The Peasants — Volume III: Spring

Chłopi: Wiosna · The Peasants: Spring · published 1906 · 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

Published in 1906, two years after the first pair. That gap coincides with the upheavals of 1905 in Russian-ruled Poland, and this is the volume most concerned with the village's dealings with outside power: courts, prison, administration, manor.

Summary of The Peasants — Volume III: Spring

The thaw comes and the village must live with what winter left behind. Its men are still imprisoned after the clash with the manor, the land is due for sowing, and there are not enough hands. The weight falls on the women — above all on Hanka, the slighted wife who now has to take hold of her husband's whole inheritance.

Analysis & legacy

Spring belongs to Hanka, and gives us one of the finest portraits of a woman in early twentieth-century European rural fiction. In the first two volumes she is nearly invisible: a poor daughter-in-law, dismissed by her husband, overruled by her father-in-law. When the men are gone she does not become someone else; she simply does what must be done — and the village is forced to look at her again. Reymont builds the change through no moment of awakening at all, but through a chain of small decisions about seed, livestock and money. This is also the volume that shows the seasons are not on anyone's side: the soil demands sowing on time regardless of who is in jail or who has died.

Themes: A woman takes charge · Village and the state · The land waits for no one · Poverty and debt · Revival

Frequently asked questions

What is The Peasants — Volume III: Spring about?

The thaw comes and the village must live with what winter left behind. Its men are still imprisoned after the clash with the manor, the land is due for sowing, and there are not enough hands. The weight falls on the women — above all on Hanka, the slighted wife who now has to take hold of her…

Is The Peasants — Volume III: Spring worth reading?

Spring belongs to Hanka, and gives us one of the finest portraits of a woman in early twentieth-century European rural fiction. In the first two volumes she is nearly invisible: a poor daughter-in-law, dismissed by her husband, overruled by her father-in-law. When the men are gone she does not…

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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