Pigs

Pigs in Lipce are neither background livestock nor merely food: they are working household assets whose care, loss, and slaughter expose the village’s dependence on animals and the precariousness of its economy. Sows farrow, piglets follow people home or rootle through crops, and hogs must be fed and managed alongside the other demands of farm life.

Husbandry and Household Routine

The animals are part of the ordinary choreography of the farm. As Antek Boryna and Kuba cart potatoes, Hanka Borynowa and Józka Boryna attend to evening chores: geese must be rounded up, pigs fed so they do not crowd onto the porch and nose into the cattle’s water tubs, and cows milked. The sequence makes pig-keeping one task among many, but also shows how easily livestock can spill beyond its assigned place and disrupt household work.

Elsewhere, pigs mark the rhythms of reproduction and care. A sow farrows by a wall, and her piglets are described as round and healthy; at another home, a sow lies in the sun while her litter pushes at her for milk. Such scenes place the animals within the cycle of farm reproduction, where a litter is both a new demand on household labor and the prospect of future value. Their presence is also audible and persistent: a hog squeals in its sty, pigs rootle at fences and in gardens, and hungry animals make neglect visible when a household can no longer keep up with its chores.

Ownership, Scarcity, and Dispute

Pigs could be valuable enough to provoke a formal accusation, but ownership was not always straightforward. Bartek was charged with stealing a sow from Marcjanna Pacześ, taking it from a field, slaughtering it, and eating it. His account instead concerned a small piglet that had followed him home: it kept returning whenever the household chased it away, and his wife began feeding it scraps. Bartek argued that the poor family could not starve the animal, yet could not afford to keep feeding it indefinitely; after they finally ate some of it, Dominikowa arrived with the village head and took what remained. The episode turns a dispute over property into a testimony about hunger, care, and the narrow choices poverty allowed.

The loss of a pig could also threaten a household’s survival outright. During the hard period before harvest, thieves stole Filipka’s sow on the very first night of a watch, just as it was about to farrow. It was her only possession and the means on which she relied to get through until harvest. Filipka grieved as if she had lost a child, beat her head against the walls, and appealed to the priest, who gave her a rouble and promised her one of the piglets expected from another litter. The promised animal was practical relief, but it also made mutual aid concrete: a future piglet could help replace the single asset whose loss had left Filipka without a way to endure.

Elsewhere, a household hog became both food and a source of obligation. Maciej Boryna’s fiercely resisting animal was led from its sty; Ambrozy approached it with a stake, struck it down, and killed it with a knife. The hog was then scalded, scraped, scrubbed, and hung in Maciej Boryna’s room. Its meat did not remain a private household feast. Hanka apportioned sausages, black pudding, and bacon among relatives and neighbors, including Magda and the blacksmith, the Voyt, Pryczkowa, and Kłąb’s wife. She acknowledged that the gifts would not stop people talking, but hoped they would leave them less reason to accuse the family of keeping Maciej Boryna’s hog for themselves. Slaughter thus converted an animal into stored food and, at the same time, into a test of reciprocal obligation and reputation.

Pigs also made the boundary between one household’s livelihood and another’s damage impossible to ignore. A piglet that dug up carrots became the occasion for a quarrel between Balcerkowa and Gulbas, one of the many small disputes that helped make village life feel perpetually combative. In another argument, a woman demanded payment for linen torn down while bleaching and potatoes rooted out by a neighbor’s sow; she threatened to take the matter to court and even to break the animal’s legs. The sow’s movements across the fence turned ordinary foraging into a contest over land, compensation, and whose losses would count.

Livestock, Poverty, and Household Breakdown

As winter approached, village households argued over what to sell—cattle, grain, or smaller livestock—while trying to find money for clothing, tools, and farm supplies. The debate places pigs within a fragile household economy in which animals were not simply kept for food or breeding: they could become reserves to liquidate when cash ran short. That reserve was precarious. The same winter could bring expenses that made even productive breeding stock indispensable to a family’s immediate survival.

Kozłowa sold her sow and piglets to pay for her gravely ill husband Bartek’s medicine. She then spent whole days raging and denouncing, even calling outside the Voyt’s house for witnesses to hear that her husband was dying. The sale converts a breeding animal and its litter into emergency medical money, but leaves the household with no such livestock to rely on afterward. Her public cries make private depletion a village spectacle, set against suspicion that Bartek might be feigning illness to affect the court case.

The capacity to care for pigs also exposes the limits of household labor. When the men were imprisoned, women had to manage fields and livestock at once, while spring brought calving cows, hatching fowl, and farrowing sows alongside sowing, planting, draining fields, and hauling manure and wood. The account presents animal reproduction not as effortless abundance but as additional work arriving at the season of peak agricultural demand. At Dominikowa’s farm, by contrast, blindness, illness, and the family’s disarray culminated in neglect: pigs squealed with hunger while cows went unmilked to pasture and horses chewed empty racks. Their cries register the collapse of daily care as plainly as any human complaint.

Care, Neglect, and Mutual Aid

A pig’s presence could also expose how attentively—or poorly—a household was being run. At Boryna’s farm, the absence of a housekeeper was already understood as an opening for things to go wrong. Later, in the barn, Jagna’s pig rooted through potatoes while chickens scratched at grain screenings that should have been stored. Hanka scolded Józka and tugged Witek’s curls; the boy fled, and the girl protested. Hanka’s frustration fell on the pig as well, which ran off squealing with Łapa clinging to its ear. The scene makes animal care part of the household’s larger disorder: provisions meant for people and livestock alike are vulnerable when supervision falters, and irritation passes readily from people to animals.

The novel also shows a piglet becoming a small but tangible form of support between households. When Nastusia was in need, someone asked Hanka to give her a piglet, promising that Nastusia might pray for the donor in return. Hanka agreed and sent Witek to lead the animal to Nastusia on a string, since she hesitated to visit herself. The exchange joins material assistance to prayer without making either one a substitute for the other: a living animal offers practical value, while the promise of a prayer gives the gift a reciprocal, devotional meaning.

Across these episodes, pigs register the condition of the rural household in unusually concrete terms. A litter may represent future security, but it also requires feeding and care; a wandering sow can destroy a neighbor’s crops, and a stolen or sold animal can undo a family’s hopes of making it to harvest. The pigs’ recurring movements through yards, barns, fields, and fences connect ordinary husbandry to the novel’s larger pattern of scarcity and interdependence. Their cries are not merely part of the farm’s soundscape: at moments of abundance they mark reproduction, while under neglect or poverty they make the failure of household care audible.