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Rating: Jan Potocki (1761-1815) was a Polish prince of ancient nobility. During his life, he undertook an impressive series of journeys, from the intellectual salons of half of Europe to Morocco and Mongolia, gaining knowledge, mostly mathematical, linguistic, ethnographic, and religious in nature, so extensive that it earned him continental fame. Characterized by a sensibility in which the Enlightenment approach and a subterranean romantic tension tumultuously fused, ultimately afflicted by neurasthenia, he ended his life in 1815 after having personally polished the knob of a teapot until it became a bullet. Besides the secret language of Circassian princes, Crimea, and the customs of numerous peoples, making him one of the most interesting figures at the dawn of anthropology, he wrote the six volumes of "Recherches sur la Sarmatie", a "Histoire primitive des Peuples de la Russie" and took on a kind of small "decameron" (the term was directly used by him): precisely this "Manuscript", one of the most disturbing texts you could have in your hands.
Noting that the edition in question is incomplete (as soon as possible, I will proceed to purchase and analyze the complete edition, but I found it urgent to highlight a gem like this), what exactly is the "Manuscript"? At first glance, we would judge it a Bildungsroman like Fénélon's "The Adventures of Telemachus" or Goethe's "Meister", on one side the horror in which the protagonist Alphonse van Worden falls suggests Poe, Schwob, and other authors of the genre, on the other the story-within-a-story mechanism, similar to Chinese boxes, partly borrowed from "One Thousand and One Nights", places it in the tradition of the highest and least occasional storytelling - if we want to be more specific, of that mystical-allegorical type, from the abyssal Apuleius, collected over a thousand years later by the titanic Boccaccio (specifically the story of Cupid and Psyche) to then resurface precisely in these picaresque works capable of suggesting an imponderable "beyond" to the story itself. Marc Fumaroli went so far as to claim that "if Potocki, anticipating Napoleon's marshals and 'romantic Hispanism', sets his novel in Spain, it is because he has written in fact a second 'Don Quixote', where the encyclopedism of the Enlightenment and the illuminated mythology of the 'Magic Flute' replace chivalric novels."
This mystical aspect constitutes an additional element of interest in the story. The great Roger Caillois, in the introduction, rightly points it out as an additional factor of unease that seeps through these pages (divided into days) and distinguishes them: it is the almost obsessive repetition of the same story through different situations and contexts, as if the characters, narrator included, find themselves in a hall of mirrors. Not only that: the unthinkable happens, and what one would believe unrepeatable repeats. As if the entire universe evoked here, made of inexplicable and often mysterious encounters among myriad adventures, was but the artistic projection of a great initial question: what is virtue? The entire web of characters, among which there are pirates, vagabonds, gypsies, nobles, sailors, maids, dukes, and duchesses, hermits and Kabbalists, but also ghosts, vampires, succubi, demons, through evident references to the hermetic tradition develops all around this slender yet powerful philosophical suggestion - one of the primeval ones for mankind.
The quest, however, lacks a compass. In some ways, we are facing a great polyphonic fabric. Caillois himself, who selected for this edition only a part of the available material, published later, wonders whether those who considered Potocki an enemy of Chateaubriand were wrong or right, if Potocki was truly a follower of Enlightenment and relativism - in life he sympathized with the first French revolutionaries in 1789 - or if the recurring references to the power of the cross, the relentless fight between God and Satan present in the "Manuscript" came from his personal worldview. Certainly, the hallucinatory circularity of the story only increases the general disorientation and the alienating sensation one breathes: all the less realistic elements, fading in one section, reemerge in another.
The writing style, quick and pressing, reaches peaks of speed that are hardly surpassable and strips the work of any appearance of artificiality or pedantry, even though Potocki pours a (microscopic) part of his knowledge into it.
First published in 1813, the text is, at least superficially, placeable in the fantastic-adventurous genre. As if by a subtle paradox, however, it is among those that most forcefully place the emphasis on the sorrow and deviation that the defeat in the face of the reality principle causes in the human being. According to the author, we can confront the vast and threatening world of appearances only by finding the key - be it philosophy, religion - to grasp its substance, as if to exit the maze mentioned before. And it is this defeat that generates in literature the figure of the melancholic, among the most fruitful and significant, from Don Quixote to Madame Bovary.
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