This evening I finished volume III of Reymont's The Peasants: Spring. It ends with the death of old Mattias Boryna, first of the peasant husbandmen of Lipka, mortally injured at the end of Winter in a village uprising against the local Squire, who had been logging illegally in the peasant wood. The final volume, Summer, I won't likely get to until winter. Tomorrow I begin my third semester of Polish language study.
In 1924, for the most part on the strength of The Peasants, Ladislas Reymont won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the same year that my grandfather, Aleksander, returned to Poland, though without either Reymont's or Boryna's material success. Other coincidences reveal themselves in the reading. Lipka, as it turns out, was based on the town Lowicz, south of Torun, which is only @ 30-40 km from Kikot and Lipno, towns associated with my grandfather's "estate" and his birth and early years. The conditions Reymont describes, physical and economic and political, were those contemporary with my grandfather's and my great-grandfather, Vincenty's, generations. Reymont's pictures of country, peasant life are worth their thousands of words, and like Sienkiewicz's images of the nobility, they tend toward the mythic, and yet the familiar, because I have seen family pictures, even taken some--of Vincenty's well and the remains of the foundation of his house or barn--and trodden upon those very lands. An earthy heroism, even a dirty one, redolent of animals and manure, but also of cut hay and miscellaneous wildflowers.
