Lent

Lent, also called the Great Fast, gives the novel a season in which religious observance, communal feeling, and the natural world seem to press upon one another. Its hymns and meditations on Christ’s Passion gather the village into a shared act of penitence, even as Lent’s bleak, rain-lashed days deepen the sense of weariness. It also marks a boundary in the village calendar: a winter custom of going from house to house with a star, Christmas crib, or bear is practiced from Yuletide until Lent, while Holy Week brings stricter restraints and the approach of Easter.

Place in the Village Calendar

Lent is not presented only as a sequence of church services. It also helps order customary time. The explanatory note on the bear procession places that winter practice between Yuletide and Lent, making the season a threshold between festive visiting and the more restrained period that follows. The seasonal calendar thus links religious observance with ordinary village activities: Lent’s arrival closes one customary interval and begins another.

The transition is especially audible. Singing and music, prominent in village gatherings and celebrations, take on a different purpose during Lent. The season’s devotional music focuses attention on the Passion, and a later note records a custom forbidding music and singing throughout Holy Week; the restriction had once applied to the whole of Lent. The seasonal rule gives silence a place beside song in the village’s religious life.

The Passion Devotions

On the first Sunday of Lent, the congregation begins the Bitter Lamentations, a Catholic devotion known in Poland since the eighteenth century. It combines hymns with meditations on Christ’s Passion; portions are sung in church on each Sunday of Lent, and the complete devotion is performed on Good Friday. In the service attended by Antek Boryna, the organ sounds beneath the congregation’s singing, while the organist reads meditations on the Passion from the loft. The service is both structured worship and a collective emotional event: voices join, then give way to readings that reach the packed church from above.

At first, Antek Boryna is there for a personal reason. He expects to meet Jagna and find an opportunity to speak with her, but she is absent, and the congregation’s curious attention makes his own presence conspicuous. The Passion service gradually displaces that purpose. The music absorbs him until he loses track of why he came; when he becomes fully conscious again, drowsiness has given way to heavy sadness. The narrative makes Lent’s devotion consequential for an individual as well as communal: Antek is drawn into a ritual whose meaning overtakes his private errand.

The service then turns from the Passion to admonition. The priest condemns the congregation’s hardened sinning, neglect of God’s commands, quarrelling, fighting, and drunkenness. His rebuke narrows upon wayward sons who burn their fathers’ houses and upon seducers, making Antek understand that he is among those being publicly condemned. A note explains the severity of such a rebuke: to be denounced from the pulpit before the parish was among the gravest punishments a churchgoer could face. Lent’s public worship therefore exposes private wrongdoing to communal judgment, and the congregation’s shared penitence does not erase the unequal force of accusation directed at a particular person.

Mid-Lent Weather and Collective Feeling

In the middle of Lent, the novel describes a day of unusually oppressive gloom. Fine rain falls beneath dense clouds, the village seems subdued, and people wander without quarrelling or holding forth, wanting only a quiet place to lie down and forget their troubles. The change is rendered through the environment as well as behavior: after the noonday bell, the light suddenly fails, wind drives rain against the cottages, and the pond breaks against the ice. The description makes the season’s despondency collective without attributing it to a single cause; weather, fatigue, and the villagers’ many private difficulties converge in a day of shared lassitude.

The broader March landscape sustains this pressure. Sleet and rain soak roofs and walls, streams fill the ruts, melting snow turns fields and roads to mire, and planks or straw are needed to make paths passable. At night, the darkness and wet seem so persistent that the light itself appears lost. Some women gather at their windows to spin and sing the Bitter Lamentations, their hymns accompanied by wind and rain. The devotional practice is threaded through household labor and the weather rather than confined to the church: the Passion sounds from cottage windows into a landscape still waiting for spring.

This atmosphere contrasts with the hope that spring will soon conquer and restore what winter has damaged. Yet the transition is not immediate. March remains damp, cold, and difficult, and the village must endure its present conditions even while anticipating change. Lent therefore carries both an experience of heaviness and an orientation toward what follows it; the seasonal passage toward renewal is felt through delay and endurance, not as an instant release.

Holy Week and the Passage to Easter

The approach to Easter gives restraint a ceremonial form. According to the explanatory notes, music and singing were forbidden throughout Holy Week, and the period of silence had once covered all of Lent. The rule makes the season’s soundscape change as the Passion observances advance: the congregation sings the Bitter Lamentations during Lent, while the later custom emphasizes abstention from music. This alternation between collective song and prescribed quiet marks religious time through what the village may, and may not, do.

The end of Lent is also enacted through playful communal ritual. Before Easter, village youths perform a burlesque burial of the herring and rye soup associated with the privations of the Great Fast. The herring is carried on a stick; a novice bears a pan of soup on his head, followed by a gravedigger with a shovel. At the appointed moment the pan is knocked onto the novice, to everyone’s delight. The mock funeral turns remembered hardship into a public joke: the foods that tormented stomachs during Lent are treated as though they, too, must be buried.

The passage into Easter is then marked by the Resurrection Mass at midnight, which completes Lent and begins the Easter season. After the season’s devotional singing, somber weather, and customs of restraint, the midnight service supplies a sharply defined threshold. Lent’s significance lies in this combination of discipline and transition: it gathers the community around the Passion, brings individual conduct under public scrutiny, and prepares the village calendar for a ritualized return to celebration.