W cieniu

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.