The Manuscript Found in Saragossa （Jan Potocki）

A literary masterpiece by a Polish traveller, aristocratic adventurer, political activist,
ethnographer and publisher.
 
Jan Potocki used a range of literary styles – gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral,
erotica – in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales
from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.
 
Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the
strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes
and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is
discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters
transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of
hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices.
 
Jan Potocki(1761-1812), was born in Poland. He was educated in Geneva and
Lausanne, served twice in the army, and spent some time as a novice Knight of
Malta. 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. Potocki was proficient in many different languages, and his extensive
travels led him through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and China. He
married twice and had five children. In 1812 he retired to his estates in Poland,
suffering from chronic ill health and melancholia. He committed suicide in 1815.