Schulz w katalogu Towarzystwa Wydawniczego „Rój”

Abstrakt

Bruno Schulz placed both of his collections of short stories with “Rój” Publishers. Its 1938 catalogue, designed by Mieczysław Berman (some of the “Schulz” pages are reproduced in the present issue), sums up the publishing achievement of “Rój” as a kind of the press’ last self-portrait. Next to notes on the published books, it includes many illustrations – drawings and photos – as well as portraits of authors, whose arrangement reveals the contemporary literary hierarchy. The largest is the portrait of the President of Polish Academy of Literature (6.7 × 11 cms), the smallest the effigies of those Polish writers who made their debut with “Rój” (one size fits all: 4 × 3.3 cms). In this section, one may find a photo of Schulz, next to those of Jerzy Andrzejewski, Marian Buczkowski, Pola Gojawiczyńska, Witold Gombrowicz, Teodor Parnicki, Sergiusz Piasecki, Adolf Rudnicki, Maria Ukniewska, and Adam Ważyk. The catalogue of “Rój” documents a certain segment of Polish literature, allowing one to determine Schulz’s place in the overall hierarchy. Actually, it was much higher than we might think. Resumed in the 1950s and 1960s, the discourse on Schulz did not discover a writer who had been unknown, but restored his position in Polish literature, which dated back to the 1930s. Significantly, Schulz achieved his high status relatively quickly, in only four years.