abstracts

sr Between Death and Birth. Biography

Nothing is more our own than our biography. Even the body, in which we spend our whole life, from birth to death, even this body, closest to us, our very own, the body that roots us into existence, although at the same time it betrays us every day, is only a loan with a definite if usually hidden payment deadline. It is only someone who, looking at the life of another person, says: gráphō, that shifts events, a sometimes extensive series of the body’s adventures, into the sphere of shareable words. Becoming a biographer with this declaration, he or she seeks meaning where there (probably) is none, and has never been. And yet, for reasons difficult to understand, for a long time the humanities looked down on life writing. Decreed by Barthes in 1968, for two or even three decades “the death of the author” continued to be an almost universal proclamation. Writing biographies seemed a menial task compared to developing sophisticated text exegeses or theoretical and methodological speculations, which, once announced to the world, were hardly taken up. But let us leave aside the humanists with their eternal troubles and dilemmas. Let us save biography as a form of grasping and understanding life – including one’s own life, as “everybody’s autobiography”, according to Gertrude Stein. But if it wants more than just popularity with readers, life writing should not stick to its old ways. Today, biographers face the obligation to develop new forms of biographical discourse. Full rights must be granted to fragmentary biographies, focused on one topic, in fundamental opposition to holistic approaches that span birth and death. To biographies selecting one role played by the protagonist over the years, or a single event, around which all other events are centred. To acoustic biographies or – this could be done – biographies in which the privileged way of settling into existence would be the eye and the act of looking, as was the case in Cézanne’s life. To parallel biographies, tangled together or perhaps multiply tied, which embrace the evident truth that every “I” establishes itself in relation to some “you” and some “him” or “her”. What seems most important in this new biography writing, however, is to cross the boundaries of individual life as soon as possible. Tense anticipation: are we going to see an electric arc in the gap between two lives, between being (of one) and being (of another), an arc that will connect them, establishing a continuity of existence. Between the one who died and the newly born. And hence Schulz, hence his biography.

Katarzyna Warska Childhood in a Writer’s Biography: The Case of Bruno Schulz

The author considers childhood as an element of a writer’s biography, connected with the rest of his or her life in a complicated way. Under this approach, recounting the story

of the writer’s childhood is the biographer’s duty, which he or she – striving to show the ‘truth’ – imposes on him or herself, but does not necessarily fulfil. Biographers omit or reduce childhood for cultural reasons, based on the adopted convention, because of their own convictions, or simply due to the lack of sources. The author challenges all these reasons, arguing for the importance of childhood as a phase of human life.

Aleksandra Skrzypczyk Towards an Acoustic Biography of Bruno Schulz: Auditory Experiences

The article analyzes the potential sonic experiences of Bruno Schulz. The numerous references to music in his prose inspire questions about Schulz’s attitude towards music. Based on the testimonies of his family and friends, it is impossible to determine Schulz’s opinion on the art of sounds, or whether he was musical and what kind of music he listened to. The ‘acoustic biography’ presented here becomes a metaphor for Schulz’s probable auditory experiences. Arranged in the chronological order, it respects the principles of probability, and is based on the historical and cultural context of 19th and 20th century Poland.

Tymoteusz Skiba Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz. Parallel Biographies

This article gives an account of the overlapping biographies of Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz. It frames the events which brought the two writers together with a discussion of their literary debuts in 1933, which preceded their first meeting, and the postwar memories of Gombrowicz, who kept reminiscing about his “deceased friend”. The author describes the meetings and conversations between Schulz and Gombrowicz that took place at the latter’s apartment or in Zofia Nałkowska’s salon, their joint undertakings, such as the publication of open letters in Studio magazine, and their battle with literary critics, whose spiteful comments and attacks were aimed at what they called “young literature”. The article presents testimonies of Gombrowicz and Schulz’s mutual inspirations and interpretations, and discusses texts and events which echo their vigorous correspondence, mostly lost during the Second World War. This mosaic of dispersed facts and memories depicts a great friendship between two artists, who approached each other with curiosity and respect, but also with their typical penchant for selfirony. The idea of parallel biographies was born during the author’s work on the research project Calendar of the Life, Work, and Reception of Bruno Schulz.

Robert Dion, Frédéric Regard The Death – and Lives – of the Author

Writers’ biographies (written about writers by writers) constitute a genre with very long historical roots, which has flourished in the last twentyfive or thirty years. This is undoubtedly linked to the lifting of the poststructuralist ban concerning the author as a person, so that it became possible, at least in France, to legitimize biographical writing again. We date this revival to the mid1980s, when Duras, RobbeGrillet and Sollers all published (auto)biographical texts, whose status is certainly problematic, but nonetheless worthy of careful attention. Immersed in Romantic anthropology, in various

transpositions and numerous genre nostalgias, this general ambiguity appears as the key characteristic of biographical productions of the 1980s. What we have here is a kind of a spectacle, in which the figure of the author reenters the stage. At the same time, it is a “biographical illusion” (Bourdieu). Many contemporary biographers know that the ‘truth’ about the other can only be grasped through a play on forms (or on the memory of forms), if not, to evoke Lacan, in “a line of fiction”.

Christian Klein Biography as a Concept of Thought. On the Premises of Biographical Research and Narrative

Beginning with a discussion of the peculiarities of biographical work, this article systematizes the field of Biography Studies by distinguishing several approaches, and then focuses on biographies as narratives. Although textual and other biographical narratives are unmistakably mediated constructions, the contents presented are often received as ‘truth’. Which textual strategies do biographies use to evoke this mode of reception, and how do they try to realize it? Finally, the article addresses the unique position of the biography between text and life, as well as their complex interactions.

Marcin Romanowski An Unintended Silva Rerum. Anna Kaszuba-Dębska’s Book Bruno. Epoka genialna

The article offers a critical discussion of Anna KaszubaDębska’s book Bruno. Epoka genialna [Bruno. The Age of Genius]. The reviewer argues that the main feature of Kaszuba Dębska narrative is its heterogeneity; it manifests itself through the renouncement of the authorial voice, which it replaced by a dense tissue of quotations, as well as through the extensive discussion of cultural contexts and the lack of a consistently outlined dominant theme organizing the course of the protagonist’s life. For this reason, the reviewer regards KaszubaDębska’s publication as a text reminiscent of a silva rerum (cf. commonplace book), whose heterogeneity, however, seems to stem from the author’s lack of control over her material, rather than from an attempt to cross the borders of the biographical genre.

Agata Tuszyńska In the Shadow

This biographical essay presents the postwar history of the friendly relationship between Józefina Szelińska, Schulz’s fiancée, and Jerzy Ficowski, his first biographer and champion of his work. This reconstruction is based on an analysis of their correspondence. Seventynine letters and postcards from Józefina Szelińska to Jerzy Ficowski have survived, dating from 1948 to 1990; they are either handwritten, in convoluted, hardtoread writing, or typed. There are over a dozen postcards; Christmas cards outnumber Easter cards, and there are a few picture postcards from the sea and one from Tleń in the Tuchola Forest. The major part of the collection is letters written on both sides of A4 sheets, which makes them even more difficult to read. Sometimes, Szelińska kindly used a typewriter, neatly and sparingly, so as not to waste space or lose her thread – as befits a Polish teacher. Few errors, few deletions. According to the official and only version of events, Ficowski’s letters to her were lost. Thus, we only know a part of their epistolary relationship: her

letters kept by Ficowski. If we call them the obverse, then the reverse is unknown, absent in this arrangement of planets. “Please keep my person in deep shadow at all times”, Szelińska writes in the autumn of 1973, and this request often recurs in their correspondence. This request – or perhaps a command – is iterated in her conversationinletters with Jerzy Ficowski, which lasted for almost half a century. Schulz’s biographer was a witness and midwife to her memory, as well as a witness of her struggle with herself, with her old love and her own to beornotto be on the stage of the past.

Piotr Millati We’ve Got the Messiah!

The text refers to the question of affinities between the prose of Bruno Schulz and Olga Tokarczuk. Its narrative axis is the risky and provocative idea that Tokarczuk’s novel The Books of Jacob is, in its deepest essence, a literary realisation of Schulz’s unwritten or lost Messiah.

Zbigniew Maszewski Father and Schulz: On a Drawing from the Cover of The Catalogue of Stanisław Weingarten’s Library

The text traces imaginary patterns of correspondences between Bruno Schulz’s fictions and the story of the antiquarian bookstore Słowo (“The Word”), as remembered by the son of its founder and owner, an admirer and collector of Schulz’s graphic works, Henryk Maszewski. From that perspective, Maszewski’s chance acquisition (in the1950s) of The Catalogue of Stanisław Weingarten’s Library, illustrated by Bruno Schulz, gains an aura of an unquestionable “missionary” privilege. Relevant correspondence between Henryk Maszewski and Jerzy Ficowski is fragmentarily quoted. The last section of the text offers an introduction to possible interpretations of Schulz’s drawing from the front cover of Weingarten’s Catalogue. Part of the mythology of the bookstore, which operated in Łódź in the years 1945–1989, the barrel bearing Schulz’s initials on which the figure of a “dreamerwanderer” stands astride, symbolizes a means of escape from the mental enslavement and boredom of the communist times. It may still provide means of escape from the falsehood of xenophobic and nationalistic propaganda of our times. Occasioned by the guiding theme of the 2019 Conference in Gdańsk: SchulzbeyondDrohobych, the text is the author’s venture beyond the personal memory to meet the expectations of the conference organizers and participants.

Debora Vogel Bruno Schulz

Adam Stepnowski's translation of Debora Vogel’s critical text on Bruno Schulz, originally published in Yiddish in the journal Tsushteyer 1930, issue 2 (June), pp. 57–58.

Adam Stepnowski Debora Vogel in a Galician Yiddishland: The Tsushteyer Journal

The paper sums up the history and analysis of Tsushteyer [Contribution] literary journal, published between 1929 and 1931 in Lviv. The goal of the group under the same name (comprising such writers as Debora Vogel, Rachela Auerbach, Ber Shnaper, Melekh

Ravitsh and Mendl Neugröschl) was to create a strong Yiddishspeaking cultural centre in Galicia. One of their projects was establishing and publishing a literary journal. Three issues of Tsushteyer contained prose, poetry, essays and art reproductions. The paper describes the characteristics of the contents, emphasises the role of Debora Vogel in the editorial office and outlines the unique features of Tsushteyer in comparison with other Yiddish literary journals.

From the Editors. Tsushteyer Programme Articles

Examples of three programme articles published in the consecutive issues of Tsushteyer: 1929, issue 1; 1930, issue 2; 1931, issue 3.

Piotr Szalsza Tracing Debora Vogel in Vienna and Lviv

A report on research conducted in Vienna and Lviv archives to locate information on Debora Vogel’s family and her young years: her exile in Vienna in 1914–1918, her education at the Realgymnasium at Albertgasse 38 (one of Vienna’s best and most modern educational institutions), and her studies at the John Casimir University (Pol. Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza) in Lviv in 1919–1924. The documents and facts presented in the article contribute to a reconstruction of the historical and cultural context in which the future writer’s mind was formed. Records such as school registers and Vogel’s student book also give an insight into the process of crystallization of her specific interests, which were later developed in her literary and critical work. Considering her tragic fate, in the case of Deborah Vogel, every new finding is particularly significant.

Biblioteka „Schulz/Forum”

Pod patronatem czasopisma wydawane są książki schulzologiczne zarówno polskich, jak i zagranicznych autorów. Ostatnio ukazały się:

Bruno Schulz w oczach współczesnych. Antologia tekstów krytycznych i publicystycznych lat 1920–1939, redakcja Piotr Sitkiewicz, Fundacja Terytoria Książki, Gdańsk 2021.

Od pierwszej wzmianki prasowej we lwowskiej „Chwili” aż po nekrolog opublikowany w konspiracyjnym miesięczniku „Sztuka i Naród” – antologia tekstów krytycznych i publicystycznych ukazuje, jak współcześni postrzegali dzieło literackie i plastyczne Brunona Schulza, a także jego samego. Podstawą zakwalifikowania tekstu do niniejszej antologii było występowanie w nim nazwiska Schulza w jakimkolwiek kontekście – krytycznym lub biograficznym. Dlatego rozbudowane recenzje i szkice krytyczne sąsiadują tu z krótkimi wzmiankami prasowymi o charakterze stricte informacyjnym.

Katarzyna Warska, Schulz w kanonie. Recepcja szkolna w latach 1945–2018, Fundacja Terytoria Książki, Gdańsk 2021.

Jeśli to prawda, że recepcja szkolna stanowi margines marginesu, szary koniec historii literatury, to jest to margines nader szeroki, a historia wciąż pozostaje nienapisana. By objąć ten obszar, literaturoznawczyni musi wejść – trochę po omacku i na własne ryzyko – na pole historii, nauk społecznych i politycznych oraz dydaktyki. A nie bardzo jest się na kim wzorować. Zaledwie paru polskich autorów doczekało się monografii recepcji szkolnej. „Schulz w kanonie” jest zatem próbą nakreślenia własnej teorii badań nad recepcją i wcielenia jej w życie. Choć Katarzyna Warska skupia się na recepcji Schulza, nieuchronnie pisze historię polskiej powojennej polonistyki szkolnej i dalej: kreśli obraz byłej i obecnej rzeczywistości szkolnej i pozaszkolnej – społecznej i kulturalnej.

Ilustracja na pierwszej stronie: Józef z ojcem Jakubem, tusz, ok. 1936, rysunek zaginiony

Ilustracja na okładce: Porwany przez wiatr – szkic autora do opowiadania Emeryt, ołówek, 14×14 cm, przed 1937, Muzeum Literatury w Warszawie

Ilustracja na stronie 120: Autoportret, ołówek, 15,7×19,7 cm, Muzeum Literatury w Warszawie

Przekład na stronach 99–110: Robert Dion, Frédéric Regard, Śmierć autora i jego żywoty pochodzi z wydania Les nouvelles écritures biographiques. La biographie d’écrivain dans ses reformulations contemporaines, dir. Robert Dion, Frédéric Regard, ENS Éditions, Lyon 2013.

© 2013 Robert Dion, Frederic Regard

Przekład na stronach 111–119: Christian Klein, Biografia jako figura myśli – założenia badań i narracji biograficznych pochodzi z wydania The Biographical Turn: Lives in History, ed. Binne de Haan, Jonne Harmsma and Hans Renders, Routledge, New York 2017.

© 2017 Routledge, 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group

Schulz/Forum 16 Gdańsk 2020 Wydawca: Fundacja Terytoria Książki ISSN: 23005823

Dofinansowanie z dotacji Wydziału Filologicznego Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego na podstawową działalność naukową, zadanie badawcze nr 530F000D48314

Projekt realizowany i finansowany w ramach Narodowego Programu Rozwoju Humanistyki 0446/NPRH4/H1a/83/2015