
Member Reviews

Polish Realism Classical Novel Revitalized
Wladyslaw Reymont; Anna Zaranko, tr., The Peasants (Dublin: Penguin Books, June 10, 2025). Paperback: $30; Historical Fiction. 976pp, 5-1/16X8-3/4”. ISBN: 979-0-241-52424-4.
****
“One of Poland’s most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village’s wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride—but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons—Autumn to Summer—the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek… Richly lyrical and thrillingly realist, at turns comic, tragic and reflective, Wladyslaw Reymont’s magnum opus is a love song to a lasting dream of rural Poland, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.”
The “Introduction” offers the needed background. Poland had a turbulent history as this kingdom was captured, or split among its neighbors. When the author was born in 1867, Poland was still fresh from the end of serfdom in the Austrian partition in 1848, 1850 under Prusia, and 1864 under Russia. Poles were trying to gain independence but had been failing before 1867. Reymont’s father was a church organist. Reymont trained as a tailor, before joining a traveling theater as an actor, and then working for the railway, as he started publishing short stories. He experimented with popular fiction in works such as the horror The Vampire (1911). Reymont’s The Peasants was inspired by the naturalism/realism movement led by Emile Zola (i.e. The Earth, 1887). This work was written curiously after Reymont won “35,000 rubbles” from a “railway accident on 13 July 1900” that left him with “a number of injuries”. The novel was serialized between 1901 and 1908. Reymont was so ill with heart-disease that he could not receive his Noble Prize for Literature in 1924 in person, and died a year later in 1925 (i-xi).
The philosophical significance for this “epic novel” has been described as proving “the primacy of the naturalistic myth over history”. Protagonists are driven by primal drives for “biological survival, the sexual drive, conflict over land, familial and individual egoism”. The lack of details about the focal village makes it into, as Franciszek Ziejka stated, “a tale of every village”.
These are enormous pufferies that promise a lot for any single novel.
“Chapter 1” opens with the mythic exclamation: “Praised by Jesus Christ!” After this, apriest questions Agata about where she is heading. She says she is going away from the village to beg for “alms” despite the winter being “afoot”. The priest gives her a coin, and she thanks him on her knees in tears (3).
The priest then watches a few mares, and other animals in the village around him.
The description is indeed worthy of erudite literary standing: “like a red-and-yellow caterpillar curled upon a grey burdock leaf from which a long and tangled thread of plots stretched to the forest, strips of grey fields with baulks roping through, full of pear trees and stone heaps.” Some dense description in modern novels is nonsensical when one stops to read it closely, as the authors seem to be deliberately repelling readers from these dense sections. In contrast, this author follows this caterpillar to the leap, and then out to the forest, and the fields covered by pear trees (5). A lengthy film can be pictured by closely reading these lines: a painting of a place long-gone, but perhaps not too unlike modern villages, at least those like among the Amish where technology is avoided.
Then the priest encounters another girl, who is heading with a cow to have it mate with “the miller’s bull”. The cow rebels and drags the girl onwards “in a cloud of dust” (5).
This book is nearly a thousand pages, and it just carries on like this describing the simple, mundane, but somehow dramatic life of simple “peasants” in a single village in the course of a single year. This is indeed a great example of a realistic novel. It just presents the reality of this narrow time and place. It is probably easier to read this novel about peasants than Tolstoy’s War and Peace because the latter’s descriptions of conversations among rich people tend to be about petty and repetitive subjects of love, or death, whereas here the intricacies of what peasants suffered in Poland at this moment are examined in their strange uniqueness. While I once made it through the War, I cannot indulge in reading this masterpiece further.
Those who are searching for little-known classics will be delighted to spend some time with this polished new translation. Though the “Notes” section is only a few pages per-section. This is far too short for a novel of this size that is exploring many historical elements that modern readers must be clueless about. There is a “Guide to Polish Pronunciation”, which is needed. And there is a helpful list of the dozens of characters for those who might be researching specific themes or characters, or job-types. It should be as logical to add Russian classics to world-literature as Polish ones, and this certainly is a strong rival for these spots. Though it would be extremely difficult for a student to pass a reading quiz about this novel because so many events happen at any single page that nobody could remember much of it after reading hundreds of pages. So, it probably is not a practical book to add to a syllabus unless the lecturer is understanding, and asks for students to discuss themes in this book, as opposed to memorizing what happened to which characters.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025