BRUNO SCHULTZ’S MYTHOSPACE OF “THE CINNAMON SHOPS”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the work of the outstanding Polish writer of the interwar period, Bruno Schulz. The stylistic and pictorial-artistic originality of “The Cinnamon Shops” (Sklepy cynamonowe) does not leave the researchers of B. Shultz’s work indifferent so far. The work, which has become a cult for many generations, deals with implied images, symbols and motifs, which in their origins reach (in the opinion of the article’s author) to the deep layer of Indo-European myths.

Bruno Schultz’s prose is full of archetypal and mythical thinking. The writer creates a world in which the real and the unreal are vaguely demarcated, interpenetrating in the planes of the conscious and subconscious, and the spheres of the sacred and the profane constitute the diffuse fabric of the text. He creates his own artistic world through a masterful combination of elements of different cultures, religious systems and chronotopes. Time is also subject to transformations, which is divided into two time categories of the mythical dimension: “real/full time” and “time of dying/emptiness” in the cycle “Cinnamon Shops”. This approach to understanding the category of time can be explained by B. Schultz’s deep immersion in the prophetic tradition of Judaism. Apart from this specific national tradition, Polish and European cultural traditions are equally organic for the writer. Therefore, symbols and mythologemes, diverse in their origin, appear in a whimsical interweaving. However, they constitute a single and indivisible canvas of the artistic world of B. Schultz’s work, illustrating the complex but unceasing process of entry and «implantation» of a peripheral or foreign culture into the cultural sphere of the center (or the core of national culture). The space in The Cinnamon Shops is divided into different worlds, different levels of initiation and knowledge of reality. The space-time, where all places and every minute are significant, is fragmented, as it is constructed by the author from fragments of memory and subjected to the process of mythologizing. Thus, a coherent picture emerges from disjointed passages and turns into a myth.