Bruno Schulz and Ukrainian Culture: Historical Contexts and Literary Traces

Abstract

The Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) lived in a culturally diverse region, today in western Ukraine, mostly belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Second Polish Republic in his lifetime. Various interpretations have placed his works in cultural contexts of the region’s historic Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian ethnic ‘triangle’, generally finding far fewer Ukrainian threads than Polish or Jewish. This article explores this absence of Ukrainian influence, while also situating Schulz as comprehensively as possible within the Ukrainian contexts of his time and place. It does so through examination of historical evidence—including local newspapers of the 1920s and -30s —and through interpretations of his literary works. The article begins by comparing previous contextualizations of Schulz, including recent Ukrainian scholarship. It then examines the history of Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian relations in Schulz’s region and his contact with Ukrainians and Ukrainian culture. Against this background, it lays out evidence for Ukrainian contexts, subtexts, and traces in his literary works. The article argues that the relative absence of Ukrainian culture from Schulz’s creative purview was not just an individual characteristic of his work, but also partly reflected broader cultural and political relations, including the marginalization and repression of Ukrainian culture under the Second Polish Republic.