FRANÇOIS ROSSET, DOMINIQUE TRIAIRE: JAN POTOCKI. BIOGRAPHY [2006].

Description

This is the first Polish edition of a fundamental biography of one of the most fascinating and mysterious figures of the Polish Enlightenment – the author of “The Saragossa Manuscript.” The book was published in 2006 by the Warsaw-based W.A.B. Publishing House in the “Fortune and Fate” series, translated by Anna Wasilewska, with the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in Poland.

François Rosset and Dominique Triaire – prominent French literary scholars and authors of the critical edition of “The Saragossa Manuscript” – have created a work that has permanently changed the state of knowledge about Potocki. On the basis of countless documents, letters and testimonies from archives in more than a dozen countries, they reconstructed the extraordinary life of the aristocrat, traveler, scholar, politician and writer – from his service in the Austrian army, through his expeditions to Turkey, Egypt, Tunis, Morocco, the Caucasus and Mongolia, to his activities in the Four-Year Sejm and at the court of Tsar Alexander I.

The biography reveals Potocki as a mind beyond the confines of his own era – an erudite man fascinated by the latest scientific concepts, a free-thinker and a fantasist who granted himself the right to absolute freedom – even in the matter of death. His suicide in 1815, carefully planned to the smallest detail (a bullet sawed off a can), was a dramatic “dot over the i” in his original life.

It is not only a mine of knowledge about Potocki, but also a stunningly rich panorama of Enlightenment-era Europe – an invaluable source for lovers and researchers of the “Manuscript Found in Saragossa.”

1509-25-AZ