The Peasants
by Władysław Reymont
Summary
The novel follows one year in the Polish village of Lipce, opening in autumn as the harvest comes in and running through winter, spring and summer back around to the next autumn, four volumes each named for a season. Boryna, the village's richest farmer, takes a much younger second wife, Jagna, whose beauty unsettles nearly every household in Lipce almost immediately, not least his own son Antek, who is already married and already resents his father's wealth. Jagna and Antek begin an affair the whole village half suspects and nobody stops, until Boryna catches them together in a haystack and sets it alight, driving his son from the farm. The break between father and son is still raw when the village's long quarrel with the manor over the forest turns into a pitched fight, and Boryna is struck down by one of the manor's foresters; Antek, seeing his father fall, kills the man. Boryna lies senseless for weeks, rises one last time in spring to walk his own fields scattering earth in the motion of sowing, and dies, and Jagna, blamed by the village for the whole disaster regardless of what any single person actually did, is driven out of Lipce on a cart of manure in a public humiliation led by the same women who once envied her.
Władysław Reymont writes almost none of this as psychology; he writes it as agricultural calendar, plowing, sowing, threshing, feast days, church processions and the small transactions of land and dowry that decide who marries whom, and lets the seasons themselves carry the plot's inevitability the way weather carries a harvest. Individual characters matter less here than the village as a whole, its customs, its gossip, its collective judgment falling on Jagna at the end, which is why the village of Lipce itself is often called the novel's real subject rather than any one Boryna or Jagna. Reading it means slowing down for long, dense passages of description, more field and festival than dialogue, and it suits a reader interested in how a whole agricultural society actually worked before mechanization changed it, more than a reader looking for a fast moving story about one particular love triangle.
Historical Context & Significance
The Nobel citation for Władysław Reymont in 1924 named this exact book, praising his great national epic, The Peasants, one of the few Nobel literature citations to single out one title rather than a career. Reymont had worked as a gateman at a rural railway crossing for sixteen rubles a month and had briefly considered joining a monastic order before turning to writing, and that firsthand closeness to rural and religious life is what gives the novel's agricultural detail its documentary weight rather than a visitor's guesswork.
The book was written and published across 1904 to 1909, well before the prize, and it had already made Reymont Poland's most honored living novelist by the time the Academy recognized him. A 1973 Polish film and television adaptation directed by Jan Rybkowski brought the novel back to wide attention decades after the Nobel, and The Peasants remains one of relatively few Nobel winning novels whose citation still describes exactly what the book contains rather than gesturing at a whole career.