EN
This article explores Rzewuski’s Pamiątki Soplicy (Soplica’s Memoirs) based on a key concept of postcolonial studies such as inbetweenness (Bhabha) as well as on approaches to “cultural memory” (Aleida and Jan Assmann). The way Rzewuski depicts the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is linked to the problem of cultural self-description in a colonial context, where domination encompasses political as well as cultural aspects. In the Pamiątki Soplicy emerges a particular „memory culture” with its own forms of reference to the past. Close attention is paid to the fact that Rzewuski created Seweryn Soplica as narrator and main hero of the gawęda-like stories collected in the Pamiątki, but refrained from commenting the autobiographical sketches that cover a wide range of disparate events of the second half of the 18th century. The author’s – Rzewuski’s – position in the aftermath of the partitions of Poland is a blind spot that indicates the challenge arising from the fact that a proper self-positioning against the background of the historical events has still to be developed and needs new forms of discourse, not comparable to hitherto known ways of representing the past. The double-layered narrative (Soplica – Rzewuski) is an expression of the basic problem how to find an autonomous self-description of past events under completely new circumstances, caused by the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and is related to the search of new vocabularies of self-description. Both questions refer to crucial matters of contemporary postcolonial studies. Therefore the article attempts to offer a starting point for further study of Polish romantic culture on the ground that postcolonial studies have opened up.