Bruno Schulz - Literary References and Biography

Literary References and Biography

Cynthia Ozick's 1987 novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, makes reference to Schulz's work. The story is of a Swedish man who's convinced that he's the son of Schulz, and comes into possession of what he believes to be a manuscript of Schulz's final project, The Messiah. Schulz's character appears again in Israeli novelist David Grossman's 1989 novel See Under: Love. In a chapter entitled "Bruno," the narrator imagines Schulz embarking on a phantasmagoric sea voyage rather than remaining in Drohobych to be killed.

In the last chapter of Roberto Bolaño's 1996 novel, Distant Star, the narrator, Arturo B, reads from a book titled The Complete Works of Bruno Schulz in a bar while waiting to confirm the identity of a Nazi-like character, Carlos Wieder, for a detective. When Wieder appears in the bar, the words of Schulz's stories '...had taken on a monstrous character that was almost intolerable' for Arturo B.

Polish writer and critic Jerzy Ficowski spent sixty years researching and uncovering the writings and drawings of Schulz. His study, Regions of the Great Heresy, was published in an English translation in 2003, containing two additional chapters to the Polish edition; one on Schulz's lost work, Messiah, the other on the rediscovery of Schulz's murals.

Israeli writer Amir Gutfreund refers to Bruno Schulz in two stories of his book, The Shoreline Mansions. The first story, "Trieste", tells the story of a man who studied drawing with Bruno Schulz, who, after the war, found Schulz's lost drawings and kept them for him. Another story in the book is "If Bruno Schulz Sat Here".

Characters in Nicole Krauss' 2005 novel The History of Love discuss The Street of Crocodiles. One of the main characters has a friend named Bruno who appears to be based on Schulz.

China Miéville's 2009 novel The City & The City begins with an epigraph from Schulz's Cinnamon Shops: "Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelgänger streets, mendacious and delusive streets". In addition to directly alluding to the dual nature of the cities in Miéville's novel, the epigraph also hints at the political implications of the book, since Schulz himself was murdered for appearing in the "wrong" quarter of the city.

In 2010 Jonathan Safran Foer "wrote" his "Tree of Codes" by cutting into the pages of an English language edition of Schulz' "The Street of Crocodiles" thus creating a new text.

In 2011, the Austrian Band "Nebenjob" published the Song "Wer erschoss Bruno Schulz" ("who shot Bruno Schulz"), a homage on the poet and accusation of the murderer, written by T.G. Huemer live: Wer erschoss Bruno Schulz (german version)