Edenic Past
Red Amardcord (2020)
The Connection Between Bruno Schulz and the Holodomor
"First, briefly, about the history of the Great Famine. At the start of 1929, the sixteenth Conference of the All Soviet Communist Party/Bolsheviks ratifies the program for universal collectivization. Stalin decides that by the fall of 1930 the entire peasantry of his country (which at that time means three-quarters of the population, more than one hundred million people) must be in kolkhozes (footnote definition here). But the peasants do not want to join kolkhozes. Stalin proceeds to snuff out their resistance by two methods. He sends hundreds of thousands of them to the camps or deports and resettles them in Siberia, and the rest he undertakes to starve into obedience. The main blow falls on Ukraine...
Officially, the matter presented itself as follows: Moscow had determined the size of the quota each village was obliged to deliver to the state—how much grain, potatoes, meat, and so on, but the quotas were significantly greater than what the land could realistically be expected to yield. Understandably, the peasants were unable to fulfill the plan imposed upon them. So then, by force—usually by military force—the authorities started confiscating everything edible in the villages. The peasants had nothing to eat and nothing to sow. A massive and deadly famine began in 1930, lasting seven years and reaping its grimmest harvest in 1933. The majority of demographers and historians today agree that in those years Stalin starved to death around ten million people.
Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium
Kapuściński gives this history in 1991 as he travels to Lvov, to the home of Father Ludwik Kamielowski. Kamielowski's elderly mother, Bronisława Kamielowska, experienced the Great Famine, which has come to be called the Holodomor, firsthand. This is Kapuściński's method. He would never be satisfied to academically recount this history from the comfort of his desk. He has to go there, where it happened, see something, if only traces. Traces are all he finds in Kolyma, looking for evidence of that great crime. The Dal’stroy 1 headquarters, NKVD barracks, the prison where interrogations took place have all been torn down by the time Kapuścińksi visits in the early ‘90s. The only camp building still standing is the House of Political Instruction of the NKVD cadre stationed at Kolyma. That erosion of history extends to people; sitting at a bus stop with an elderly man, Kapuscinski wonders if the man was torturer or victim. Ultimately both are victims.
In Ukraine he finds an oral history of the Holodomor. Bronisława Kamielowska lived in the village of Butryn in the '30s. She gave birth to 10 children, six of whom died of hunger. Bronisława recounts the escalation that was the "Law of the Blade of Grain", written personally by Stalin in 1932. Under this law one could be sentenced to Kolyma for years or even shot for stealing anything, even a single blade of grain, from a kolkhoz. "Similar punishment awaited the tractor driver whose tractor broke down, or the kolkhoz member who lost a hoe or a shovel."2 The conditions of starvation were such that even occasional acts of charity, as when groups of dissidents from nearby towns would bring shipments of bread, could mean death. A starving person's body cannot always handle a sudden influx of food. Kamielowska recounts the recipients of such charity gorging themselves and then dropping to the floor, contorting in pain. Amid this horror her family was still harrassed by the NKVD, which would conduct house searches, pull up floorboards, dig up gardens. If they found any food hidden, they would take it and imprison the owner. Kamielowska's husband, Józik, was imprisoned six times in this way. Eventually Józik was involuntarily conscripted into the Red Army to fight World War II. Bronisława was deported to a kolkhoz in Kazakhstan. By some miracle, both survived.
From Lvov it is not far to the city of Drohobych. Kapuściński travels there for the same reason most tourists make pilgrimages to Drohobych: because it was the birthplace and liftime residence of the writer Bruno Schulz. Schulz was a teacher of art and writing at a local high school who wrote brilliantly imaginative short stories. I encountered his work in high school because of the adaptations of his stories by the experimental filmmakers the Brothers Quay. Schulz worked alone in Drohobych, not formally aligned with any artistic movements, but has been retroactively put under the umbrella of surrelism and its offshoots. I felt as a teenager, and still do today, that his work is better than most of what came out of the primary French surrealist scene. 3
Schulz was born in 1892, when Drohobych was part of Poland. Today, it is in Ukraine. In 1941, it was occupied by the Nazis as part of the Operation Barbarossa offensive. Schulz, who was Jewish, was forced to relocate to the Drohobych ghetto. He fell under the protection of a Gestapo officer who admired his artwork, but this association ultimately doomed him. In 1942 a rival Gestapo officer shot Schulz dead in the streets of Drohobych. It was revenge for Schulz's patron having killed a Jewish dentist under the rival's protection.
The story "Cinnamon Shops" recounts a nighttime walk taken by the narrator (a child version of Schulz) through Drohobych. He is on an errand for his absentminded father, but his path through Drohobych expands and contracts in waves of kaleidoscopic, fractal imagery that render the execution of any rational task nearly impossible. The narrator is drawn to the district with the cinnamon shops, exotic stores open only at this phantasmagoric time of night. Kapuściński, visiting Drohobych on the same trip in which he spoke to Bronisława Kamielowska in Lvov about the Holodomor, attempted to visit the cinnamon shops in person. His local guide laughs-- the shops existed only in Schulz's imagination.
As Drohobych was part of Poland during the Holodomor, Kapuściński is certain Schulz knew nothing of the famine, which was effectively hidden by the USSR at the time. Quoting a typically psychedelically overabundant description of food from the story "August",4 he speculates on some sort of psychic inverse synchronicity: that the suffering of millions starving not that far away could have somehow influenced Schulz to have such exaggerated visions of exotic plenty. The poetry of this link is given support by the fact that Drohobych ultimately did become part of Ukraine. Reviewing the Schulz stories with this in mind, I saw things slightly differently. Here is the description of the cinnamon shops from the eponymous story:
"I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark panelling of their walls. These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish, and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities. You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in jars, microscopes, binoculars, and, most especially, strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories."
Bruno Schulz, "Cinnamon Shops"
The shops sell food, yes. But to me what they embody more than culinary excess is cultural pluralism. The objects they offer expose the inhabitants of Drohobych to cultures from the world over, and "most especially" to the knowledge of those cultures, through those rare books and folios. In the fight over Ukraine's soul, whether it will have Western or (neo)-Stalinist values, which as I write this in December 2024 is reified in a literal, actual hot war claiming hundreds of lives every day, Schulz's story is a salvo in celebration of multicultural humanism. I am reminded of Goethe's ethos of "weltliteratur" (world literature): a delight in the offerings of every world culture, undergirded by the belief that, despite their differences, each one has the same approximate total "value" as the others. The implicit belief that they have something to offer each other other than dominance and war. The fact that Schulz was killed by a soldier of a totalitarian, supremacist government gives this interpretation a grim poetic logic. I don't wish to "but actually..." Kapuściński's observation, only to add to it. I think his original formulation (through the translation by Klara Glowczewska) of the connection between Bruno Schulz and the Holodomor is so beautiful I wish to reproduce it here:
"Everything is so unclear, so unfathomable. Schulz wrote The Cinnamon Shops during the most terrible year of the Great Famine in the Ukraine, not far from Drohobych. Schulz most certainly knew nothing of this great tragedy, hidden as it was from the world. Yet what forces could have been at work here, what mysterious currents, associations, connections, and oppositions, that would lead him to begin his book with a magnificent, stupefying vision of satiety?"
Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium
I almost always have the same dream. The objects, people, and settings change, but the format is constant: I am in a large multifaceted setting with lots of people, like a college campus, convention center, a part of New York City on a warm summer night when everyone is out. I have a seemingly simple task: to deliver a document or message, to visit some bureuacratic office and register for something, just one of the thousands of errands we perform in our lives and more or less instantly forget after completion.
But as I begin to walk to my destination, the setting unfolds, revealing new rooms, torrents of people, some of whom I know, some of whom are engaging me. The environment disgorges room after room, plaza after plaza, obeying a fractal logic-- I move forward, but the sense is I am getting deeper into the ever-unfolding, now unfathomably complex location, not any closer to my intended destination. Side quests and side conversations proliferate. A door or threshold reveals what seems like a sudden total change of setting, but this too eventually finds its place in the origami honeycomb structure I have been attempting to navigate.
I hadn't read "Cinnamon Shops" (the individual story) since I was 15 or so. Rereading it for this project, I was shocked to see that it is an instance of this dream. The child narrator tasked with retrieving his father's wallet while the family is at a theatre waiting for the curtain to rise; the total sensory overload and explosion of new settings as he attempts to make his way back on what seemed to be a simple path back home. Kapuściński writes of impossible communication linking the suffering of millions to the pen of an extraordinarily sensitive artist. Synchronicity, the sort of thing we might these days jocularly call "a glitch in the simulation." What am I to make of reliving palette-swap versions of Schulz's story night after night?NEXT