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Listy Bezimiennej

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Tuszyńska A.

Schulz/Forum

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2012

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issue 1

83-92

PL

The title Nameless One is Józefina Szelińska, Bruno Schulz’s fiancé who, however, never became his wife. The author reconstructs the history of their relationship, from their first meeting in 1933 through a period of friendship, marital plans, contradictory ideas about the future, and the ultimate breakup in 1937. The essay is also an attempt to account for the later life of Szelińska and draw a psychological portrait of the mysterious woman, hiding in all publications behind the initial „J.” Little has been known about her so far. The author relies on Szelińska’s letters to Jerzy Ficowski. Their correspondence began in 1948 with Szelińska’s response to Ficowski’s appeal for any information about Schulz, published in Przekrój. The exchange of letters continued for forty years until the woman committed suicide in 1991. In almost eighty letters written by her to Ficowski, one can find the rhythm of her destiny, a cryptic cardiogram of her exiled memory, a record of the past that cannot be traced on the surface.

2

J[…], Juna, Józefina

100%

Tuszyńska A.

Schulz/Forum

|

2014

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issue 4

43-52

PL

In the first part of the essay, Tuszyńska introduces Józefina Szelińska, “Juna,” and presents the circumstances of discovering an unknown manuscript of Bruno Schulz – an application for a sick leave that he wrote for his partner to the Main Statistical Office in Warsaw. The file with the document was kept for several decades in the Office archive to be preserved in the times of the Second World War and the communist regime. The other part is an attempt to present the relationship of Schulz and Szelińska in the form of a literary reportage or a biographical sketch. The difficult liaison of the writer and the most mysterious of his mistresses – both of them suffered from depression and could hardly communicate with each other – is an opportunity to make references to the politics and social life of the prewar Poland. The essay is a part of a book that will soon be published by Wydawnictwo Literackie.

3

W cieniu

100%

Tuszyńska A.

Schulz/Forum

|

2020

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issue 16

137-146

PL

This biographical essay presents the post-war history of the friendly relationship between Józefina Szelińska, Schulz’s fiancée, and Jerzy Ficowski, his first biographer and champion of his work. This reconstruction is based on an analysis of their correspondence. Seventynine letters and postcards from Józefina Szelińska to Jerzy Ficowski have survived, dating from 1948 to 1990; they are either handwritten, in convoluted, hard-to-read writing, or typed. There are over a dozen postcards; Christmas cards outnumber Easter cards, and there are a few picture postcards from the sea and one from Tleń in the Tuchola Forest. The major part of the collection is letters written on both sides of A4 sheets, which makes them even more difficult to read. Sometimes, Szelińska kindly used a typewriter, neatly and sparingly, so as not to waste space or lose her thread – as befits a Polish teacher. Few errors, few deletions. According to the official and only version of events, Ficowski’s letters to her were lost. Thus, we only know a part of their epistolary relationship: her letters kept by Ficowski. If we call them the obverse, then the reverse is unknown, absent in this arrangement of planets. “Please keep my person in deep shadow at all times”, Szelińska writes in the autumn of 1973, and this request often recurs in their correspondence. This request – or perhaps a command – is iterated in her conversation-in-letters with Jerzy Ficowski, which lasted for almost half a century. Schulz’s biographer was a witness and midwife to her memory, as well as a witness of her struggle with herself, with her old love and her own to be-or-not-to be on the stage of the past.

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J[…], Juna, Józefina

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