Abstract

The article brings a new proposal to read Bruno Schulz’s story Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, which focuses on taking into account social and cultural background of the writer’s era. Jacob is presented here as an elderly and sick man. Despite the flow of time and the information that he passed away, he does not die, but again and again appears in new forms and lives together with his family, however he can not count on their support. Finally, he gets to the hostile medical center. The proposed style of reading presents Schulz’s work in the light of the problem of prolonging life due to the achievements of medicine and the resulting phenomenon of hospitalization of death, which is characteristic of contemporary civilization.