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

Abstract

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 “dreamer-wanderer” 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: Schulz-beyond-Drohobych, the text is the author’s venture beyond the personal memory to meet the expectations of the conference organizers and participants