EN
The purpose of this article is the attempt of critical analysis of printed and hand-written memoirs of Polish borderland landlords, written in the 20th century, but concerning the end of the 19th century. The distorting mirror in the title means looking for any facts that happened in the past, but they were not described, and trying to find the answer what was the reason of memoirists’ silence. The author deals with seven chosen aspects of political social and economic activity of Polish landlords whose descriptions were different from the borderland reality. These are the following problems: 1) influence of the past history and space of borderland and Russian Empire on the political activity of the Polish landlords (chapter 1, 2); 2) answer to the question whether they only defended the Western civilization against Russia, or perhaps mainly their own fortunes and high standard of living (chapter 3, 4); 3) the estimation of what democracy gave and took away from them (chapter 7); 4) how they tried to shape the relationship with other borderland nations (chapter 6) and the Russian Empire (chapter 5).