The Saragossa Manuscript

This is an extraordinary collection of tales that is sure to appeal to all readers of the weird and supernatural. Written in French by a Polish nobleman and first published, almost secretly, in St. Petersburg in 1804. During the wars in Spain, an officer of the Walloon Guards finds, in a deserted castle in Saragossa, a manuscript of such absorbing interest that he carries it with him on his campaign. Taken prisoner by the Spaniards, he falls into the hands of a Spanish officer who claims that the manuscript belonged to his family. The Spaniard proceeds to dictate to his prisoner, now an honored guest in the officer's house, the remaining stories in this collection.

A collection of loosely related stories, presented as if found in an anonymous manuscript in Saragossa by an unnamed French officer. Also included (by the editor) are a selection of short stories originally published in the 1813 edition of "Avadoro."

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) 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.

The book features a detailed analysis and interpretation of «The Saragossa Manuscript» (1964) by Wojciech Jerzy Has. The interpretative key is the director's reference to the aesthetics of various art trends, starting with baroque, through romanticism, symbolism, surrealism and the culture of Orient. The artistic references named here which to a high degree can be brought down to quotations and hints (the composition of stop-frames referring to the style of a given painter or an art trend) are to a large extent the consequence of having been adapted by a particular novel (Jan Potocki). Notwithstanding, also this time Has stigmatised the project with his own style by referring to the aesthetics of surrealism which was alien to the literary prototype.