The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center

 The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center Thomas Anessi Abstract: Bruno Schulz was intricately linked with Poland’s Skamandrite literary center in Warsaw. His career as a writer began in Warsaw and was nurtured in journals that carried the Skamander torch. His place in the literary milieu of the interwar period cannot be understood without reference to his place within this center. Important textual links between Schulz and the Varsovian literary milieu are the essays, reviews, and stories he published in Poland’s most prominent literary journals, including the Warsaw-based Tygodnik Ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly), Wiadomoci Literackie (Literary News), and Skamander, as well as Schulz’s stories and essays connected with his Polish homeland and, especially, the figure of Józef Pisudski. Introduction Wychowany na guchej prowincji, w podkarpackim miasteczku dawnej Galicji, w czasach, gdy wylot stamt d graniczy z fantazj nieoczekiwanych przypadków, znajdowaem w jego ksi kach moje t sknoty i nadzieje, bodce i zachwyty, mio i urod wiata, pierwsze sny o pot dze i pierwsze odjazdy w marzenie. (Wierzyski 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 Wierzyski 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 Wierzyski also describes as helping to shape “the spiritual world from which I emerged” (“duchowy wiat, z którego wyszedem”; 92). His lofty praise of Staff is hardly surprising, since 398 Thomas Anessi the latter acted as a mentor to the Warsaw-based Skamander group, of which Wierzyski was a leading member. Staff’s poetry, which flirted, in turn, with Nietzschean dynamism, Decadentism, and Classicism in a carefully crafted, yet unpretentious language, was one of the models for the Skamandrites, whose works married a penchant for classical allusion and a programmatic desire to “modernize” Polish poetics.1 The five young poets who comprised the core of the Skamander group – Kazimierz Wierzyski, Antoni Sonimski, Jan Lecho, Jarosaw Iwaszkiewicz, and Julian Tuwim – promulgated their aesthetic program through three journals edited by Mieczysaw Grydzewski: Pro Arte et Studio (1916-1918), Pro Arte (1919), and Skamander (1920-1928 and 1935-1939). Grydzewski also helped organize one of the first Skamander cultural events, the opening of Warsaw’s first “poet’s cafe” – Cafe Pod Picadorem – on November 29, 1918, just eighteen days after the end of the First World War. The poster advertising the event exuded a mix of patriotic and artistic exuberance that marked the group’s early days:2 Rodacy! Robotnicy, onierze, dzieci, starcy, ludzie, kobiety i pisarze dramatyczni! […] Sumienie modej Warszawy artystycznej! Wielka Kwatera Gówna Armji Zbawienia Polski od caej wspóczesnej literatury ojczystej. Codziennie od 9-11 wielki turniej poetów, muzyków i malarzy. Modzi artyci warszawscy  czcie si !!! (Kwiatkowski 2001: 54) (Countrymen! Workers, soldiers, children, seniors, people, women, and dramatic writers! … The conscience of young artistic Warsaw! The Main Quarters of the Army of Polish Liberation for all of the nation’s  1 These aesthetic interests led the group to name itself after the Trojan river Skamander, which is described in Homer’s Iliad but also appears in Act II of Wyspiaski’s Akropolis (1903), where it mixes with the waters of the Vistuala River: “The Skamander glistens, / glittering with a wave from the Vistula” (1985: 66; “Skamander poyska, / wilan wietl c si fal ”). 2 In principle, the Skamander poets sought to decouple Polish poetry from the nationalist and patriotic traditions that dominated throughout the nineteenth century. This desire is voiced in a well-known line from Jan Lecho’s poem ‘Herostrates’ (1917), in which he writes: “And in the Spring – Let me see Spring, and not Poland” (“A wiosn – niechaj wiosn , nie Polsk zobacz ” ; in Lam 1969: 22). Poland and its fate, however, remained a theme in the group’s work. For example, the volume of Lecho’s poetry that included ‘Herostrates’, Karmazynowy Poemat (Crimson Poem; 1920), also contained the poems ‘Pisudski’ and ‘Polonez artyleryjski’ (‘Artillery Polonaise’), which hailed two military officers who played a key role in securing Poland’s independence, Józef Pisudski and Ottokar Brzoza-Brzezina. The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 399  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, Wocianie, i onierze Polscy! Nad skrwawion i um czon ludzkoci wschodzi zorza pokoju i wolnoci!”; 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 Pisudski and his politics, evidenced in the group’s close relationship with the Marshall’s aide-de-camp Gen. Bolesaw Wieniawa-Dugoszowski, 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 Ziemiaska, 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 Wa yk, Futurist Aleksander Wat, and Young Poland legend Stefan eromski, as well as two writers of modernist prose often associated with Bruno Schulz, Stanisaw 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 Ziemiaska as well as Skamander-affiliated cabarets such as Quid Pro Quo (Groski 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 by program Kolumba, wiod cego swe galeony przy bladych gwiazdach, aby nadprogramowo odkry Ameryk ”; Lam 1969: 105). 400 Thomas Anessi Skamander and Wiadomoci 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 Ziemiaska 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 Wierzyski) and his Jewish heritage, shared by three of the movement’s founders (Tuwim, Sonimski, Lecho) 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 Pisudski-like figure to depict a mythic hero. In Schulz’s essays, the link is two-fold. First, three of these essays explore the Pisudski legend, including reviews of two works by writers with links to the Skamander group, Kazimierz Wierzyski’s Wolno 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  5 The last edition of Wiadomoci Literackie was predated September 3, 1939, two days after Germany’s invasion of Poland. The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 401  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 Zoty 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 Jarz bski 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 rodowisk 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 spyway na za jego ycia sk po”; 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” (“zespó uwarunkowa ksztatuj cych osobowo i psychik 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 Jarz bski notes, as a whole with “‘layers’ of meaning running through all his texts simultaneously” (“‘warstwy’ znaczeniowe, przebiegaj ce przez wszystkie teksty jednoczenie”; 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 402 Thomas Anessi 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 Wiadomoci 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 Nakowska, Schulz soon began developing relationships with major literary figures in it, including Cafe Ziemiaska regulars such as Julian Tuwim, Adam Wa yk, and Aleksander Wat. He also received letters of praise from a number of established writers, among which were Stanisaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (the two had become acquaintances years earlier in Zakopane), Leopold Staff, Bolesaw Lemian, Wacaw 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” (“przyj cie do rodziny twórczych duchów, […] poczucie, e wiat mój graniczy, dotyka si z innymi wiatami, e na tych granicach wiaty te przenikaj si i krzy uj ”; 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 The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 403  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 Szeliska, 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 Szeliska and Romana Halpern, as well as with numerous individuals from the literary elite. Although his correspondence with Szeliska 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 goal – for 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 Ksiga listów (The Book of Letters) lived or worked in Warsaw, outnumbering the number of  6 The journey today still requires one to travel via Krakow. 404 Thomas Anessi 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 Wacaw 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 pole dalsze artykuy, mo e wywiady z ró nymi osobistociami, cho by fikcyjne (kto to skontroluje?). Potem b dzie Pan musia mie kogo w Warszawie, kto te pieni dze 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 Pisudski, 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 The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 405  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 Pisudski at the time of his death in 1935, it is the Pisudski-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, Wierzyski, and Iwaszkiewicz, and three years older than Sonimski. 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” (“daway upojenie, przeczucie nadludzkich triumfalnych si”) 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; “cae niebo wchaniao si 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 nauczy, e ka dy stan duszy, dostatecznie daleko cigany w g b, prowadzi poprzez cieniny i kanay sowa – w mitologi . Nie w zastyg mitologi ludów i historyj – ale w t , która pod warstw nawierzchni szumi w naszej krwi, pl cze si w g biach filogenezy, rozga zia si w metafizyczn 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 ‘Ksi ga’ (‘The Book’), the first story in Sanatorium pod klepsydr (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 406 Thomas Anessi into our Age of Genius? […] In God’s name, then – let’s embark and go!” (2008: 128;7 “Czy przygotowalimy w pewnej mierze czytelnika do rzeczy, które nast pi , czy mo emy zaryzykowa podró w epok genialn ? […] W imi Bo e 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 Wierzyski’s ‘piew 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 marze’ (‘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 Pisudski 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 8 All further references will be given as SC. All further references will be given as Op. The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 407  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 wsuni ta samotnie mi dzy smage w gierskie 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; “zst pio w esencjonalno ”; Op 325-26). Following these paradoxical images, Schulz asks rhetorically “How to express this in words?” (“Jak to wyrazi ?”). 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; “maj korzenie w g b rzeczy i si gaj 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 modych”): Tu mielimy ukonstytuowa prawodawstwo nowe i niezale ne, wznie now hierarchi miar i wartoci. Miao to by ycie pod znakiem poezji i przygody, nieustannych olnie i zadziwie. Zdawao si nam, e trzeba tylko rozsun bariery i granice konwenansów, stare o yska, w które uj ty by bieg spraw ludzkich, a eby w ycie nasze wama si ywio, wielki zalew nieprzewidzianego, powód romantycznych przygód i fabu. (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). 408 Thomas Anessi 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 fabulizuj cego ywiou, natchnionemu przypywowi dziejów i zdarze i da ponie si 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” (“deliberowalimy nad romantycznymi zawikaniami”). 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 przenikaj ca te opowiadania wyst powaa z ram narracji, wchodzia mi dzy 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 The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 409  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 powracaj dzi te dalekie marzenia. Przychodzi na myl, e adne marzenie, cho by nie wiedzie jak absurdalne i niedorzeczne, nie marnuje si w wszechwiecie. W marzeniu zawarty jest jaki gód rzeczywistoci, jaka pretensja, która zobowi zuje rzeczywisto , ronie niedostrzegalnie w wierzytelno i w postulat, w kwit du ny, który domaga si 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; “Re yserem 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” (“B kitnooki”) 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 wspótwórczoci”; 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 410 Thomas Anessi worn down by years of struggle. The description of his situation feels eerily like that of Schulz late in his career: Nie byo niemal czasu na dziwienie, wraz z t pomyln pass moich losów przyszed zarazem jaki pogodzony fatalizm, jaka boga bierno i ufno , która kazaa mi podda si bez oporu grawitacji wypadków. Zaledwie odczuem to jako zado uczynienie dugo niezaspokajanej potrzeby, jako g bokie nasycenie wiecznego godu odtr conego i nieuznanego artysty, e tu wreszcie poznano si na moich zdolnociach. […] [W]szedbym jakby na podstawie dawno nabytego prawa w najlepsze towarzystwo […] (1989: 355-56) (There was scarcely time for astonishment: the happy turn in my fortunes went hand in hand with a compliant fatalism, a blithe passivity and trust that bade me to submit to the gravitational pull of events with no resistance. I had barely registered all this as the fulfillment of a longunsatisfied need, the profound gratification of the unrecognized and rejected artist’s perennial hunger, when my gifts found appreciation at long last. […] I entered the best society by what seemed like a longstanding privilege; 2008: 330) 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, The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 411  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 Wiadomoci 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 (1934-1939), Schulz signed his name to 27 pieces in the journal (including seven of his stories), more than Wierzyski 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 Pisudski, 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, Sygnay (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 Wiadomoci 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 Pisudski. He produced a larger volume of more banal commentary on relatively unremarkable translations he was assigned to regularly review for Wiadomoci 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 412 Thomas Anessi 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 Wiadomoci 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 Pisudski. 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 Nakowska in Skamander in 1939, as well as some of his shorter essays in Wiadomoci 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 Pisudski. The first of these three critical works, ‘Powstaj legendy’ (‘The Formation of Legends’, 1935), was published shortly after Pisudski’s death. The two other The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 413  were written as reviews of works by writers associated with Skamander, the poet Kazimierz Wierzyski and Juliusz KadenBandrowski. The first Pisudski 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 Pisudski from Napoleon. Whereas Napoleon embodied history, Pisudski 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; “caa obecno i chwila”; 1993: 24), whose impact on the imagination ended once he had been removed from power. Pisudski, 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 (“przeistacza si ”), “draped himself in 414 Thomas Anessi history as in a royal cloak” (1990: 327-28; “[u]bra si w histori jak w paszcz królewski”; 1993: 25), Pisudski 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 zwykej 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 Pisudski 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 Pisudski, 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 Pisudski had been drawn into nasty political disputes that laid his humanity bare in the decades that followed Poland’s independence. In his review of Wierzyski’s paean to Pisudski, ‘Wolno Tragiczna’ (‘Tragic Freedom’, 1936), Schulz describes the success of the work as being on a par with Poland’s greatest myth-maker, The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 415  Mickiewicz, because Wierzyski 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 Wierzyski than their prose style would suggest. What separates the two is not just the physical distance between Drohobycz and Warsaw but Wierzyski’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. Conclusion In Prowincja Centrum (Province of the Center), Jerzy Jarz bski keenly notes that for Schulz the center was more likely to be a marital bed than a national capital, and that likewise, nothing could be more banal than placing the writer and his work at the margins merely due to his lifelong association with Drohobycz (2005: 109). This rings true, on the one hand, because the center and margins are difficult to position in relation to interwar Poland – after all Drohobycz is just a short ride from the former Austro-Hungarian regional capital of Lwów, and Warsaw was then (much as now) firmly in the cultural shadows of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Yet, his critique rests more squarely on the fact that Schulz’s use of the city and the provinces is so rooted in a universalist literary project within which their power to signify is so wide-ranging as to become meaningless as a fixed point of measure or orientation. Drohobycz is an ideal location for his literary “center” simply because it can hold all that signifies the human condition – dreams, family, youth, age, commerce, erotic compulsion, etc. – in tidy bundles, without distractions or site-specific expectations. Moreover, Schulz can borrow from his authentic lived experiences there to ground his ideas in a physical and social milieu as he stretches reality at times almost beyond recognition to fashion it to his artistic needs. 416 Thomas Anessi For these reasons, any effort to place Schulz and his work in any one place at almost any time in his career carries great risk. His tendency toward introversion, and at times depression, often left him feeling dissatisfied, yet it is almost certainly these negative emotions, this mild alienation, that pushes him creatively forward. His arrival onto the Varsovian literary scene was a major event for this reason because it provided him with the hope of long sought-after artistic recognition and success, the possibility of making a living from his art. At the same time, his life after 1933 did not change radically, as evidenced in a letter to Romana Halpern from mid-1937, roughly a year after he returned to Drohobycz from his sabbatical in Warsaw: Zdaje mi si , e wiat, ycie, jest dla mnie zawsze wa ny jedynie jako materia twórczoci. Z chwil gdy nie mog ycia utylizowa twórczo – staje si ono dla mnie straszne i niebezpieczne, albo zabijaj co-jaowe. Utrzyma w sobie ciekawo , podniet twórcz , oprze si procesowi wyjaowienia, nudy – oto najwa niejsze zadanie. Bez tego pieprzu ycia popadn w letarg mierci – za ycia. Sztuka przyzwyczaia mnie do swych podniet i ostrych sensacji. Mój system nerwowy ma wybredno i delikatno , która nie dorosa do wymaga ycia pozbawionego sankcji sztuki. Obawiam si , e ten rok pracy szkolnej mnie zabija. […] Jestem teraz dojrzalszy i bogatszy ni wówczas, kiedym pisa Sklepy cyn. Nie mam ju tylko tej naiwnoci, tej beztroski. Nie czuem wtedy adnej odpowiedzialnoci na sobie, adnego ci aru, pisaem dla siebie. To bardzo uatwia. […] Prawda, e w Warszawie nie miabym tej samotnoci twórczej. Ale za to nie groziaby mi tam mier z nudy, zanudzenie, straszliwe wymioty z jaowoci ycia. Po pewnym czasie usun bym si w cisz , eby pisa . Temu, co mówi , mo na zarzuci wiele sprzecznoci, ale Pani mnie zrozumie, je eli si wmyli w moj sytuacj . (2002: 146-47) (It seems that the world, life, is always important to me solely as raw material for writing. The moment I cannot make creative use of life, it becomes either fearsome and perilous to me, or fatally tedious. To sustain curiosity, creative incentive, to fight the process of sterilization, boredom – these are my most important and urgent tasks. Without the zest to life I would fall – alive – into lethal lethargy. Literary art has accustomed me to its stimuli and sharp sensations. My nervous system has a delicacy and fastidiousness that are not up to the demands of a life not sanctioned by art. I am afraid this school year may kill me. […] I am richer and more mature than I was when I wrote Cinnamon Shops. I lack only that naiveté, that insouciance. Back then I felt no responsibility on my shoulders, no burden, I wrote for myself. That make it much easier. […] It is true that in Warsaw I wouldn’t have this creative isolation. On the other hand, I wouldn’t face death by tedium. After a certain time, I would remove myself to a place of quiet to write. One can accuse me of many contradictions The Great Heresy of the Varsovian Center 417  in what I say, but you will understand me if you put yourself in my situation mentally; 1990: 151) Schulz’s long description of his feelings about where he can continue to function creatively makes it clear that Warsaw continues to maintain a strong hold on him long after he had become familiar with it and its literary world. In order to master it, he placed himself among those who were in charge, the writers and editors who by the 1930s had been “bronzed” by their association with the Skamander poetry that dazzled Poland’s literati in the first years of Poland’s independence. Although the association between Schulz and the group might appear to have been one merely of convenience, for they were the gatekeepers to the nation’s best literary journals, Schulz’s engagement in the subject of Pisudski and his reviews of Wierzyski and KadenBandrowski’s books make it clear that his links go deeper. The relative disconnect from Poland’s twentieth-century reality in his two volumes of stories – most of which were written, at least in some form, before his initial literary success in 1934 – becomes less definitive of Schulz’s writing once one includes essays and stories he published later, where one can feel a response to the groundbreaking literary and historical events that surrounded him. The formation of the legend of Schulz at the margins may, in large part, be symptomatic of the marginal role of the center of Poland’s interwar literary world, which was cosmopolitan and to a large extent Jewish in a nation most often defined (both within and without) by its parochialism and Catholicism. The heresy is therefore not that Schulz was in the Varsovian center but the recognition that this center was tailored for an assimilated, non-practicing Jew and was comprised of many like himself. His warm reception into this center, like his desire to enter into it, is indicative of a moment in Polish literature when Bruno Schulz and his innovative and ambitious aesthetic project were artistically a model of the center itself. Bibliography Bartosik, Marta. 2000. Bruno Schulz jako krytyk. Kraków: Universitas. Ficowski, Jerzy. 2003. Regions of the Great Heresy (tr. T. Robertson). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Groski, Marek Ryszard. 1978. Jak w przedwojennym kabarecie: Kabaret 418 Thomas Anessi Warszawski, 1918-1939. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa artystyne i filmowe. Jarz bski, Jerzy. 2005. Prowincja centrum: przypisy do Schulza. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Kumanicki, Kazimierz. 1924. Odbudowa Pastwowoci Polskiej: Najwaniejsze dokumenty 1912 – stycze 1924. Warszawa-Kraków: Ksi garnia J. Czerneckiego. Kwiatkowski, Jerzy. 2001. Dwudziestolecie midzywojenne. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Lam, Andrzej (ed.) 1969. Polska awangarda poetycka. Programy z lat 1917-1923, v. II: Manifesty i protesty. Antologia. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Prokopczyk, Czesaw Z. (ed.) 1999. New Documents and Interpretations. New York: Peter Lang. Schulz, Bruno. 1989. Opowiadania, wybór esejów i listów (ed. J. Jarz bski). Wrocaw: Zakad Narodowy im. Ossoliskich. ——. 1990. Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz (ed. J. Ficowski). New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation. ——. 1993. Powstaj legendy: trzy szkice wokó Pisudskiego (ed. S. Rosiek). Kraków: Oficyna Literacka. ——. 1998. Collected Works of Bruno Schulz (ed. J. Ficowski). London: Picador. ——. 2002. Ksiga listów (ed. J. Ficowski). Gdask: slowo/obraz terytoria. ——. 2008. The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (tr. C. Wieniewska). New York: Penguin. Shore, Marci. 2006. Caviar and Ashes: a Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968. New Haven: Yale UP. Vico, Giambattista. 1968 [1725]. The New Science of Giambattista Vico (tr. T. Bergin and M. Fixch). Ithaca: Cornell UP. Wierzyski, Kazimierz. 1990. Szkice i portrety literackie. Warszawa: Biblioteka “Wi zi”. Wyspiaski, Stanisaw. 1985. Akropolis (ed. E. Miodoska-Brookes). Wrocaw: Zakad Narodowy im. Ossoliskich.