His First Short Story Was a Postscript : THE COMPLETE FICTION OF BRUNO SCHULZ The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass <i> translated by Celina Wieniewska; afterword by Jerzy Ficowski; illustrations by the author (Walker: $22.95; 336 pp.; 0-8027-1091-3)</i>

For the American reader, this is by no means the first encounter with Bruno Schulz, one of the greatest figures in Polish modernist literature of 1918-1939 and one of the most original European fiction writers of the first half of our century.

At least since the separate Penguin editions of his two collections of short stories, “The Street of Crocodiles” (1977) and “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” (1979), American fascination with this unique storyteller and graphic artist has been growing steadily. John Updike has written incisively on his art, and Cynthia Ozick published a novel in which Schulz’s legendary “Messiah,” his unfinished novel that had perished during the Holocaust, played a central part.

More recently, this interest has been fueled by the publication in 1988 of “Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, With Selected Prose” (Harper & Row), a highly revealing self-portrait of an artist consumed by his dark obsessions and paralyzing sense of inadequacy, yet also fully aware of his immense creative potential.

“The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz” does not much more than reprint his two collections of short stories under one cover (and add a dozen unpublished illustrations), but in doing so, it reminds us once more of his greatness.

Schulz was born in 1892 in the small town of Drohobycz in the Polish province of Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; today part of the Soviet Ukraine), the son of a poor Jewish merchant. His family’s faith was Mosaic but the language they spoke most was Polish. Compared to his parents, Schulz himself went a step further toward cultural assimilation by not adhering to any specific religious denomination and by writing exclusively in Polish (except for one short story in German, which has not survived).

A morbidly shy and reticent man, tormented all his life by a severe inferiority complex and suppressed sexual deviations (though his masochism and fetishism have found some outlet in his graphic art and fiction), Schulz also was burdened with all the psychological consequences of his inevitable status as an outsider. He entered Polish literature as a member of an ethnic minority, a first-generation intellectual, and a newcomer from deep provinces. This perhaps explains why from the very beginning he cared so much about the stylistic mastery of his prose: In order to be taken seriously, he had no choice but to dazzle the critics with an unquestionable brilliance.

One of the most striking characteristics of Schulz is the contrast between his unbridled imagination and the fact that he spent virtually all his life in his backwater hometown of Drohobycz. After graduating from the local high school in 1910, he did spend five years in Lwow (today Lvov) and Vienna, studying architecture and painting. However, for the rest of his life he resided mainly in Drohobycz, toiling as an underpaid and overworked high school teacher of arts and crafts.

Drohobycz finally became the place and cause of his death as well. Schulz was caught there by the Soviet invasion in 1939 and the Nazi one in 1941. Under the German occupation, he survived for a while thanks to a Gestapo agent who hired him to decorate his house. But during a roundup on Nov. 19, 1942, Schulz was shot in the ghetto street by another Gestapo agent who held some grudge against his protector. This shot cut short a career that was far from completed; we may only speculate as to what wonders might have been produced by Schulz, had he survived the war.

Yet, as some of his letters clearly show, Schulz was painfully aware that his creative powers were being constantly stifled by the pressure of everyday reality. Another paradox of his career is the contrast between his bewildering accomplishment as a writer and the meager size of his output: His entire oeuvre consists of just two slender collections of short stories. Indeed, everything in his life, from his poverty to his pathological shyness, seemed to conspire to keep his productivity at a minimum and delay his recognition.

He began to write rather late in his life, in the mid-1920s, switching to literature from the graphic arts that had been his initial vocation. In fact, his first publication was a portfolio of etchings, “A Book of Idolatry,” that he distributed as a limited edition in the early 1920s. Characteristically, Schulz’s beginnings as a writer stemmed from his correspondence, which for him was the principal way to maintain contacts with the external world.

His early short stories originally were written as postscripts to his letters to a female friend, the writer Debora Vogel. Collected as “The Cinnamon Shops” (changed in the English translation to “The Street of Crocodiles”), the stories came out in book form in 1933 thanks to the enthusiastic support of the influential Polish novelist Zofia Nalkowska. (As legend has it, she had agreed reluctantly to read the manuscript of an unknown author only because she had been asked by a mutual friend.)

Schulz’s first book met with critical acclaim, even though its success was limited to the circles of the literary avant-garde. Significantly, the two authors who wrote the most penetrating analyses of Schulz’s work in the 1930s were two other representatives of what was then the most innovative group of Polish literature: novelist/playwright Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) and novelist Witold Gombrowicz. In 1936, Schulz, buoyed by the favorable reception of his debut, published “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” another collection comprised in part of his earlier writings.

The two collections differ only slightly. Both are written in lyrical, stylistically luxuriant prose, and both treat the recognizable setting of a Drohobycz-like provincial town as the point of departure for a complex interplay of realism and fantasy. The only difference, perhaps, is that “Crocodiles” is a more tightly knit collection of stories sharing the same characters, whereas “Sanatorium” is based on a much looser composition and includes larger pieces (as the extensive short story, “The Spring”) with more developed, fantastic plots.

These attempts at longer and more complex fictional constructions apparently foreshadowed Schulz’s only novelistic undertaking. Since 1934, he had been working intermittently on his novel, “Messiah”; apart from two fragments included as separate stories in his second collection, though, the text of this novel, in all probability never completed, perished during the war.

Besides short stories, drawings and a few letters, Schulz’s surviving output also includes a number of brilliant essays and book reviews, scattered in prewar Polish periodicals. Most of these critical works, such as the essay “The Mythologizing of Reality,” show him as a perspicacious and profound theorist with a clear, consistent set of original ideas on the role and significance of literature.

Schulz’s name often is mentioned in one breath with those of two other great innovators in prewar Polish literature, Witkacy and Gombrowicz. Yet his singular achievement is a combined result of innovation and dependence on a specific tradition. He owes much to the spirit of modernist literature of the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian empire: Significantly, his favorite poet was Rainer Maria Rilke, and he wrote an insightful afterword to Kafka’s “The Trial.”

In his unique way, Schulz largely continues the tradition of expressing the fundamental problems of human existence in the language of myth or subconscious symbolism. In order to reach back to this language’s original sources, he often explores the material of dream, childlike imagination, erotic fantasy, trashy popular culture, etc. Metaphor is the chief device that enables him to imitate the peculiar poetics of these layers of imagination and reproduce mythologized reality’s constant metamorphoses.

What makes Schulz unique, though, is that his metaphors create rather than reproduce. In his work, the author-narrator emerges as a demiurgic maker of the world represented. While burdening him with a sense of sin and guilt, this kind of usurpation of divine prerogative also results in ironic detachment that adds to the complexity of his prose.

Schulz’s work appears the extreme consequence of the specific tendencies of 20th-Century fiction--its evolution toward the lyrical rather than the epic, the fantastic rather than the realistic, the subjective rather than the objective modes of narration and vision. Even though the brilliance of his innovation is particularly dazzling in the original Polish, it has not dimmed much in its English version. The translation of Celina Wieniewska, as well as the highly informative afterword by Jerzy Ficowski, Poland’s leading expert on Schulz’s life and work, successfully convey the writer’s uniqueness.

This definitive edition of his short stories will most certainly win the shy teacher from Drohobycz many more admirers in this part of the world.