Land as inheritance and identity

In The Peasants, land joins inheritance to identity: it is a material safeguard, the ground of family continuity, and a measure of whether a person can stand independently in the world. Characters’ claims to land reach beyond private property into village rights and national belonging, while the novel repeatedly shows how poverty and unequal power can make those claims precarious.

Inheritance, Home, and Security

During a frozen winter night, Hanka the Farmstead Keeper stops opposite the Boryna house and fixes her gaze on its snow-covered garden and buildings. She longs to return, but her attachment is not simply to shelter or comfort: she thinks of the property as belonging to her and her children, fears that the blacksmith could get his hands on it, and resolves not to leave. The house and its land remain a possible inheritance even while she and her family are separated from them. Her stillness before the lit windows makes that claim both intimate and painfully uncertain.

A conversation about a hypothetical child makes the inheritance logic explicit. A child might receive a share equal to the others, or perhaps even all of the old man’s portion; the prospect presents family descent as a route to securing land. Jagna dismisses land as a concern that means little to her. The answer she receives is that being landless is like having no legs: a person without land cannot get anywhere. The comparison turns property into a condition of movement and self-reliance, not merely a store of wealth. Hanka’s insistence that the children must not be disregarded gives that principle a generational stake.

The novel also places inheritance within marriage and household power. Its central family plot begins with the marriage of Maciej Boryna the Patriarch, Lipce’s wealthiest peasant, to Jagna, and runs alongside Jagna’s affair with Antek the Lover, Maciej’s son. Marriage, land, and succession therefore converge within a single family conflict. Land can secure a future, but control over it can also sharpen rivalry between generations and make intimate relationships part of a struggle over who belongs to the household and who may inherit.

Land, Work, and Rural Poverty

The historical background makes this attachment especially consequential. Under serfdom, peasants and land were subject to landowners, and peasants owed unpaid labor for a set number of days each week. Emancipation ended those ownership rights and introduced a countryside in which landowners had to pay for labor, but rural workers remained poorly positioned: low wages and widespread illiteracy restricted their ability to survive or find other work. The disappearance of formal serfdom did not make land or security equally available.

That inequality is visible in the winter dispute over work at Wolf’s Hollow woodland. Villagers point out that at least twenty hired hands urgently need employment; snow and frost have already ruined some potatoes, money is scarce, and families face a lean period before the harvest. They had expected the Squire’s felling to provide work, but he has decided not to hire men from Lipce. The forest is thus both a contested resource and a possible source of wages. Exclusion from the logging threatens immediate survival even for people whose deeper claim is that the forest is theirs.

The account of Filipka’s household shows the limits of land as security when people cannot make it sustain them. Her family has run out of potatoes, sold its quilt, and must beg groats from the miller; in another struggling household, a woman has fields standing fallow while her husband is imprisoned, and land cannot feed her newborn child. The village’s poor are not protected simply by living near farmers who possess land. Hanka the Farmstead Keeper observes that better-off farmers concentrate on their own provisions and lending, while the poorest are left to divine order. Land can be the foundation of livelihood, but access, labor, and mutual aid determine whether it actually keeps anyone alive.

From Local Rights to Political Belonging

The novel places the question of land within the larger problem of building national identity among peasants who had been former serfs. Polish Romanticism had fashioned a political ideal of the patriotic Pole ready to sacrifice for the recovery of independence, but peasants’ experience of landowners—many of whom had opposed their emancipation—could leave them reluctant or hostile toward uprisings led by the gentry. The novel asks how people liberated under Russian rule might become citizens sincerely attached to Poland without Polish educational or administrative institutions in their hands. Land and the memory of unequal power shape the answer; national identity cannot simply be assumed to overcome the experience of class.

The forest conflict briefly gives that political problem a public voice. A speaker calls together farmers and hired hands as Poles who have suffered injustice: the manor is felling the forest, refusing employment, and driving villagers toward ruin. He recalls that court cases and complaints have brought no remedy, and presents the wood as a shared right unrecognized by those in power. The appeal connects livelihood and customary claims to a wider language of collective injustice. Yet the coalition is not secure. At a later gathering, a farmer from Przyłęk accuses Rocho of standing with the gentry and setting people against the officials. The charge reveals how quickly arguments about authority and political allegiance can divide villagers who might otherwise share material grievances.

Narrative Significance

The novel’s account of land works on two scales at once: particular families struggle over inheritance, while the village’s conflict with the manor raises the question of who may claim the resources on which rural life depends. Its two principal plotlines—the marriage of Maciej Boryna the Patriarch and Jagna, and Jagna’s affair with Antek the Lover—unfold alongside the battle over the forest. Private succession and collective rights are not separate themes: both ask who controls the ground and whose future that control will secure.

Although the story’s four-season structure can make rural life appear governed by nature and recurring work, its land conflicts expose the pressure of social arrangements within that cycle. Lipce serves as a microcosm rather than a complete portrait of the outside world, and the novel’s investigation of peasant political potential remains skeptical: it portrays a possible new class without presenting its emergence as assured. Land can bind a family across generations and give a community grounds for resistance, but neither inheritance nor shared grievance automatically produces justice or a unified political identity.