Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz: With Selected Prose

Schulz's hopeless dream of a renewal of society through inspiration and myth pervades these letters and fragments, mostly written in his native Polish village between 1933 and 1942 as the Nazi threat loomed ever larger. The same tortured spirit permeates his justly famous prose collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. This morbidly shy crafts teacher, who was shot by an SS brute, wrote spiritually questing letters, some of which bear comparison with those of his idol, Rilke. But the most impressive selections are his essay on Kafka, whom Schulz considered deeply religious; his richly beautiful ``The Republic of Dreams''; and his rhapsodic meditation, ``Fatherland.'' The 70-odd pencil or ink drawings reproduced here reflect Schulz's neurotic preoccupation with dwarfish male freaks cowed by coy or powerful females. (October)