A Werewolf Legend, a Polish Count and a Novel Ahead of Its Time

By Daniel Okafor

A new exhibition at the Fondation Jan Michalski in Montricher, Switzerland, celebrates a novel its curators call "a western version of One Thousand and One Nights". The book is The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, written in French by a Polish count, first published in fragments in St Petersburg in 1804, and still largely unknown in western Europe.

The author, Jan Potocki (1761-1815), ended his life in 1815 with a pistol at 54. An inventory of his possessions at Uładówka found a silver sugar bowl missing its lid. Speculation holds that he filed down the knob to cast the bullet that killed him — the seed of outlandish theories that he believed he was a werewolf.

What kind of novel is it?

The book follows Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer travelling through Spain's Sierra Morena to Madrid to join the Spanish army. En route he meets two demonic Moorish sisters, shape-shifting apparitions and a Jewish Kabbalist testing mystical formulas to control spirits. Structured like a Chinese box, with narratives nested within narratives, it spans from the birth of Christ to the early 19th century, and ranges from the Mediterranean and north Africa to Mexico, Peru and the Philippines.

Salman Rushdie once wrote in the Guardian that it is redolent of "the most brilliant modern novels, as if it were written yesterday".

Why was the text such a mess?

For decades the novel circulated in fragmentary, competing versions. The widely read Penguin edition, translated by Ian Maclean, rested on René Radrizzani's revised French edition of 1990. That assumption collapsed in 2002, when co-curator Dominique Triaire discovered eight miscatalogued manuscripts in Polish archives. "We were able to establish that Potocki had left behind not one but two novels," Triaire says.

The show, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa: An Investigation into a World Novel, is curated by Triaire and François Rosset. Rosset notes Potocki's unusual openness: "He was one of the very few Poles with a deep interest in Jewish culture as it was cultivated by rabbis in eastern Poland at the time, in what is now Ukraine."

Who keeps the book alive?

Admirers include Prix Goncourt winner Mathias Énard and Poland's 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, who calls the book part of her "literary first-aid kit": "I open a page by chance and I draw a good dose of creative energy. All of the vital force of literature is there in its purest state."

The exhibition screens the opening four minutes of Wojciech Has's 1965 black-and-white film adaptation, restored in the 1990s after a campaign initiated by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and later backed by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. It also shows excerpts from a four-part 1973 French television adaptation, La Duchesse d'Avila, and displays 10 dreamlike engravings by Leonor Fini, commissioned in Buenos Aires in 1961.

The latest adaptation is theatrical: Grzegorz Jarzyna's The Saragossa Manuscript: The Gomelez Legacy, premiered at Warsaw's Teatr Polski last year. Its hero, Alex, travels back from a modern city to 18th-century Spain and into the machinations of a secret society led by the Gomelez clan.

Is it a novel for our age?

Triaire frames the book as a novel of education, rooted in Enlightenment universalism: "There were no separate kinds of human beings divided by race or religion. White people, Black people, Christians, Muslims: these were all members of the same humanity." Yet it also registers reason's fragility, shaken by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. "I think this fragility of reason also speaks to our own age," Triaire says.

Rosset offers the closing verdict: "He wrote a book that is outside time, but that belongs to all times."