Swiss exhibition explores Jan Potocki's novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

A new exhibition at the Fondation Jan Michalski, a cultural foundation in the Swiss village of Montricher, looks at one of the least-known great works of European literature, the novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. The show is titled The Manuscript Found in Saragossa: An Investigation into a World Novel. The book was written in French more than 200 years ago by the Polish count Jan Potocki (1761–1815), and its first fragments appeared in St Petersburg in 1804.

About the novel

The work is structured like a Chinese box, with stories nested inside other stories, spanning the period from the birth of Jesus Christ to the early 19th century. Its settings include the Mediterranean, north Africa, Mexico, Peru and the Philippines. The hero, a young Walloon officer named Alphonse van Worden, crosses Spain's Sierra Morena on his way to Madrid and meets demonic sisters, shape-shifting apparitions and a Jewish Kabbalist. The curators call it a western version of One Thousand and One Nights, and Salman Rushdie once wrote that it reads as if it had been written yesterday.

Potocki was born in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and educated in Orbe, Switzerland. He took a deep interest in Jewish culture in eastern Poland, in what is now Ukraine. He shot himself in 1815 at the age of 54. An inventory of his home at Uładówka afterwards recorded a silver sugar bowl with a missing lid, and some speculate the bullet was cast from its knob, which has fed theories that he believed himself a werewolf.

Rediscovered text and influence

For many years the novel circulated in fragmentary, competing versions. The widely read English Penguin edition was based on René Radrizzani's 1990 French edition. In 2002, the exhibition's co-curator Dominique Triaire found eight miscataloged manuscripts in Polish archives, showing that Potocki had left behind two novels rather than one.

Admirers include novelists Mathias Énard and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Wojciech Has's 1965 film was restored in the 1990s in an effort begun by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and later backed by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Last year Grzegorz Jarzyna's stage adaptation premiered at the Teatr Polski in Warsaw. The curators stress the novel's vision of a universal humanity and say its view of reason's fragility speaks to the present day.