Emigration to America as an escape from hardship

Emigration to America is presented as a possible escape from hardship in The Peasants, but never as a simple solution. In the novel’s village world, leaving can mean evading prison or escaping poverty; it also means abandoning a wife, children, land, and the community that gives a farmer his place. The possibility becomes most urgent when Antek, fearing the consequences of the woodsman’s death, imagines flight as an alternative to a long sentence. His conversations with his brother-in-law and his appeals to Jagna and Hanka reveal three different limits on that escape: the threat of imprisonment, the impossibility of making his lover accept the cost, and his wife’s determination to keep the household intact.

An Escape from Prison

The prospect of emigration enters Antek’s immediate crisis through a comparison with men who have faced the law. His brother-in-law recalls Kazimierz from Modlica, who went to America rather than wait to be proved guilty of killing a guard. Antek observes that Kazimierz was a bachelor, implicitly distinguishing his freedom to leave from the responsibilities binding a married man with children. The example makes flight conceivable, but not yet practicable for Antek.

The alternative is described in stark terms through Wojtek Gajda, who returned from prison at Easter. A ten-year sentence, Antek is told, would involve hard labour and consume a substantial part of his life. Wojtek is not yet forty, but has returned grey-haired, bent, coughing blood, and barely able to walk. The bodily damage described in this account gives the choice its force: emigration means leaving everything familiar, while imprisonment threatens to return a man to his village physically broken. Antek remembers how even a few months in custody nearly drove him mad.

His brother-in-law adds that a person could be across the sea in three weeks and directs him to Jankiel for information. Yet the speed of the journey sharpens rather than resolves Antek’s fear. He names what departure would require him to abandon: home, children, land, and village, perhaps forever. His brother-in-law counters that many have left willingly and have no desire to return to what he calls paradise. That judgment makes departure sound like liberation from a place others idealize, but the exchange leaves Antek unable to treat it as a clean break.

Flight Proposed to Jagna

Antek’s idea of emigration also becomes an offer to Jagna. During a private encounter, after Jagna insists that she belongs to neither him nor anyone else, he asks whether she would go away with him, even to America, so that they could be together. His proposal turns the imagined destination into a promise of escape not only from prosecution but from the arrangement of their lives in Lipce.

Jagna’s question about what he intends to do with his wife immediately exposes what the fantasy leaves out. Antek starts as though struck, and Jagna pointedly asks whether he expects to poison Hanka. His plans and hopes pour out as he clings feverishly to the idea of running away with Jagna; his intensity does not make the proposal more persuasive. She answers that his having drawn her into sin does not mean she has lost her reason, and refuses to run. She says she is not badly off alone, wraps her apron around herself, and prepares to leave. The exchange ends the proposed escape before it can become a shared plan: Antek imagines a future elsewhere, while Jagna declines both his promise and the life he asks her to abandon.

Hanka’s Refusal and the Farm

The possibility of flight returns when Antek confesses his troubles to Hanka. He tells her that there is nothing for it but to sell up and run away, even to America. Hanka stands pale and forbids the move: she will not go, nor permit the children to go to perdition. In the extremity of her refusal, she threatens to kill the children with an axe and throw herself into a well if he forces her to leave, then kneels before the holy pictures as if sealing a vow. Her words make the proposal’s stakes unmistakable: for her, emigration is not an abstract chance at freedom but a danger to the children and a rupture of the household.

When Antek says he was only talking, Hanka sets out the alternative she is prepared to endure. He will serve his time and come back; she will manage, keep every strip of land, and let nothing slip from her grasp. She accepts the ordeal as a scourge she will bear with the Lord Jesus’ help. Antek eventually agrees that they must wait for the case and leave the outcome to God. His earlier wish to sell and flee gives way, in this exchange, to a decision to remain for trial, while Hanka claims the responsibility of preserving the farm in his absence.

Land, Belonging, and the Limits of Escape

These conversations place emigration in tension with the novel’s larger concern with land and the making of a political community. The historical frame describes peasants emerging from serfdom and asks how people formerly subordinated to the Polish nobility might become citizens sincerely attached to Poland, despite the absence of Polish educational and administrative institutions. The novel’s village plots, including the conflict over the forest and the competing claims made in its name, show how collective belonging is shaped through local grievances, work, and access to land. Against those claims, America appears as a route out of immediate danger, not as a resolution of the village’s shared political problem.

The contrast is especially sharp because Antek’s contemplated departure is personal and urgent, whereas the forest dispute is voiced as a collective injustice. At a gathering, he addresses farmers and hired hands together, naming the manor’s felling of the forest, its refusal to employ them, and the injuries they have suffered; the crowd answers with calls to drive the woodcutters off and stop them. The speech gathers people around a claim to land and rights, while the possibility of emigration pulls an individual toward separation from home and community. In the broader account of the novel, peasants’ uncertain national consciousness and the absence of revolutionary action point to a political class that has not yet come fully into being. Antek’s indecision between flight and remaining is consistent with that unresolved condition: America offers a way to escape particular hardships, but the text does not present departure as a collective emancipation or promise what life beyond the sea would bring.