The Many Realities of Bruno Schulz

Tuition: $300 | YIVO members: $225**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

Bruno Schulz has long been understood to be a visionary painter and writer. His biographer, Jerzy Ficowski, has described Schulz as a “myth-maker,” able to withdraw hidden embryonic states out of a culmination of the dynamics of the ordinary. This course will explore, as Schulz himself put it, “the mutterings of mythological delirium” found in his work through close readings of Schulz’s two fictional masterpieces, Street of Crocodiles, and Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, supplemented with a selection of Schulz’s pictorial and graphic art.

What is the purpose of Schulz’s myth(s)? Does his myth-making provide a way out of stifling “reality” for a possibly deranged Jewish genius on the fringes of Polish-Jewish culture or does it take the reader more deeply into that reality? We will discuss the idea of “ordinary reality” as it had developed in the thinking and art of the European avantgarde of the 19th and 20th centuries and its role in the making of Bruno Schulz’s mythological kingdom.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following book before the first date of class:

• The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska (Purchase)

The instructor will provide any other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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