Count Jan Potocki (; 8 March 1761 – 23 December 1815) was a Polish nobleman, ethnologist, linguist, traveller and author of the Enlightenment period, whose life and exploits made him a celebrated figure in Poland. He is known chiefly for his picaresque novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.

Born into affluent Polish nobility, Potocki lived abroad from an early age and was primarily educated in Switzerland. He frequently visited the salons of Paris and toured Europe before temporarily returning to Poland in 1778. As a soldier, he fought in Austrian ranks in the War of the Bavarian Succession, and in 1789 was appointed a military engineer in the Polish army. During his extensive voyages he actively documented prevailing customs, ongoing wars, revolutions and national awakenings, which made him a pioneer of travel literature. Fascinated by the occult, Potocki studied ancient cultures, rituals and secret societies. Simultaneously, he was a member of parliament and took part in the Great Sejm shortly before the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist.

In spite of his literary career, Count Potocki became burdened by mental illness and melancholy. He committed suicide by gunshot in 1815; however, the circumstances of his death remain controversial to this day.

Life

Jan Potocki was born into the Potocki aristocratic family, that owned vast estates across Poland. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the Polish Army as a captain of engineers, and spent some time on a galley as novice to the Knights of Malta. His colorful life took him across Europe, Asia and North Africa, where he embroiled himself in political intrigues, flirted with secret societies and contributed to the birth of ethnology – he was one of the first to study the precursors of the Slavic peoples from a linguistic and historical standpoint.

In 1790 he became the first person in Poland to fly in a hot air balloon when he made an ascent over Warsaw with the aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard, an exploit that earned him great public acclaim. He spent some time in France, and upon his return to Poland, he became a known publicist, publishing newspapers and pamphlets, in which he argued for various reforms. He also established in 1788 in Warsaw a publishing house named Drukarnia Wolna (Free Press) as well as the city's first free reading room. His relation with Stanislaus Augustus was thorny, as Potocki, while often supportive of the king, on occasion did not shy from his critique. It is a frame tale. On account of its rich, interlocking structure, and telescoping story sequences, the novel has drawn comparisons to such celebrated works as the Decameron and the Arabian Nights. Soon after, the French officer is captured by the Spanish and stripped of his possessions; but a Spanish officer recognizes the manuscript's importance, and during the French officer's captivity the Spaniard translates it for him into French.

The manuscript has been written by a young officer of the Walloon Guards, Alphonse van Worden. In 1739, while en route to Madrid to serve with the Spanish Army, he is diverted into Spain's rugged Sierra Morena region. There, over a period of sixty-six days, he encounters a varied group of characters, including Muslim princesses, Gypsies, outlaws, and kabbalists, who tell him an intertwining series of bizarre, amusing, and fantastic tales which he records in his diary.

The sixty-six stories cover a wide range of themes, subjects, and styles, including gothic horror, picaresque adventures, and comic, erotic, and moral tales. The stories reflect Potocki's interest in secret societies, the supernatural, and oriental cultures, and they are illustrated with his detailed observations of 18th-century European manners and customs, particularly those of upper-class Spanish society.

thumb|right|180px|Title page of [[The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, first Polish edition, 1847]]

Many of the locations described in the tales are real places and regions which Potocki would have visited during his travels, while others are fictionalized accounts of actual places.

While there is still some dispute about the novel's authorship, it is now generally accepted to have indeed been written by Potocki. He began writing it in the 1790s and completed it in 1814, a year before his death, though the novel's structure is thought to have been fully mapped out by 1805.

The novel was never published in its entirety during Potocki's lifetime. A proof edition of the first ten "days" was circulated in Saint Petersburg in 1805, and a second extract was published in Paris in 1813, almost certainly with Potocki's permission. A third publication, combining both earlier extracts, was issued in 1814, but it appears that at the time of his death Potocki had not yet decided on the novel's final form.

Potocki composed the book entirely in the French language. Sections of the original manuscripts were later lost, but have survived in a Polish translation that was made in 1847 by Edmund Chojecki from a complete French copy, now lost.

Travel memoirs

  • Histoire Primitive des Peuples de la Russie avec une Exposition complete de Toutes les Nations, locales, nationales et traditionelles, necessaires a l'intelligence du quatrieme livre d'Herodote (St. Petersbourg: Imprime a l'Academie Imperiale des Sciences, 1802)
  • Histoire anciènne des provinces de l'Empire de Russie (St. Petersburg, 1804)
  • Voyage dans les steppes d'Astrakhan et du Caucase (Paris, 1829).
  • Voyage en Turquie et en Egypte (1788; Polish translation by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Podróz do Turek i Egiptu, 1789).
  • Voyage dans l'Empire de Maroc (1792)
  • Voyage Dans Quelques Parties De La Basse-Saxe (1795)
  • Voyage en Hollande, fait pendant la révolution de 1787

Modern editions have appeared as follows:

  • Voyages en Turquie et en Egypte, en Hollande, au Maroc (Paris: Fayard, 1980; new edition, Éditions Phébus, 1991)
  • Voyage au Caucase et en Chine (Paris: Fayard, 1980)

Honours and awards

  • Order of the White Eagle
  • Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st Class
  • Order of St. Vladimir, 1st Class

See also

  • Back-translation of The Saragossa Manuscript
  • List of Egyptologists
  • List of Poles
  • Polish literature

Notes and references

  • Ian MacLean, introduction to The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, London, Penguin Books, 1995
  • Jan Potocki Histoire anciènne du gouvernement de Volhynie : pour servir de suite à l'histoire primitive des peuples de la Russie, Sankt Petersbourg 1805
  • "English-language Sources of Biographical Information about Jan Potocki," Looking for the Manuscript Found in Saragossa, accessed April 17, 2015
  • – includes image of Polish stamp commemorating Potocki's flight