Od Staszica do Grochulskiej - badania nad biografią Stanisława Kostki Potockiego

The life of Stanisław Kostka Potocki (1755-1821), one of the luminaries of the Polish Enlightenment, a long-time politician and public official, as well as a scholar and patron of the arts, has attracted the attention of many scholars. The first biographical essays on Potocki were provided by Stanisław Staszic and Franciszek Maksymilian Sobieszczański still in the nineteenth century, followed by Stanisław Krzemiński in the 1900s. These texts focused especially on Potocki's contribution to the enlightened reform of Polish education during the Duchy of Warsaw and Congress Poland. However, it was only after the Second World War that Potocki's life became the focus of more wide-ranging and intense research, spearheaded by such scholars as Emil Kipa or Juliusz Starzyński and Stanisław Lorentz. Paradoxically, it was the communist fascination with the Enlightenment that fostered the growing academic interest in Potocki's manifold contributions to art, archaeology, literature, as well as the state administration of religion. Nowadays, the bibliography of his life is quite rich and clearly dominated by art-historical and literary studies, in recent years promoted by the Museum of King Jan III's Palace at Wilanów. However, there is still no book-size biography presenting an analysis that would go beyond mere biographical entries.