Profetyczne akcenty prozy Brunona Schulza

The publication of Cinnamon Shops precedes by just one year the Nobel Prize in medicine given to Hans Sperman, who a few years later, in 1938, proposed a crucial experiment of removing from an unfertilized egg cell its nucleus and replacing it with the nucleus of a cell of an embryo. From our present point of view it is hard not to notice a prophetic bent of Schulz’s fiction even if Jacob’s experimental assumption does not quite correspond to the process of cloning as we know it. Also Father’s ornithological experiment is a key component of the narrative structure of the Cinnamon Shops as a kind of frame that consolidates particular stories. The mystical student of the matter does not renounce the discourse of science even though the order which he creates becomes more and more fantastic, while he suffers from the metaphysical and anthropological anxiety about the alien handicapped creatures.