Dominikowa’s dependence after losing her land

Dominikowa’s dependence after losing her land shows how surrendering a farm can turn an elderly mother from a landholder into a servant in her children’s household. Her regret is both material and personal: without land, she lacks security, a home of her own, and the standing to visit the place she still regards as hers.

The land transferred to her children

Dominikowa explains her predicament to Boryna as he considers marrying in old age. She gave her children ten morgen of the best land, trusting that they would provide for her; instead, she says, she has been pushed out to earn her keep as a hired hand. Her account makes the transfer more than a failed financial bargain: it has left her dependent on the very family she expected to support her.

She urges Boryna not to repeat her choice. When he says he will not sign over a single field, she affirms his resolve, drawing on her own experience of trusting her children and being pensioned off. She regards his marriage as a possible safeguard against the isolation she now endures, telling him that taking another spouse might have spared her from lodging with others after her husband died.

Work, home, and failed redress

Dominikowa’s loss continues to govern her daily life. She says that she has trailed through the courts until the few zlotys she possessed were gone, without obtaining justice. Her daughter-in-law treats a visit to the old property as an intrusion, accusing her of spying when she has come to see the orchard whose trees she grafted herself. The rebuke sharpens the dispossession: the land bears the mark of her labor, yet she is no longer recognized as having a claim to be there.

Her wishes are concrete. She would rather farm her own land, sleep in a warm room beneath a quilt, eat her fill of butter and fat, and enjoy herself a little than depend on other people and work for them. When she sought the Parish Priest’s intervention, he told her that Jesus would reward her for her wrongs. She resents consolation that offers spiritual recompense while leaving her without a farm, a warm room, or dependable food.

Dependence as a warning

Dominikowa’s story gives force to Boryna’s refusal to transfer his fields: land represents not only wealth but the means to remain housed and self-directed in old age. Her advice arises from the consequences she has lived through, rather than from an abstract rule about inheritance. The farm she gave away remains present in her memory as a place she worked and a home from which she has been excluded.

The novel also places her complaint against a broader landscape of rural need. During the hard winter, hired laborers face scarce work, frozen potatoes, and meals missed or reduced; later, accounts of hunger and fallow fields show how the absence of land or working hands can leave households exposed. These hardships do not erase the particularity of Dominikowa’s grievance: her dependence began with a transfer made within her own family, and neither court proceedings nor religious consolation restores the land she surrendered.