EN
This article proposes a shift in Polish postcolonial studies from the discourse analysis of external imaginations of Poland as a kind of “Orient” (as exemplified in Larry Wolff’s In-venting Eastern Europe, 1994) to explorations of Polish self-descriptions in the sense of sub-versive “self-Orientalisation”. Drawing on the analogy of Iberian Moors and Lithuanians as presented in Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod (1828), Lithuania is analysed as Po-land’s “other”, as both close and alien, as “one’s own Orient”. Special attention is paid to the psycho-biography of the colonised personality Konrad Wallenrod, to his betrayal and to his conspiratorial communication with Aldona and Halban, which appears as an aporetic means of subaltern self-assertion.