The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
Bruno Schulz and Celina Wieniewska, Translator
The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)
The untimely death of Polish writer Bruno Schulz at the hands of a Gestapo officer stands as one of the great losses to modern literature, but since his death, word of his extraordinary literary voice has won him an international readership. This volume brings together Schulz's complete fiction, including The Street of Crocodiles, praised by The New York Review of Books as "a masterpiece . . . marvelously inventive"; his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass; and three short stories. Illustrated with Schulz's luminous original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.
“[Schulz’s] very beautiful, sensitive, meaningful stories raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language.” —Olga Tokarczuk, The Guardian
“Every time I open his books, I’m amazed anew to discover how this writer, a single human being who rarely left his home town, created for us an entire world, an alternate dimension of reality. . . . His [stories] create a fantastic universe, a private mythology of one family, and are written in a language that brims with life, a language that is itself the main character of the stories and is the only dimension in which they could possibly exist. . . . On every page, life [is] raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly worthy of its name.” —David Grossman, The New Yorker
“Bruno Schulz’s slim output of stories were all he needed to publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other 20th-century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.” —Sjón, Vulture
“A masterpiece of comic writing; grave yet dignified, domestically plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving, marvelously inventive, shy, and never raw.” —The New York Review of Books
“Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words. . . . [His] verbal art strikes us—stuns us, even—with its overload of beauty.” —John Updike
“One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
“Schulz cannot be easily classified. He can be called a surrealist, a symbolist, an expressionist, a modernist. . . . He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached. . . . If Schulz had been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer
“Rich in fantasy, sensuous in their apprehension of the living world, elegant in style, witty, underpinned by a mystical but coherent idealistic aesthetic, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were unique and startling productions, seeming to come out of nowhere. . . . Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life, which is at the same time the recollected inner life of his childhood and his own creative workings. From the first comes the charm and freshness of his stories, from the second their intellectual power.” —J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
About the Authors
Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) was a Polish-Jewish writer, artist, and teacher, born in Drohobych, a provincial town in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine. He spent nearly his entire life there, working as a drawing teacher at a local secondary school while writing in the evenings.
His reputation rests on two story collections, Cinnamon Shops (1934), published in English as The Street of Crocodiles, and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). Drawing on the landscape of his childhood, Schulz transformed ordinary family life into a dreamlike world of myth, where time bends, fathers become birds, and a small town expands into something cosmic. His prose, dense with metaphor and sensory detail, has been compared to that of Kafka, whom he translated into Polish, and Proust, though his voice remains unmistakably his own. He was also a gifted graphic artist, and his drawings and etchings carry the same obsessive, uncanny imagination as his fiction.
Schulz was killed in 1942 by a Gestapo officer in the Drohobych ghetto. A manuscript he was known to be working on, a novel titled The Messiah, was lost. Today he is regarded as one of the most original prose stylists of twentieth-century European literature, and his work has influenced writers including Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Philip Roth, and Olga Tokarczuk.
Celina Wieniewska (translator) was awarded the 1963 Roy Publishers Polish-into-English prize for her translation of The Street of Crocodiles.