Tomasz Zan was one of the leaders of the Philomatic Association, a secret student organization that existed from 1817 to 1823 at the Imperial University of Wilno (Vilnius). This article deals with his autobiographical novel made up of letters he wrote between 1815 and 1823. As the assembled letters do not follow the author’s life in chronological order, the text has be read outside the formal categories of an autobiographical record, with due attention to the poetics of the fragment. Moreover, the textual narrator is not always a representative of the author. The occasional use of a persona suggests that the letters are not underpinned by a consistent and well-defined narrative “I”. It seems that in so far as Zan’s identity inscribed in the text appears fuzzy or disparate, its accurate reconstruction would not be possible without an analysis of the tropological system of his letters.