![]() ![]() ![]() Ian Maclean is Reader in French at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Queen's College. In 1812 he retired to his estates in Poland, suffering from chronic ill health, melancholia, and disillusionment. He married twice (the first marriage ending in a divorce) and had five children: scandalous rumors surrounded both of his marriages. Among his other exploits were an ascent in a balloon over Warsaw with the aeronaut Blanchard and the provision of the first free press in that city.Potocki was proficient in many different languages, and his extensive travels led him through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and China. He was a political activist and probably a freemason, although he seems to have espoused a bafflingly wide range of political causes, some of them patriotic. During his lifetime he was an indefatigable traveller and travel-writer, an Egyptologist and pioneering ethnologist, an occultist and an historian of the pre-Slavic peoples. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the army, and spent some time as a novice Knight of Malta. Jan Potocki was born in Poland in 1761 into a very great aristocratic family, which owned vast estates. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was written in French, probably between 17 this new translation makes the full text available in English for the first time. For as well as being one of the great masterpieces of subversion, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is also an encyclopedia of the dark side of the European Enlightenment. Convinced that he is being hunted by the Inquisition, he joins a band of wanderers - including a gypsy chief, a geometer, a cabbalist and the Wandering Jew himself - who travel aimlessly while regaling their companions with a hundred and more stories, and stories within stories, told over the course of sixty-six 'days', each day as disorienting as a thousand and one nights.Īnd this nest of stories frames yet more stories driving the reader ever deeper into a labyrinth of sadism, satanism, the cabbala and other phantoms brought forth by the sleep of eighteenth-century Reason. It is 1739 and Alphonse van Worden, a Walloon officer serving the King of Spain, spends the night in a haunted inn in the Sierra Morena where he is plunged into a series of adventures, by turns mysterious, erotic and nightmarish. ![]()
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