart of the mainstream of literary high culture in Warsaw and beyond during the interwar decades. Schulz's presence in these journals was relatively high profile and appears to have been well managed by the author himself. For example, although Schulz split his publication of stories from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass between both publications (and others), he dedicated more time to the reviews and essays he wrote for the more prestigious Tygodnik Ilustrowany, which included a key essay on Kuncewiczowa's psychological novel Cudzoziemka (The Foreigner, 1936) and all three essays on the national hero Józef Piásudski. He produced a larger volume of more banal commentary on relatively unremarkable translations he was assigned to regularly review for WiadomoĞci Literackie. These tend to be limited to a discussion of themes, a critique of technique and a cursory evaluation of the translator's work, usually using the summary terminology of the Polish school system's grading scale: good, very good. The translated works critiqued do not appear to have been selected by the author himself, or if so, not chosen for their literary merit, as his evaluations are often quite harsh, and he finds mediocrity to be more common in them than exceptionality, proof of Schulz's ability to critically navigate and explicate a wide variety of texts, discerning between good and bad novels. The reviews also required him to engage world literature, discussing issues wider than the experiences of many Polish readers, including Socialist Realism and Surrealism. In Schulz's reviews and essays in the Skamandrite WiadomoĞci Literackie and the venerable Tygodnik Ilustrowany, four themes can be distinguished in the writer's selection and explication of texts: (1) engagement with the psychological novel (including two long articles on Kuncewiczowa); (2) public discourse with wellknown modernist writers: Witkacy and Gombrowicz; (3) display of editorial and critical skill; (4) explication of his own ideas about myth and rooting Polish national experience, in particular via the living legend of Piásudski.

All four parts can be seen as components of Schulz's project to gain entrance into the Varsovian center. The first point includes his critical essays on Kuncewiczowa's The Foreigner, about which he published three pieces in leading journals, and a long essay on Zofia Naákowska in Skamander in 1939, as well as some of his shorter essays in WiadomoĞci Literackie. The second consists of open dialogs with Witkacy and Gombrowicz. Although on good terms with both men, with whom he shared a mutual respect, Schulz was uncharacteristically unapologetic in his strong opinions (his review of Ferdydurke) and as a rival for literary and intellectual high ground (his reply to Gombrowicz's provocative open letter). In the case of Witkacy, Schulz displays his competence as a critical reader of innovative prose literature. With Gombrowicz, he desires to highlight affinities and mutual recognition, going to the point of daring to attempt to "better" Gombrowicz at his own "game of upupienie, after he provokes Schulz from behind the mask of a small-minded petitbourgeois housewife, for which he is in turn himself unmasked".

The last set of texts that links Schulz to the Skamander group are his reviews and essays focused on Piásudski. The first of these three critical works, 'Powstają legendy' ('The Formation of Legends', 1935), was published shortly after Piásudski's death. The two other were written as reviews of works by writers associated with Skamander, the poet Kazimierz WierzyĔski and Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski.

The first Piásudski essay, 'The Formation of Legends', was published in Tygodnik Ilustrowany just weeks after the Marshall's death. The essay is interesting not only because it provides a clearer explication of Schulz's thoughts on Poland's most recent history and its roots in legend, but also contrasts these with the relationship between scientific knowledge and the loss felt in modern society due to the rupture with metaphysical experience rooted in ritual, belief and myth, in line with Witkacy's theories. At the heart of the essay's argument is humanity's tendency toward small-mindedness -the ideal of which would be petit-bourgeois creature comforts -unless a powerful force can act to create a sense of greatness. The key to Schulz's argument is the manner in which he distinguishes Piásudski from Napoleon. Whereas Napoleon embodied history, Piásudski embodies destiny, and while the former inspired action, he was also consumed by that which he unleashed. Georg Lukács writing in Der historische Roman (The Historical Novel, 1937) illustrates this. In it he makes the argument that the historical novel was impossible before Napoleon because the wars and social revolutions the French general unleashed upon Europe gave people across the continent the feeling of seeing history in the making. This direct contact with a historical narrative that transcended the framework of previous conflicts in scale and impact created the material conditions necessary for the development of a historical consciousness, which could then be put to work in the aesthetic realm, with writers able to embody in characters the specificities of the thinking of a given historical moment, and readers the desire to vicariously re-live historical moments through these characters in fiction. Napoleon was therefore "all presence and moment " (1990; 328; "caáa obecnoĞü i chwila"; 1993: 24), whose impact on the imagination ended once he had been removed from power.

Piásudski, on the other hand, was burdened by history in the way a prophet carries generations of tales predicting his arrival and path. The blue-eyed general, however, is simultaneously a mysterious other -tamten 'the other one', whose arrival is not predicted, but whose failure to arrive cannot be conceived. Whereas Napoleon "transubstantiated" himself ("przeistaczaá siĊ"), "draped himself in history as in a royal cloak " (1990: 327-28; "[u]braá siĊ w historiĊ jak w páaszcz królewski"; 1993: 25), Piásudski embodies Poland paradoxically, as both the son and father of the nation. 'The Formation of Legends' posits that the death of the general signals a return to "people of ordinary caliber and the usual course of history " (1990: 326; "ludzi zwykáej miaryi zwyczajne dzieje"; 1993: 19), where the small-minded -politicians, historians, and others -will go to work both dissecting and co-opting this greatness, either trying to cloak themselves in its authority or belittle it, so that they can return to a more comfortable state of mediocrity. Schulz uses as examples of the antithesis to greatness, history, psychology, and the philosophy of pragmatism. Scientific humanism's antithetical relationship to belief makes these disciplines the enemy of greatness, which cannot exist as a maxim or common defining characteristic, and is both rare and universally desirable, meaning those who have pretensions to greatness must necessarily be doubted, forced to project themselves beyond the inertia of a sea of skepticism.

In his brief review of Kaden-Bandrowski's collection of essays entitled Pod Belwederem (At Belveder, 1936), Schulz continues a pattern found in all three Piásudski essays, contextualizing the book through his own theories about history and myth. As in 'The Formation of Legends', he contrasts a flash of greatness and action personified with the belittling power of its articulation in the rational language of science and reason. He praises Kaden-Bandrowski for bucking this tendency in his "magical portrait" of Piásudski, which rather than portray the man, embodies the means by which through him "the great and nameless forces of history arrange for themselves as a "rendevous" leading to epoch-making enterprises" (Prokopczyk 1999: 52). The book, he says, captures "a strange borderland where a man becomes a myth and myth the man" by allowing the portrait of the man to "dissolve", revealing "the unfathomable face of history" (52). Schulz's words resonate with messages found throughout his prose, but they also seek to recover a moment, nearly twenty years in the past, before Piásudski had been drawn into nasty political disputes that laid his humanity bare in the decades that followed Poland's independence.

In his review of WierzyĔski's paean to Piásudski, 'WolnoĞü Tragiczna' ('Tragic Freedom', 1936), Schulz describes the success of the work as being on a par with Poland's greatest myth-maker, Mickiewicz, because WierzyĔski manages "not to sever the umbilical cord of the myth, not to enclose it prematurely within an unequivocal and definite form! Because the base of the myth must communicate with the incomprehensible and preverbal, if it is to stay alive and remain rooted in the dark mythical fatherland" (in Prokopczyk 1999: 44). The equation of this Skamander with Poland's great romantic poet is no accident. Schultz's focus on origins and myth places him closer to WierzyĔski than their prose style would suggest. What separates the two is not just the physical distance between Drohobycz and Warsaw but WierzyĔski's psychic distance to his former home, from which he once dreamed of escape. Schulz draws artistic inspiration from a reality that in its immediacy provides easy access to his childhood and his own roots. For him, the Varsovian center is the hub of a literary machine whose workings he must master, while the provinces are his true artistic center.