Bruno Schulz was born and was killed in the Polish town of Drohobycz, now in the Ukraine. The road there from Lviv (which Schulz knew as Lwów) is today lined with barren fields. There are patches of cultivation a few yards from the garden walls of roadside villas, but everywhere else the land is ragged with tares and other weeds. The long battle lines of combine harvesters tackling endless miles of grain can be watched only in old film stock, most of it black and white, or only in memory. The towns and villages have shed the more obvious emblems of Soviet uniformity, especially in Drohobycz itself, where an unusual number of old houses survive. Much of the town center still looks like the environment that Schulz grew up in. In fact, the material remains of the command economy are more obsolescent than the physical evidence of a largely nineteenth-century townscape. On the outskirts are shunting yards full of rotting iron, with a classic Soviet billboard showing a cartoon Stakhanovite worker balancing a huge girder on one shoulder. These give way to acres of unused bricks, stacked mysteriously in a series of upside-down arches. The traffic slows when the hoarded debris of overproduction has been passed and you reach the edge of what feels like an older, more domestic economy. There is an apple orchard, with a black and red woodpecker resting on a telegraph pole. Across the street is a wooden house sporting bright new tin drainpipes. The clapboarding is cracked and warped, but this one-story dwelling sports a row of stylized metopes. Sparrows are having a dustbath on the pitted pavement outside. Next door, a small girl pushes a pink-clad Barbie doll through the ironwork of her front gate. A cockerel is crowing in the front yard. There is a garden area with a large and robust crop of dandelions and a shabby old hexagonal summer house, a compost heap propped against one side. Between the road and the pavement is a narrow verge with untidy stacks of hay at regular intervals. Schulz’s own house is found at 10 Florianska Street. I approached it with two friends, poet Leo Mellor and translator Piotr Szymor. We stood under the walnut tree across the road to avoid a shower of rain.
It is a modest-sized house, one story high and no more than thirty feet by twelve feet in area. During his adult years, Schulz was living in this space with four dependents. The style of the façade is neoclassical, with a certain amount of restrained plaster ornamentation and a disciplined repetition of elements. The arrangement of the five windows, however, with three on one side of the door and two on the other, introduces a curious asymmetry, which must have appealed to a writer whose imagination was quickened by opportunities to discompose the orderly and introduce subtle mutations into conventional appearances. It is impossible to see inside this dwelling for the simple reason that it remains, as it always was, a private residence, but there is something fitting, and even obscurely satisfying, in this gatekeeping, in this show of indifference to the literary pilgrim. Mere observation never reveals anything in Schulz’s stories, where the substance of reality eludes every attempt to imprison it in the dead forms of everyday appearance. Schulz’s entire universe is premised on the vitality of hidden life and encrypted purpose:
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