Poles you should know - Jan Potocki

Garrett Van Reed - 14th January 2010

Most Western readers have never heard of Count Jan Nepomucen Potocki – indeed his singular masterpiece was only translated into English in 1995, some 180 years after it was completed. However, here in Poland he remains a household name, achieving no small share of celebrity during his own lifetime, a celebrity which he has sustained in the nearly two centuries since his death.

Potocki’s immortality is due as much to the endurance of his strange, supernatural novel The Manuscript Found In Saragossa as it is due to the mystery and intrigues of his life – and the bizarre circumstances of his departure from it. The Saragossa Manuscript is therefore that rare work of literature, the story of ...