Ukrainian Traces in the Works of Bruno Schulz | Kultura 2025

Professor Stanley Bill

University of Cambridge

Professor of Polish Studies, University of Cambridge

Lecture Title:

Ukrainian Traces in the Works of Bruno Schulz

Lecture Synopsis:

The Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) lived and worked in a multicultural region—today in western Ukraine—inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, among others. This lecture explores Ukrainian contexts, subtexts, and traces in Schulz’s literary and artistic works, from his short stories to illustrations made during the Second World War.

Biography:

Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge. He works on twentieth-century Polish literature and contemporary Polish politics. He is the author of Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution(with Ben Stanley, Stanford University Press, 2025) and Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is co-editor of Multicultural Commonwealth: Poland-Lithuania and Its Afterlives (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (2021).

Bill has also published translations of Czesław Miłosz’s novel The Mountains of Parnassus (Yale University Press, 2017) and a selection of short stories by Bruno Schulz entitled Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories (London, 2022). He is the founder and editor-at-large of the news and opinion website Notes from Poland.

You can enrol for the full course here.