Jan Potocki

Count Jan Nepomucen Potocki of Piława (Pików, March 8, 1761-Uladowka, December 2, 1815) was a Polish nobleman, scientist, historian and novelist, captain of sappers in the Polish Army, famous for his novel The manuscript found in Zaragoza.

Biography

Youth

Count Jan Potocki was born in Pików Castle, in Podolia (then Polish region, later annexed by Ukraine), from a noble family, son of Józef Potocki and Anna Teresa Ossolińska, belonging to a wealthy family of the highest nobility. Józef Potocki, with Austrian, Polish and Ukrainian origins, owned lands in Ukraine, when they belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is believed that he was an Ashkenazi Jew, the dominant ethnic group in those lands, and that he converted to Catholicism to be able to establish personal and family relationships with the Polish high aristocracy, all of the Catholic religion, the majority in the country. That may have been the reason why Jan Potocki received no education in Catholic schools in Poland, nor Christian religious training.

His first studies were done in his country, receiving a solid education, and at the age of twelve he was sent to Switzerland, along with his brother Severin, to continue them in Geneva and Lausanne, where he began his knowledge of sciences and literary and linguistic studies, with a Presbyterian pastor.

The years of his Swiss education gave the young aristocrat a growing curiosity about the sciences and a cosmopolitan feeling for life.

On his return to Poland he embraced a military career, as was customary in the nobility. He entered the Vienna Military Academy, but soon abandoned it to devote himself to the two passions that would dominate him until his death: travel and studies. Determined to know everything, he soon possessed an encyclopedic culture and a command of almost all modern languages, in addition to the classical ones.

At the same time, the young Count Potocki was infected by the liberal and progressive spirit that prevailed in the enlightened Polish court, whose sovereign, Stanislaus Augustus, was one of the protectors of Freemasonry, to which some of the great lords belonged. of the nobility. Some ladies shared that spirit, among them Princess Isabel Lubomirska, born Czartoryska, one of whose daughters, Princess Julia, Potocki would marry a few years later.

Regarding his possible Jewish origins, Potocki wrote a Chronology of the Hebrews (Chronologie des Hébreux, 1805), studied the Kabbalah and the Talmud and even included in almost a hundred pages from his famous novel the figure of the Wandering Jew. That was in the version called 1804 (not edited in its entirety in Saint Petersburg, so the allusions to the Jews were not published). However, between 1810 and 1815, Potocki decided to eliminate all mention of the myth of the Wandering Jew, Ahasvero; some biographers (cf. F. Rosset, D Triaire, Jean Potocki. Biographie. Paris, Flammarion, 2004) have seen in this an attempt to hide his partially Hebrew origins, given that at that time there had been Married remarried to the Catholic princess Julia, with whom he had children. In the Manuscript (Sixth Decameron, Day fifty-ninth), Potocki reveals in the chapter titled History of the House of Uzeda the keys to the novel and its relationship with Hebrew genealogy from one of the protagonist's family branches, taking these roots back to biblical Israel, prior to the Temple of Solomon. None of his descendants has spoken of those Ashkenazi Jewish origins, something easy to understand given the anti-Semitism that devastated Poland and Eastern Europe, both at that time and in the century XX.

Travel

But before returning to his homeland, the young count decided to see the world, in order to satisfy his hobby. to travel, which was linked to his vocation as a historian and ethnologist. Like the romantic travelers half a century later, Potocki began the series of his travels through the countries of Southern Europe. In a first cycle, which lasted from 1778 to 1780, he toured Italy, visited the island of Malta, Sicily and Lampedusa, and landed in Tunisia, where Prince Ali-Bey received him in his palace. He also visited the Great Mosque of the holy city of Kairouan. Potocki would later evoke, in his Manuscrit trouvé a Saragosse, something of that Tunisia interview in 1779.

From Tunisia, Potocki went to Spain, a country that was going to attract him more than any other, and where the enlightened Charles III reigned. The Spain that Potocki visited was a lively and picturesque Spain, rich in bandits and smugglers, gypsies and beggars, who wandered along the roads and in the inns, but also rich in artists and writers, in noble humanists and renowned scientists. He was especially attracted to Andalusia, that paradise that would soon become one of the must-see destinations for romantic travelers. He visited Seville, Granada, Córdoba, traveled the roads and mountains of the Sierra Morena, and closely studied the customs of the gypsies and some of their language. There are traces of this frequentation by Andalusian gypsies in The manuscript found in Zaragoza and in another work by Potocki, the operetta Les Bohémiens d'Andalousie.

Es probable que Potocki visitar en Madrid el estudio de Goya, como afirma su biógrafo Édouard Krakowski.

After the trip to Spain, Potocki began a second journey, in which he visited, from 1781 to 1784, the countries of the Ottoman Empire: Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Albania and Montenegro. He was especially enthusiastic about Turkey, and not only did he add Turkish costumes and objects to his luggage, but he also took a servant there, Ibrahim, taking him with him to Poland. He wrote his impressions of that trip in the form of letters addressed to his mother, later collecting them in a volume with the title Voyage en Turquie et en Egypte, which was published in an edition of very few copies in 1788. The taste for the oriental remained very alive in his spirit from then on, and sometimes he had the whim of dressing Turkish, like his faithful servant Ibrahim.

Return to the homeland

On his return to Poland, in 1785, he married the beautiful and spiritual Julia Lubomirska, daughter of Prince (later Marshal) Stanisław Lubomirski and Princess Elizabeth. Princess Julia was not only beautiful but an excellent cultivator of the arts (music, dance, painting, theater). Potocki had two children from her: Alfredo, born in 1786, and Arturo, born in 1787. But Julia died of tuberculosis in 1794 and Potocki left her children in the care of her mother-in-law, Marshal Lubomirska, to devote herself entirely to travel and the studies.

A previous stay in Paris, invited by his mother-in-law, who lived in the Palais Royal, allowed him to frequent enlightened and encyclopedist circles, and especially the salon of Madame Helvétius, where he was a great admirer of Diderot, Buffon, D&# 39;Alambert and other encyclopedists. He also met Madame de Stäel and Choderlos de Laclos, the author of Les Liaisons dangereuses. He was also interested in esotericism and occultism, frequenting the followers of Swedenborg and the Rosy Cross society, one of whose most active members, Jacques Cazotte, was the author of a Diable amoureux, which without Doubt Potocki read. The cabal had many followers in Paris, and stories of ghosts, bandits and vampires were in fashion. Potocki, his reader, was going to demonstrate, years later writing his Manuscrit trouvé a Saragosse, that he was capable of improving them.

After a brief trip to Holland, where he witnessed the popular insurrection against Prussian troops, Potocki returned to Poland in early 1788 to attend as a deputy to the Grand Sejm. Faithful to his liberal ideas, he was one of the first to denounce the dangers of Prussian militarism and to call for the abolition of serfdom in Poland and the participation of the third estate in the tasks of government. The revolution that Potocki called for was a revolution from above, with the support of the king, a moderate and liberal revolution that would install an order for progress. Stanislaus Augustus favored this moderate tendency, but Potocki was accused of being a Jacobin by the police, who tried to cut off his revolutionary propaganda. Potocki did not give up, and installed a private printing press in his own palace where he continued publishing pamphlets and pamphlets with a markedly progressive tone. In this free printing press, as he himself called it, he also edited the two volumes of his Essai sur l'Histoire Universelle and his Recherches sur la Sarmatie, and reprinted, in 1789, his Voyage en Turquie et en Egypte.

Even in the midst of political strife, Potocki found time for new travels and adventures. In July 1788 he surprised his contemporaries by accompanying the famous French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard on his balloon flight from Warsaw. The entire city watched the ascension, in which Blanchard and Potocki were accompanied by the faithful Ibrahim, dressed as always in Turkish style, and a fourth passenger, Lulú, Potocki's favorite white poodle. The flight was a success; and the poet Stanisław Trembecki wrote an Ode to the balloon in tribute to the risky travelers.

New trips

In June 1791 Potocki undertook a new trip, this time to the mysterious Morocco. He crossed Paris in the midst of revolutionary upheaval, and chartered a ship in Marseille that took him to Barcelona. In Madrid, the Moroccan ambassador, Sidi Mohammed ben Otmar - one of the wisest men I have ever met, Potocki writes in his diary - gave him a letter for the sultan, which the traveling count had translated. upon arrival in Malaga by a Tripolitan named Hamed Hogia. In Estepona Potocki embarked for Gibraltar, and on that voyage he saw for the first time a singular fish which he calls in his diary a meula . Already in Morocco, the Sheikh of Tetouan received him with great honors in his palace, whose halls and gardens remind him of those of the Alhambra. On July 31 he arrived in Rabat, where the soldier Muley Yesid received him. In August Potocki visited Larache, Asilah and Tangier and in the latter city he was surprised by the beginning of hostilities between Morocco and Spain. A Spanish fleet appears in front of the bay of Tangier and bombards the city. Potocki takes refuge in the Spanish Consulate, and then in the house of the Swedish ambassador, from whose terrace, protecting himself from the harsh sun with a enormous Andalusian hat , he contemplates the attack. But a projectile explodes nearby and Potocki decides to go to the Peninsula. On September 7 he embarks with the Swedish ambassador, Baron Rosenstein, heading to Cádiz, and that same night he disembarks in the Cadiz capital and attends a flamenco dance show. Like so many others, Potocki gets excited watching the beautiful dancers dancing fandangos and playing castanets. From Cádiz he goes to Lisbon, Coimbra and Cintra, and again to Madrid where it is more than likely that he visits the workshops of Goya and Vicente López.

On his return to Paris, still in the midst of the revolutionary boil, Potocki attended a session in the National Assembly where he was applauded when he took the floor and exalted freedom. But the spectacle of a Paris dominated by the Jacobins and an increasingly aggressive and violent populace disillusioned him: Goodbye, beautiful hopes of the last year! -he writes disillusioned-; freedom will survive, but as for public happiness, our generation has to say goodbye to it. he leaves Paris for London, where he frequents the theaters and cultivates contact with writers and scholars. He reads the poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Walter Scott, and the novels of Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe.

Returned to Warsaw in 1792, he wrote a series of small theater pieces with the title Parades, in the tradition of the Italian commedia dell'arte, which are performed in the private theater of his mother-in-law, Marshal Lubomirska. In one of them, titled Cassaridre démocrate, Potocki mocks both the aristocratic emigrants and the revolutionaries. In Łańcut Castle - the Polish Versailles -, already disillusioned with his revolutionary illusions, he generously welcomed emigrants from Jacobin Paris, among them the Duke of Berry and some bishops, who there learned of the execution of Louis XVI.. Two years later, another play by Potocki, Les Bohémiens d'Andalousie, was performed in the castle of Prince Henry of Prussia, in Rheinsberg. The customs of the Andalusian gypsies, the sound of guitars and castanets, which this piece captures, are undoubtedly memories of Potocki's adventures in the South of Spain.

In 1799, Potocki married again, this time with his cousin, the spiritual Constance Potocka, daughter of Count Felix Potocki and Countess Josephine. From this second marriage Potocki had only one son, Bernardo, born in 1801. In the following years, Potocki devoted himself to ethnological study and research. His capacity for work was enormous, and every year new works came out of his tireless worker's workshop: works of history, ethnography, geography, travel... TheVoyage dans quelques parties de la Basse-Saxe pour la recherche des antiquités slaves ou vendes, the four volumes of the Fragments historiques et géographiques sur la Scythie, la Sarmatie et les Slaves, the Histoire primitive des Peuples de la Russie i>, perhaps his fundamental work, which appeared in Saint Petersburg in 1802, the Voyage dans les Steppes d'Astrakhan et du Caucase. These works were the result of the countless trips, investigations and studies that Potocki undertook between 1797 and 1804. But Potocki was not only an indefatigable and meticulous scholar: he was also a creator, as he had already proven with his theatrical pieces, and he returned to demonstrate this by publishing in 1804, in Saint Petersburg, where he was with his friend Prince Adam Czartoryski, the first part of his extraordinary novel Manuscrit trouvé a Saragosse, also written in French. Today it is known that there are at least two editions of the work, one from 1804 and another from 1810. The second part, Avadoro (a Spanish history), was published in 1813, in Paris, in the hand of the editor Gide Fils, and was reprinted with some deletions and additions in 1815.

At the service of the Tsar

The friendship of Czartoryski, who had been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs by Tsar Alexander, suddenly changed the course of Potocki's life, who was called to St. Petersburg to take up a position in the Ministry's Directorate of Asian Affairs.. The following year the Tsar appointed him head of the Scientific Mission attached to the embassy that, led by Count Golovkin, was going to visit China for political and scientific purposes. Two hundred and forty people made up this embassy, of which we preserve a precise and humorous account thanks to the Mémoire sur l'expeditlon en Chine that Potocki wrote as a diary of the trip. The political results of the expedition were null, as Emperor Jiaqing denied them passage, but Potocki knew how to collect in his Memory not a few interesting scientific data, ending up in Mongolia.

On his return to Saint Petersburg, Alexander I appointed him his privy advisor, while, ironically, his two sons, Alfred and Arturo Potocki, fought in Napoleon's army against the Tsar's troops. In 1812, Alfred, captain of artillery, was wounded in the battle of Borodino, and taken prisoner by the Russians. The intervention of his father with the Tsar quickly obtained his release, and Count Alfred was able to return to Poland as a hero, while Potocki remained in St. Petersburg. But it wasn't going to be for long. The advance of the Grande Armée to the gates of Moscow electrified Polish patriots, who enlisted en masse in a war of national liberation against the Russian empire. In that situation, continuing to serve the tsar would have been taking betrayal too far.

Decline and death

Prince Adam Czartoryski asked the tsar to authorize him to leave his service, and Potocki imitated him, obtaining permission from Alexander I to retire to Podolia, where he owned a small property in Uladowka. There, aged and disillusioned, Potocki once again devoted himself to study, and only left his study to go to work in the Krzemieniec library.

On June 18, 1815, the Day of Waterloo definitively put an end to the Napoleonic empire and the hopes of Polish patriots of achieving an independent Poland free from Russian domination. Although personally loyal to his protector Tsar Alexander, Potocki would not fail to share the feelings of bitterness of his compatriots, lost all hope of the restoration of Poland. Suffering from a malignant fever and terrible neuralgic pains, his melancholy was exacerbated and he ended up in neurasthenia. Finally, on December 2 of that year, locked in his library, Count Jan Potocki committed suicide with a gunshot to the head with a silver bullet that he himself had filed from the handle of a silver sugar bowl, until he had the size needed for your gun. His romantic end in some ways contrasts with the enlightened eighteenth-century progressive that he was in his youth.

Marriage and children

He married twice:

• From his first marriage to Julia Lubomirska he had two children:
  • Alfred Wojciech Potocki
  • Artur Potocki
• From the second with Konstancja Potocka, three:
  • Bernard Potocki
  • Irena Potocka
  • Teresa Potocka

Works

Novel

• The manuscript found in Zaragoza (Part I, St. Petersburg, 1804). Part II, Avadoro (a Spanish story), Paris: Gide Fils, 1813, reissued with expressions, changes and additions with the title Les dix Journées de la Vie d'Alphonse van WordenParis: Gide Fils, 1815. In 2002 the manuscript was discovered of a second copy of the first part dated in 1810, which was printed in 2008.

Theatre

• Lights (parades(1792).
• The Gypsies of Andalusia (1794).

Travel books

• Travel to Turkey and Egypt (1789).
• Travel to the Empire of Morocco (1792).
• Travel through some parts of the Lower Saxony for Antiquities or Wendas (1794).
• Memory on a new journey of the Ponto Euxino, as well as on the oldest history of the villages of the Taurus, the Caucasus and the Escitia (1796).
• Travel to the Empire of China.
• Travel through the steppes of Astracán and the Caucasus (posttum-1829).

Travel and history books in their original editions

• Histoire Primitive des Peuples de la Russie avec une Exposition complete de Toutes les Nations, locales, nationales et traditionelles, necessaires a l'intelligence du quatrieme livre d'Herodote (St. Petersbourg: Imprim a l'Academie Imperiale des Sciences, 1802)
• Voyage dans les steppes d'Astrakhan et du Caucase (Paris, 1829).
• Voyage en Turquie et en Egypte (1788; Polish translation: Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Podróz do Turek i Egiptu1789).
• Voyage dans l’Empire de Maroc (1792)

History Books

• Historical and geographical fragments on Escitia, Sarmatia and Slavs (1796).
• Early History of the Peoples of Russia (1802).
• Testing on universal history.
• Chronology of the Hebrews (Chronologie des Hébreux, 1805)
• Principles for a chronology of the times before the Olympic Games.

Honorary distinctions

• Knight of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland).
• First-class Knight of the Order of San Estanislao (Poland).
• First-class Knight of the Order of St. Vladimiro (Russia).

Others

• Weapons of the Potocki of Pilawa