Boryna

Boryna is a landholding patriarch whose control of the family homestead makes inheritance a source of both security and conflict. His position links private household authority to the wider pressures of village life: scarce cash, seasonal labor demands, and the dependence of family survival on land. His death becomes a marker in the community’s religious calendar, while references to the Boryna cross and his children extend his presence into family memory and the landscape.

Identity and Family Background

Boryna had been married twice before the later events of the story. Antek Boryna, Magda, and Grzela were children of his first wife; Józka Borynianka was his daughter by his second. This family history establishes a household formed across successive marriages, with Boryna as the figure connecting its generations. The children’s position within that household is also a matter of property: control of the land is bound up with who may remain on the farm and who may inherit it.

The inheritance question is especially consequential for Antek Boryna. Boryna’s refusal to transfer land to his children underlies their conflict, and the dispute becomes more than a disagreement between father and son: it concerns the means of making a living and the authority to decide the farm’s future. When Antek Boryna and his family are expelled from the paternal homestead, the injury persists. Three weeks after their expulsion, Antek Boryna and Hanka remain locked in resentment and hardship, their sense of wrong undiminished.

Household Authority and the Village Economy

Boryna’s authority belongs to a rural economy in which landholding does not remove the pressure of immediate need. In Lipce, households calculate what they must sell before the winter fair and what they must buy for clothing, tools, and farm work. Taxes, commune contributions, debts, and payments to servants fall due together. Even farmers with fifteen morgen can find themselves weighing whether to take a horse or cow to market; poorer households face still narrower choices. These pressures give the farm’s land and labor force their concrete importance in Boryna’s family conflict.

The crisis becomes sharper when family labor is disrupted. During the imprisonment of the men, women are left to manage livestock, gardens, household work, and the fields. Spring brings calving, hatching, and farrowing at the same time that the soil needs ploughing and planting. The fields stand fallow not because the season has failed, but because there are too few working hands. Against this background, a patriarch’s control of land and household labor determines whether the family can sustain its place in the village economy.

Land, Labor, and Collective Conflict

The broader struggle over land also shapes the world in which Boryna holds authority. The Squire’s intended felling at Wolf’s Hollow is understood by villagers as a threat to their claims and livelihood. The refusal to employ local men deepens the grievance: hired hands are left without winter work, while some families have already lost potatoes to frost and face hunger before the next harvest. At a village gathering, a speaker presents the felling as the latest in a long series of injuries, confiscations, and ignored complaints. The resulting anger is collective, but it grows from the same material conditions that make the family farm so fiercely contested.

The contrast between land as a household inheritance and land as a community resource is central to Boryna’s place in the story. Within his family, the question is who has a right to the farm; in the village, it is who may use the forest and benefit from its labor. In both disputes, formal power and economic dependence sharpen conflict. Boryna’s domestic authority therefore belongs to a wider social order in which access to land determines security, standing, and the ability to work.

Death and Remembrance

Boryna’s death is identified through the observance of its octave, the eighth day after his passing. That calendrical reference situates his death within a communal religious rhythm rather than treating it only as a private family loss. A separate note identifies the Boryna cross as a wayside cross associated with a particular family. Such crosses could mark remembrance, gratitude, penance, or a person or event, although the specific purpose of this one is not stated. Together, the octave and the cross connect Boryna’s family identity to ritual time and the inhabited landscape.

His legacy is consequently carried in more than one form. The household’s struggle over land continues through the children and the consequences of expulsion; the family name also remains attached to a landmark and to the observances surrounding death. Boryna’s significance lies in this convergence: he is at once the father who controls a farm, the center of an inheritance dispute, and a figure whose place in family and village memory outlasts his life.