The Peasants — Volume I: Autumn

Chłopi: Jesień · The Peasants: Autumn · published 1904 · ISBN

Władysław Reymont — Władysław Reymont (1867 – 1925) — Poland, writing in Polish. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924.

“for his great national epic, The Peasants” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Władysław Reymont

Polish novelist born into a large village family near Kobiele Wielkie, where his father played the church organ. He had almost no formal schooling: he left home to apprentice as a tailor, joined a travelling theatre troupe, then worked as a gatekeeper on a remote stretch of railway — and those years among labouring people became his literary capital. Reymont wrote slowly and from direct observation rather than from books. The 1924 Nobel Prize went to him for The Peasants, over candidates such as Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy; he died little more than a year later.

How it came to be

Reymont wrote The Peasants between roughly 1901 and 1908, publishing it in four volumes named for the seasons; Autumn appeared in 1904. He modelled the village on a real one near Łódź and rebuilt it down to the detail of its farming year, its rituals and its speech. At the time Poland did not exist on the map, partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria, so raising an entire living Polish village in prose carried a weight of its own.

Summary of The Peasants — Volume I: Autumn

Harvest time in the village of Lipce. Maciej Boryna holds more land than anyone else, has buried two wives, and now means to marry Jagna, the most beautiful young woman in the district and decades his junior. His son Antek, already married with children, wants her too — and also wants the land his father will not divide. Autumn here is not scenery but a clock: potatoes must be lifted, cabbage salted, feasts kept, and in among that work a family catastrophe grows until father and son come to blows in front of the whole village.

Analysis & legacy

What separates this book from the rural fiction of its day is that Reymont never looks down at his subject from outside. No visiting intellectual arrives to explain the villagers; no pity is offered. Life in Lipce runs on its own logic: land determines standing, standing determines marriage, and marriage is how land moves. Boryna marries Jagna not out of simple infatuation but as a manoeuvre, and her mother gives her away for the same reason. Reymont's achievement is to let the reader see the calculation clearly while still feeling the real desire beneath it. Autumn also sets the architecture of the whole cycle: nature does not mirror the characters' moods, it imposes a work schedule on them, and every crisis must break out with the fieldwork still unfinished.

Themes: Land and power · Father and son · Marriage as transaction · The farming year · Village and church

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What is The Peasants — Volume I: Autumn about?

Harvest time in the village of Lipce. Maciej Boryna holds more land than anyone else, has buried two wives, and now means to marry Jagna, the most beautiful young woman in the district and decades his junior. His son Antek, already married with children, wants her too — and also wants the land his…

Is The Peasants — Volume I: Autumn worth reading?

What separates this book from the rural fiction of its day is that Reymont never looks down at his subject from outside. No visiting intellectual arrives to explain the villagers; no pity is offered. Life in Lipce runs on its own logic: land determines standing, standing determines marriage, and…

When did Władysław Reymont win the Nobel Prize, and why?

Władysław Reymont won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924: “for his great national epic, The Peasants”

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