For a long time, Norwid seemed to be more a European than a Polish poet, and the spe-cific nature of his link to Polish traditions remained an open question. Norwid’s “outlandish” and complicated long poem Quidam (1857/1863) explicitly answers to Krasiński’s epic drama Irydion (1836), as did earlier Słowacki in his tragedies Balladyna (1839) and Lilla Weneda (1840). Both Słowacki and Norwid addressed their forewords to Krasiński. Słowacki reacts to Krasiński by refining his treatment of genre, verse and style and by sharpening his Romantic tragic horror and irony. Quidam beats Irydion by a more convincing portrait of An-cient Rome, by less pathetic and more intelligent hints to 19th Century modernity, and by overcoming with superior ease both Romanticism and realism in genre and time treatment. Quidam’s modest and sober main character contains also a secretly critical answer to Słowacki’s likewise overwhelming and unbearably fantastic epic Król-Duch (1847).
Schulz was particularly predisposed to intertextuality, since his hometown was genuinely multilingual, with Polish and Yiddish as dominants. German, as the official language of the Austro-Hungarian administration and that of Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, was especially attractive to the educated Eastern European Jews, which applied also to Schulz’s mother who taught him Goethe’s ballad, “The Erlking.” On the other hand, such centers of modernism as Vienna, Lviv, Cracow, and Warsaw, which affected the young Schulz in his student years, were also francophilic so that the works of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, Claudel, and Gide, as well as the philosophical writings of Bergson, must have influenced him, too.
The action of Quidam is set in Hadrian's Rome. Public and private hysteria rises due to the Jewish war 132-135 p. Chr., but also to a conflict between Hadrian's religion policy and its Greek, Jewish and Christian opponents. The Jewish uprising is confronted to Greek non opposition and to the Christian way of opposition by public faithwitnesses. It is raised to the role of a `motor' in a ruined epic machine, and hints to modern Polish (or other nations') uprisings. Barchob (Bar-Kokhba?) is shown as a Roman Jew's disciple, secret admirer of Christian courage, friend of Alexander, the poem's main person; as a messianic fighter in Judea; and finally as an advocate of interreligious solidarity. Quidam is a „przy-powieść”, a „para-novel” with a ruined narrative time and action structure, and a „parable” which answers strangely to Chateaubriand's demand for Christianity epics, forming an allegory also of modern civilisation, police state, public opinion, modern conflictual cultural and religious pluralism, modern individualism, scepticism and altruism.
Finding by Piotr Szalsza two German language stories signed with the name “Bruno Schulz” could not be ignored by the editors of Schulz/Forum. Not yet recovered from the shock caused by the 14th issue, we are again facing a possible revelation. Unlike, however, in the case of the story titled “Undula” of 1922, which leaves no doubt that it is an early work by the author of The Cinnamon Shops, even if he preferred to use a penname, the question of the authorship of the two stories published in the Cetinjer Zeitung in 1917 and 1918 seems much more complicated. Perhaps without more research in the archives its resolution will be impossible. We asked four Schulz scholars for their opinions about the texts: Stefan Chwin, Włodzimierz Bolecki, Jerzy Jarzębski, Rolf Fieguth, and Katarzyna Lukas.
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