This chapter outlines the national discourse on the house and home in Polish literature and culture under the condition of foreign rule. Literature and art played a particularly important role in the construction of this ‘cultural matrix’, that is in the multigenerational construction of a cultural identity. In Polish culture, the aristocratic manor house played a particularly important role in the unification of the ‘members of a nation’ and the preservation of the Polish identity under the period of rule by foreign powers. After the unsuccessful 1863 Polish January Uprising, the home as a national ‘fortress’ would increasingly become a place of repression and opposition. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, images of urban town houses began to appear in Polish literature with increasing frequency. The heterogeneity and socio-economic problems of town houses were juxtaposed with, among other things, the idyllic rural manor house landscapes.