Schulz’s Magic Formula. The Writers’s Literary Opinions Interpreted in the Context of Metafiction by “Schulzoids”

Abstract

The texts referring to Bruno Schulz can be divided into two groups: first, those featuring a protagonist of that name, connected with the events from the writer’s life, and second, those in which there reader can recognize some motifs from his fiction or the Schulzean model of the fictional world. The former includes works by the Serbian fiction writers Jovic Acin and Mikhailo Pantic and the Croatian poet Damir Sodan, the latter those by the Croatian poets Ivan Samia and Delimir Resicki, and the Serbian poet Dragan Boskovic. The Serbian writer’s Mirko Demic’s novel, Amber, Honey, and Sorb, belongs to both groups. In the works of those authors one can find descriptions of Schulz’s death and the following metamorphoses, similar to those experienced by the characters from his short stories. Few writers have been interested in Schulz’s life before World War II – his legend came into being at the moment of his death. Tatarenko presents and explains the creative responses to Schulz’s oeuvre and his bio- and necrography by the authors from the former Yugoslavia.