Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [1]
One could continue to quote from the stories: somebody might attempt perhaps a psycho-analysis of Schulz on the basis of his writings. Polish and other critics have drawn attention to the influence that Thomas Mann, Freud and Kafka exercised on him. This may or may not be true: although it is also said that Schulz first read The Trial when the book was sent to him for reviewing after the publication of Cinnamon Shops. What is undoubtedly true is that the atmosphere of both Kafka's and Schulz's life in their respective provinces is not dissimilar. These distant outposts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, with the memories of the 'good' Emperor Franz-Joseph still a living tradition, looked up to Vienna as the center of cultural and artistic life much more than to Prague or Warsaw.
But whether or not these derivations existed in fact does not really matter, the stories still speak for themselves in the same voice as in the thirties and emerges from them in a sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history: an ordinary provincial city with ordinary people going about their daily tasks, a city scorched by the hot summers of every schoolchild's holidays, sometimes shaken by unexpected high winds from the mountains, but mostly sleepy and lethargic — here brought to life by the magic touch of a poetic genius, in a prose as memorable, powerful and unique as are the brush strokes of Marc Chagall.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the second collection of prose fiction by Bruno Schulz. Published in Warsaw in 1937, it followed three years after The Street of Crocodiles. Like the previous book, Sanatorium is, in Schulz's own words. "An attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family, a certain house in a provincial city — not from documents, events, a study of character or of people's destinies — but by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history .. . That dusky, allusive atmosphere, that aura that thickens around any family history, can only occasionally disclose to a poet its second, mythical face: an alternative, a depth in which the secret mystery of blood and race is hidden . . . These mythical elements are inherent in the region of early childish fantasies, intuitions, fears and anticipations characteristic of the dawn of life."
Sanatorium is the poetic recreation of Schulz's autobiography: the memories of a child blessed with an extraordinary sensitivity projected with the eye of an artist; his pilgrimage into a lost and happier past. It is a time when Father was still alive but he is no more the central and dominant preoccupation of his son, as he was in the earlier book. Mother is here as a benevolent, bland presence. Other members of the family make brief appearances; the blue-eyed, temperamental, young servant girl, Adela, is still the household acolyte, the disturbing, sex-charged element. In the masterful central story that gives the book its title, Joseph, dutiful son and observant narrator, visits Father in limbo and reports on its confusion and hidden horrors. Yet Sanatorium belongs to Joseph: it chronicles his progress through stages of discovery. The revelation of nature in all its seasons, colours and phases raises him to a feverish frenzy and occasions his dramatic self-recognition of the child-as-artist. The infinite and bewildering variety of the wider world is revealed through the symbols and national emblems in a schoolboy's stamp album (in "Spring"). The evocation of first love in a long, dreamlike sequence in the same story is intertwined