Antek Boryniak

Antek Boryniak’s response to the fire at his father’s house marks a descent from shame into vengeance. He withdraws from work and ordinary ties, drinks away the money from his last heifer, and becomes increasingly estranged from the villagers. His defiance culminates in a public confrontation with the community and, later, in a forest battle where he nearly shoots his father before killing the woodsman who strikes him down.

After the Fire: Shame and Vengeance

The fire leaves Antek changed. He stops working, despite repeated messages from the miller, and spends his days loitering in the village or drinking at the tavern. The possibility that people will accuse him of setting the fire at his father’s house no longer seems to matter. Instead, he broods on revenge, imagining it with growing violence. At the tavern he challenges anyone who dares accuse him, making sure the people around him hear. His boast is less a defense than a declaration that accusation and judgment have become part of the same feud.

Antek’s old companions try to check his decline. Mateusz admonishes him, and Kłąb appeals to him as a friend to steady himself before he brings about his ruin. Antek refuses their counsel, drinks harder, and threatens the village. The villagers watch his behavior closely; as outrage grows, even former friends keep their distance and begin openly to accuse him. The blacksmith quietly encourages their hostility. Antek registers this growing isolation but does not turn back: consumed by vengeance, he treats every rebuff as fuel for the grievance that has narrowed his attention to retaliation.

His relationship with Jagna also turns coercive. The two meet secretly in Dominikowa’s barn, with Szymek helping them, apparently in the hope that Antek will support his courtship of Nastka. Jagna, however, goes to Antek unwillingly. Still bearing painful traces of Boryna’s whipping, she has lost her desire for lovemaking and is afraid of Antek’s threats: if she refuses his summons, he says he will come to her home in daylight and beat her before everyone, more harshly than Boryna did. Their meetings therefore cannot be understood as a simple continuation of mutual passion. Antek’s pursuit persists, but Jagna’s fear and unwillingness expose the violence entangled in it.

Public Condemnation and Defiance

At church, Antek is caught in the crowd and pressed against the rails, unable even to leave before the service ends. After the hymn and prayers, the Parish Priest preaches on Christ’s Agonies and turns from them to the congregation’s sins: hardened transgression, drunkenness, quarrelling, and brawling. His rebuke then narrows to sons who burn their fathers’ houses, seducers, and sinners, making Antek’s disgrace unmistakable without settling whether he caused the fire. The accusation is delivered publicly, before a congregation already primed to understand whom the priest means.

The sermon makes the community’s judgment physical. Antek stands white and barely breathing as the people’s eyes fall on him; those nearest edge away, leaving him isolated as if his presence were contagious. The Parish Priest urges them to guard against such men, refuse them food, drink, and shelter, and drive them from their doors unless they repent and make amends. Antek walks slowly toward the exit while the crowd opens a path, and the priest’s denunciation follows him. The scene turns religious authority into a demand for collective exclusion: the village is instructed not merely to condemn Antek but to deny him the ordinary supports of communal life.

Yet the humiliation does not become lasting submission. In the ensuing quiet, Antek briefly acknowledges to himself that the priest has spoken rightly, and mortal fear brings him under the power of the village. Then his resolve hardens again: he rejects forgiveness and refuses to back down, shaking his fist at the village and the world before heading to the tavern. The reversal makes his remorse unstable rather than redemptive. Public shame can arrest his defiance for a moment, but it does not loosen vengeance’s hold on him.

Forest Agitation and the Battle

At a gathering in the inn, Antek steps forward to speak against the manor’s seizure of the forest. His appeal warns that the loss of woodland may be followed by claims on the villagers’ land, cottages, and property. But his past conduct weighs against him: the crowd remembers the Parish Priest’s denunciation and responds warily, with few willing to agree. Antek presses on, carried by the urgency of the grievance even when the villagers turn away from him.

He arrives late at the forest fighting and, at its edge, sees the woodsman grappling with Boryna. While the combatants and onlookers are absorbed in the struggle, Antek moves behind a tree unnoticed. He draws a shotgun from beneath his sheepskin, crosses himself without conscious intent, and aims at his father’s head. Before he can fire, the two men rise; Antek raises the gun again but is seized by such terror that he cannot shoot. The hesitation leaves Boryna exposed: the woodsman strikes him on the head with the butt of his gun, and he falls bleeding.

Antek’s paralysis breaks when he sees his father go down. He throws himself at the woodsman, who turns and fires almost point-blank; the shot misses, scorching Antek’s face. Antek then overpowers him, choking and beating him against a tree until he dies. The killing follows the failed attempt on Boryna with a stark reversal: Antek’s violence first turns toward his father, then erupts against the man who has struck him down. Covered in his father’s blood and his own, he plunges back into the fight and beats the remaining opponents with such force that others have to drag him away to stop him from killing more.

Arrest and the Aftermath of Violence

After the fight, officials arrive and take the village men into custody. Antek is singled out for binding. He tears apart the first bonds, alarming those around him, and threatens to kill the officials and then himself. Yet he is still stunned by his father’s injury and death: when ordered into irons, he stretches out his arms and legs for them. His surrender is not calm acceptance so much as the collapse of a man whose rage has not yet caught up with what has happened. The scene closes his movement from public defiance to uncontrollable violence, then to arrest, with the father he nearly shot at the center of its decisive reversal.

Narrative Role and Moral Contradiction

Antek’s part in these episodes is defined by a split between the public grievance he can articulate and the private violence that repeatedly compromises him. At the inn, the danger he names is collective: losing the forest could expose the villagers’ land, homes, and property to further claims. Yet the crowd’s distrust shows that a cause does not erase the standing of its advocate; his earlier conduct has made it difficult for them to hear his warning apart from his own disgrace. In the forest, that same volatility turns inward toward his father before redirecting against the woodsman. His involuntary crossing of himself as he takes aim, followed by his inability to fire, sets bodily hesitation against the rage that later drives him to kill. The narrative thus makes neither his resistance to the manor nor his violence a complete explanation of him. His final submission to the irons, after threatening both the officials and himself, leaves that contradiction unresolved: he is at once a man capable of naming a shared injustice and one whose fury helps isolate him from the people he seeks to rouse.