Wszystkie twarze Adeli
All the Faces of Adela

Summary/Abstract: An attempt at deliberation on representations of female bodies in the prose, drawings, and graphic work by Bruno Schulz. The centre of interest is occupied by Adela, the lead protagonist of Sklepy cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops) and Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą (The Hourglass Sanatorium), whose body is treated as a model also for further Schulzian “erotic bodies”. Here key importance belongs to the method inspired by Hana Bellmer’s The Doll – “the anatomy of desire”. Bellmer created “condensed images of desire” via the transformations and multiplications of the female body, but Schulz’s erotic imagination reproduces repeatable and limited corporality. The “doll-like” bodies of Adela, Polda or Paulina are “condensed images of desire” as long as they are emblematic – motionless in con ventional, perfectly legible poses and gestures, to which Schulz returned ostentatiously. They are summed up in several reduced presentations typical for the aesthetics of pop culture – i.a. the fin de siècle boudoir novel and pornography. This schematic nature of women’s bodies in the prose and graphic work of Bruno Schulz is not devoid of the misogynistic phantasms of modernism. At the same time, however, it makes it possible to think about pastiche, provocation or camp.

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