Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass






Copyright © 1977,1978 by Ella Podstolski-Schulz

Originally published in Poland in 1937

with the title Sanatorium pod Klepsydra.

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CIP data is available. ISBN 0-395-86023-7

Printed in the United States of America

QUM 10 987654 3 21

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE


He was small, unattractive and sickly, with a thin angular body and brown, deep-set eyes in a pale triangular face. He taught art at a secondary school for boys at Drohobycz in South Eastern Poland, where he spent most of his life. He had few friends outside his native city. In his leisure hours — of which there were probably many — he made drawings and wrote endlessly, nobody quite knew what. At the age of forty, having received an introduction through friends to Zofia Nalkowska, a distinguished novelist in Warsaw, he sent her some of his stories. They were published in 1934 under the title of Cinnamon Shops — and the name of Bruno Schulz was made. Three years later, a further collection of stories, with drawings by the author, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was published; then The Comet, a novella, appeared in a leading literary weekly. In between, Schulz made a translation of Kafka's The Trial. It is said that he was working on a novel, entitled The Messiah, but nothing has remained of it. This is the sum total of his literary output.

When Bruno Schulz's stories were re-issued in Poland in 1957, translated into French and German, and acclaimed everywhere by a new generation of readers to whom he was unknown, attempts were made to place his oeuvre in the mainstream of Polish literature, to find affinities, derivations, to explain him in terms of one literary theory or another. The task is well nigh impossible. He was a solitary man, living apart, filled with his dreams, with memories of his childhood, with an intense, formidable inner life, a painter's imagination, a sensuality and responsiveness to physical stimuli which most probably could find satisfaction only in artistic creation — a volcano, smouldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town.

The world of Schulz is basically a private world. At its centre is his father 'that incorrigible improviser. .. the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city.' Father, bearded, sometimes resembling a biblical prophet, is one of the great eccentrics of literature. In reality he was a Drohobycz merchant, who had inherited a textile business and ran it until illness forced him to abandon it to the care of his wife. He then retired to ten years of enforced idleness and his own world of dreams. Father who surrounds himself with ledgers and pores over them for days on end — while in reality all he is doing is putting coloured transfers on the ruled pages; Father who has zoological interest, who imports eggs of rare species of birds and has them hatched in his attic, who is dominated by the blue-eyed servant girl, Adela; who believes that tailors' dummies should be treated with as much respect as human beings; Father who loathes cockroaches to the point of fascination; who in a last apotheosis rises above the vulgar mob of buyers and sellers and, drowning in rivers of cloth, blows the horn of Atonement. . . . Then there is Mother, who did not love her husband properly and who condemned him therefore to an existence on the periphery of life, because he was not rooted in any woman's heart. There are uncles and aunts and cousins, each described with deadly accuracy, with epithets as from a clinical diagnosis.

These were Schulz's people, the people of Drohobycz, at one time the Klondike of Galicia when oil was stuck near the city and prosperity entered it and destroyed the old patriarchal way of life, bringing false values, bogus Americanization, and new ways of making a quick fortune when the white spaces of an old map of the city were transformed into a new district, when the Street of Crocodiles became its centre, peopled with a race of rattle-headed men and women of easy morals. The old dignity of the Cinnamon Shops, with their aroma of spices and distant countries, changed into something brash, second rate, questionable, slightly suspect.

One could continue to quote from the stories: somebody might attempt perhaps a psycho-analysis of Schulz on the basis of his writings. Polish and other critics have drawn attention to the influence that Thomas Mann, Freud and Kafka exercised on him. This may or may not be true: although it is also said that Schulz first read The Trial when the book was sent to him for reviewing after the publication of Cinnamon Shops. What is undoubtedly true is that the atmosphere of both Kafka's and Schulz's life in their respective provinces is not dissimilar. These distant outposts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, with the memories of the 'good' Emperor Franz-Joseph still a living tradition, looked up to Vienna as the center of cultural and artistic life much more than to Prague or Warsaw.

But whether or not these derivations existed in fact does not really matter, the stories still speak for themselves in the same voice as in the thirties and emerges from them in a sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history: an ordinary provincial city with ordinary people going about their daily tasks, a city scorched by the hot summers of every schoolchild's holidays, sometimes shaken by unexpected high winds from the mountains, but mostly sleepy and lethargic — here brought to life by the magic touch of a poetic genius, in a prose as memorable, powerful and unique as are the brush strokes of Marc Chagall.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the second collection of prose fiction by Bruno Schulz. Published in Warsaw in 1937, it followed three years after The Street of Crocodiles. Like the previous book, Sanatorium is, in Schulz's own words. "An attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family, a certain house in a provincial city — not from documents, events, a study of character or of people's destinies — but by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history .. .