Life
Jan Nepomucen Potocki was born into the Potocki aristocratic family, that owned vast estates across Poland. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the Polish Army as a captain of engineers, and spent some time on a galley as novice to the Knights of Malta. His colorful life took him across Europe, Asia and North Africa, where he embroiled himself in political intrigues, flirted with secret societies and contributed to the birth of ethnology — he was one of the first to study the precursors of the Slavic peoples from a linguistic and historical standpoint.
In 1790 he became the first person in Poland to fly in a hot air balloon when he made an ascent over Warsaw with the aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard, an exploit that earned him great public acclaim. He spend some time in France, and upon his return to Poland, he became a known publicist, publishing newspapers and pamphlets, in which he argued for various reforms. He also established in 1788 in Warsaw a publishing house named Drukarnia Wolna (Free Press) as well as the city's first free reading room. His relation with the King Stanisław II August was thorny, as Potocki, while often supportive of the King, on occasion did not shy from his critique. He was highly critical of the Russian ambassador, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg.
Potocki's wealth enabled him to travel extensively about Europe, the Mediterranean and Asia, visiting Italy, Sicily, Malta, the Netherlands, Germany, France, England, Russia, Turkey, Dalmatia, The Balkans, The Caucasus, Spain, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and even Mongolia. He was also one of the first travel writers of the modern era, penning lively accounts of many of his journeys, during which he also undertook extensive historical, linguistic and ethnographic studies.
Potocki married twice and had five children. His first marriage ended in divorce, and both marriages were the subject of scandalous rumors. In 1812, disillusioned and in poor health, he retired to his estate at Uładówka in Podolia, suffering from "melancholia" (which today would probably be diagnosed as depression), and during the last few years of his life he completed his novel.
Potocki committed suicide in December 1815 at the age of 54, though the exact date is uncertain — possibly November 20, December 2 or December 11. There are also several versions of the circumstances of his death; the best-known story is that he shot himself in the head with a silver bullet — fashioned from the strawberry-shaped knob of a sugar bowl given to him by his mother — which he first had blessed by his castle priest. One version of Potocki's suicide suggests that he gradually filed the knob off the lid, a little every morning.
Read more about this topic: Jan Potocki
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.”
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918)
“There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily self.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)