Swiss exhibition reveals Potocki wrote two novels — SkimNews
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- Fondation Jan Michalski has opened "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa: An Investigation into a World Novel" in Montricher, Switzerland, curated by François Rosset and Dominique Triaire, tracing how a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth count's French-language novel was dreamed up far from Paris and London.
- Dominique Triaire discovered eight manuscripts miscataloged in Polish archives in 2002, establishing that Potocki left behind not one but two novels and overturning the claim that René Radrizzani's revised 1990 French edition — the basis for Ian Maclean's English Penguin translation — was the most faithful text.
- Jan Potocki was born in Pików in 1761, was one of the very few Poles with a deep interest in the Jewish culture cultivated by rabbis in eastern Poland, pursued esoteric learning in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, was educated in Orbe, Switzerland, and published the novel's first fragments in St Petersburg in 1804.
- Jan Potocki shot himself in 1815 at age 54, and an inventory of his Uładówka home turned up a silver sugar bowl with a missing lid, prompting speculation that he filed down the knob to cast the bullet and sparking outlandish theories that he believed he was a werewolf.
- The Manuscript Found in Saragossa argues for Enlightenment universalism — "no separate kinds of human beings divided by race or religion," with Christian, Muslim and Jewish characters finding ways to understand one another — while Triaire notes the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars were already shaking reason's certainty.
- Wojciech Has's 1965 film adaptation, screened at the exhibition with Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" over ruined Saragossa, built a cult following that funded a 1990s restoration initiated by the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and later supported by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
- Grzegorz Jarzyna's theatrical adaptation, "The Saragossa Manuscript: The Gomelez Legacy," premiered at Warsaw's Teatr Polski last year, sending a modern protagonist back to 18th-century Spain and a global Gomelez secret society — the latest chapter in a visual-art afterlife that includes Leonor Fini's 10 engravings, commissioned in Buenos Aires in 1961.
Why it matters: The 2002 discovery of eight miscataloged Polish manuscripts demotes the Penguin text English readers know — Ian Maclein's translation of René Radrizzani's 1990 edition — from definitive version to superseded one, while the Fondation Jan Michalski exhibition gives readers, novelists and artists a two-novels-deep foundation for new adaptations.
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