Bruno Schulz

1892–1942

Born in Poland, Bruno Schulz was best known as a short-story writer and regarded as one of the great Polish-language writers of the twentieth century. He was also a gifted painter and graphic artist. While little of his artwork survived World War II, a number of remarkable pen-and-ink drawings did, including erotically charged illustrations for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs (1870). Only one of his oil paintings survived the war. In 2001, wall paintings, created by Schulz while he was a prisoner of a Gestapo sergeant, were discovered in Drohobych, Ukraine. Schulz was shot to death in 1942 by another Gestapo officer who was engaged in a dispute with the sergeant.

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

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The Meeting: A Jewish Youth and Two Women in an Urban Alley

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The Meeting, Schulz’s only surviving oil painting, obliquely explores a theme he returned to many times in his writing and art, namely, sadomasochism, this time in the context of an encounter between…

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Carriage Driver (Self-Portrait), Drohobycz

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When Drohobycz (present-day Ukraine) was occupied by the Nazis, Bruno Schulz was initially spared the fate of other Jews in his hometown. Because of his fame as a writer and artist, he was kept alive…

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Cinnamon Shops

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At the time of the shortest, sleepy winter days, edged on both sides with the furry dusk of mornings and evenings, when the city reached out ever deeper into the labyrinth of winter nights, and was…