Translated by Theodosia Robertson
Hot and silent, dusty and deserted, the town of Drohobycz seemed, during the few summer days I spent there some years ago, like a place forgotten in time. The houses had a certain faded, Austro-Hungarian glamour, but seemed to have been built for different people, in a different era. The central market square had a certain pleasing symmetry, but practically no business was conducted there. The peasant women who had carved small vegetable gardens out of the tangles of weed that passed for shrubbery looked up suspiciously when a stranger passed, and then looked quickly down again. The curse of Drohobycz is not merely that it is a provincial Ukrainian town, on the edge of what used to be the Soviet empire. The curse of Drohobycz is that it has always been a provincial town, on the edge of something else. In the 19th century, it was a distant outpost of Austria-Hungary. In the first half of the 20th century it lay on the eastern edge of Poland. Worse, nothing has ever happened in Drohobycz, aside from a brief burst of oil-related prosperity in the 1890s. In fact, the only thing that has ever brought Drohobycz any notoriety is the life and work of one writer, an eccentric art teacher named Bruno Schulz, whose main subject was the town itself. And even he was hardly flattering. ‘Let us say it bluntly,’ wrote Schulz of his native region, ‘the misfortune of that area is that nothing ever succeeds there, nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Gestures hang in the air, movements are prematurely exhausted and cannot overcome a certain point of inertia . . .’
Schulz’s life was brief, and, until the end, uneventful.
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