Many scholars have pointed out the striking cultural and historical similarities between Poland and Ireland from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, resulting from the shared lack of sovereignty and the need to preserve an "imagined community" and reconstruct a cultural memory through literature.
Indeed literature played an essential, institutional role in these societies in so far as more than any of the other arts bears a 'memory-reflexive' character as well as a 'memory productive' one. Even more so given the enormous prestige that literature still enjoyed at this period as representing the summum of culture and the arts, a prestige that had been intensified by the Romantic belief in the quasi-redemptive powers of an 'aesthetic education', to use Schiller's term, in the formation of modern citizens. The imperial and colonial settings rendered cultural memory a crucial factor within the identity-formation process of these societies. As Theo D'haen notes, although for everyday uses of cultural memory Aleida Assmann's distinction between "archival" and "functional" memories makes sense, for the postcolonial Assmann's distinction evaporates because memories that for everyday purposes may have lapsed into the archival often become "re-functionalized" precisely by making them the concern of renewed attention under the postcolonial.
The creation of a postcolonial counter-memory through literature, then, sets out to "correct" the world view conveyed by the colonizing country's (or countries, as in the Polish case) official history and canonized literature, especially as it often relates to the colonies themselves. In its most radical form, such use of memory holds out the promise of the recovery of some form of authenticity lost under colonialism. In the present paper I will describe, drawing upon postcolonial theory and memory studies, the noteworthy similarities between the role of literature depicted in the epic works of H. Sienkiewicz and the mythological and epic poetry of W.B. Yeats. I wish to portray how the case of Sienkiewicz, along with the epic and folk literature in Ireland of the same period which has in W.B. Yeats the main representative, is what could be called a "fiction of memory", which broadly speaking refers to the stories that individuals or cultures tell about their past to answer the question "who am I?", or, collectively, "who are we?" These stories are called "fictions of memory" because, more often than not, they turn out to be an imaginative (re)construction of the past in response to current needs. Indeed, the postcolonial use of memory is in such contexts "therapeutic", as Sienkiewicz wrote his Trilogy "for the strengthening of the hearths". What does it mean to create a cultural memory through literature? The function of literature for nationalism is to forge those para-state institutions that gradually form the counter-hegemonic "ethical state," to use Gramsci's terms, that subsists alongside the colonial apparatus and intends to displace it. In this sense memory studies provide an important ancillary frame of analysis, since a very important realm of active cultural memory is precisely history.
