The Russian Empire's suppression of the Polish November 1830 Uprising and the ensuing repression, by the three partitioning powers, of Polish culture, education and politics had forced Polish writers to seek a collective identity in their country's past. This had created a new vogue for the Polish "gawęda", which had antecedents in Poland's 17th-century memoirists. The "gawęda" is a discursive fiction in which the narrator recounts incidents in a highly stylized personal language. It was this genre of which Henryk Rzewuski was the past master.