Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories - Bruno Schulz E-Book

Bruno Schulz

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 64

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Street of Crocodiles and Other Storiesby Bruno Schulz is a mosaic of tales set in a small Galician town that becomes both a real landscape and a mythic stage. The narrator, often a child version of Schulz himself, observes his surroundings with a heightened sensitivity, turning mundane details into symbols of mystery. Central to the collection is the figure of his father, a man who drifts between eccentric genius and madness. He raises exotic birds in the attic, speaks of cosmic secrets hidden in dust and fabrics, and gradually withdraws into a private world of visions and obsessions. His decline mirrors the disintegration of the household but also gives rise to strange revelations that transform ordinary life into myth. The title story, The Street of Crocodiles, presents a once-vibrant commercial district that now feels artificial and decayed. Shops filled with cheap goods, mannequins, and false displays become a metaphor for a society built on illusion and decline. In other stories, objects rebel against their purpose—tailor's mannequins take on lifelike qualities, fabrics breathe, and the boundaries between animate and inanimate blur. Childhood perception, with its openness to the surreal, allows the narrator to witness these metamorphoses, while adults seem resigned to a reality stripped of wonder. The narrative does not follow a conventional plot but moves through fragments of memory, dreamlike episodes, and mythic imagery. Each story is a window into a world where time stretches and dissolves, seasons expand into endless variations, and the town itself seems alive with hidden rhythms. Through this kaleidoscopic vision, Schulz captures the fragility of human existence, the yearning for transcendence, and the inexhaustible strangeness of everyday life. Since its publication, Schulz's collection has been recognized as one of the great achievements of modernist literature. Its mixture of lyrical prose, surreal imagery, and psychological depth invites readers into a world that feels both intimate and ungraspable. Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was a Polish-Jewish writer, painter, and illustrator. His literary universe, though small in volume, is marked by its intensity and originality, blending autobiographical traces with myth, allegory, and dream. His life was tragically cut short during the Holocaust, but his work continues to resonate as a singular voice in 20th-century literature.

Leseprobe

Bruno Schulz

STREET OF CROCODILES AND OTHER STORIES

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE STREET OF CROCODILES

CONFISERIE, MANUCURE, KING OF ENGLAND.

COCKROACHES

THE GALE

AUGUST

VISITATION

BIRDS

INTRODUCTION

Bruno Schulz

(1892–1942)

Bruno Schulzwas a Polish-Jewish writer, essayist, and visual artist, widely regarded as one of the most original and poetic voices of twentieth-century European literature. Born in Drohobycz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Ukraine), Schulz is remembered for his dreamlike prose, rich in symbolism, visionary imagery, and a profound exploration of memory and subjectivity. Despite his relatively small body of work, he left an enduring mark on world literature.

Early life and education

Schulz was born into a middle-class Jewish family. From an early age, he demonstrated artistic inclinations in both writing and drawing. He studied architecture and fine arts in Lwów and Vienna but returned to his hometown, where he worked as an art teacher in a secondary school. Provincial life and the figure of his father became central inspirations in his literary imagination, shaping many of the symbolic elements of his work.

Career and contributions

During his lifetime, Schulz published only two collections of short stories: The Cinnamon Shops (1934, often translated as The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). In these works, he created a unique literary universe where everyday reality was transformed into myth and fantasy through a highly poetic and imaginative language. His prose has been associated with surrealism and European modernism, while maintaining a distinct identity rooted in his personal and cultural experience.

Beyond literature, Schulz was also an accomplished graphic artist and illustrator, producing works filled with the same symbolic and expressive qualities found in his writing. His visual art complemented his literary production, offering a coherent and unified artistic vision.

Impact and legacy

Though limited in volume, Schulz’s work is considered one of the most innovative of the twentieth century. He elevated personal memory, provincial life, and the Jewish experience into universal literary material, weaving together the real and the fantastic in an unprecedented way.

His influence can be seen in the works of writers such as Czesław Miłosz and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and his legacy continues to inspire readers, critics, and artists around the world. Schulz’s lyrical, symbolic style has secured his place among the great modern European writers.

In 1942, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Bruno Schulz was murdered by a German officer, abruptly ending a promising literary career. Several of his projects, including his lost novel The Messiah, were left unfinished.

Today, Schulz is celebrated as a master of poetic prose. His brief but extraordinary body of work stands as a testament to the power of imagination and cultural resistance in the face of historical tragedy.

About the work

Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz is a mosaic of tales set in a small Galician town that becomes both a real landscape and a mythic stage. The narrator, often a child version of Schulz himself, observes his surroundings with a heightened sensitivity, turning mundane details into symbols of mystery. Central to the collection is the figure of his father, a man who drifts between eccentric genius and madness. He raises exotic birds in the attic, speaks of cosmic secrets hidden in dust and fabrics, and gradually withdraws into a private world of visions and obsessions. His decline mirrors the disintegration of the household but also gives rise to strange revelations that transform ordinary life into myth.

The title story, The Street of Crocodiles, presents a once-vibrant commercial district that now feels artificial and decayed. Shops filled with cheap goods, mannequins, and false displays become a metaphor for a society built on illusion and decline. In other stories, objects rebel against their purpose—tailor’s mannequins take on lifelike qualities, fabrics breathe, and the boundaries between animate and inanimate blur. Childhood perception, with its openness to the surreal, allows the narrator to witness these metamorphoses, while adults seem resigned to a reality stripped of wonder.

The narrative does not follow a conventional plot but moves through fragments of memory, dreamlike episodes, and mythic imagery. Each story is a window into a world where time stretches and dissolves, seasons expand into endless variations, and the town itself seems alive with hidden rhythms. Through this kaleidoscopic vision, Schulz captures the fragility of human existence, the yearning for transcendence, and the inexhaustible strangeness of everyday life.

Since its publication, Schulz’s collection has been recognized as one of the great achievements of modernist literature. Its mixture of lyrical prose, surreal imagery, and psychological depth invites readers into a world that feels both intimate and ungraspable.

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was a Polish-Jewish writer, painter, and illustrator. His literary universe, though small in volume, is marked by its intensity and originality, blending autobiographical traces with myth, allegory, and dream. His life was tragically cut short during the Holocaust, but his work continues to resonate as a singular voice in 20th-century literature.

THE STREET OF CROCODILES

My father kept in the lower drawer of his large desk an old and beautiful map of our city. It was a whole folio sheaf of parchment pages which, originally fastened with strips of linen, formed an enormous wall map, a bird’s-eye panorama.

Hung on the wall, the map covered it almost entirely and opened a wide view on the valley of the River Tysmienica, which wound itself like a wavy ribbon of pale gold, on the maze of widely spreading ponds and marshes, on the high ground rising toward the south, gently at first, then in ever tighter ranges, in a chessboard of rounded hills, smaller and paler as they receded toward the misty yellow fog of the horizon. From that faded distance of the periphery, the city rose and grew toward the center of the map, an undifferentiated mass at first, a dense complex of blocks and houses, cut by deep canyons of streets, to become on the first plan a group of single houses, etched with the sharp clarity of a landscape seen through binoculars. In that section of the map, the engraver concentrated on the complicated and manifold profusion, of streets and alleyways, the sharp lines of cornices, architraves, archivolts, and pilasters, lit by the dark gold of a late and cloudy afternoon which steeped all corners and recesses in the deep sepia of shade. The solids and prisms of that shade darkly honeycombed the ravines of streets, drowning in a warm color here half a street, there a gap between houses. They dramatized and orchestrated in a bleak romantic chiaroscuro the complex architectural polyphony.

On that map, made in the style of baroque panoramas, the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known. The lines of only a few streets were marked in black and their names given in simple, unadorned lettering, different from the noble script of the other captions. The cartographer must have been loath to include that district in the city and his reservations found expression in the typographical treatment.

In order to understand these reservations, we must draw attention to the equivocal and doubtful character of that peculiar area, so unlike the rest of the city.

It was an industrial and commercial district, its soberly utilitarian character glaringly underlined. The spirit of the times, the mechanism of economics, had not spared our city and had taken root in a sector of its periphery which then developed into a parasitical quarter.