3/2/2024 0 Comments Manuscript found in saragossaPotocki married twice and had five children. As well as his many scholarly and travel writings, he also wrote a play, a series of sketches and a novel. He was also one of the first travel writers of the modern era, penning lively accounts of many of his journeys, during which he also undertook extensive historical, linguistic and ethnographic studies. Potocki's wealth enabled him to travel extensively about Europe, the Mediterranean and Asia, visiting Italy, Sicily, Malta, the Netherlands, Germany, France, England, Russia, Turkey, Spain, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and even Mongolia. 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. 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. Potocki's colorful life took him across Europe, Asia and North Africa, where he embroiled himself in political intrigues, flirted with secret societies, 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. He was probably a Freemason and had a strong interest in the occult. 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 a novice Knight of Malta. Jan Potocki was born into the Potocki family, an aristocratic family, that owned vast estates in Poland. A novel of stories-within-stories, it combines the picaresque with gothic horror and the supernatural, wit with erotic lyricism and inventiveness and, like the Decameron and the One Thousand and One Nights, it offers entertainment on an epic scale. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which has counted Alexander Pushkin among its many admirers, was published only in part in its author's lifetime, and thereafter has only been known fully through a Polish translation which appeared long after his death controversy still rages over the original French text and the meaning to be attributed to it. The novel's narrator Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer journeying to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739, is diverted into the Sierra Morena and mysteriously detained in the company of thieves, cannibalists, noblemen and gypsies whose stories he records for us as he hears them, day by day over a period of sixty-six days. The traveller, aristocratic adventurer, political activist, ethnographer and publisher Jan Potocki (1761-1815) is a legendary figure in Poland, not least for his literary masterpiece The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |