Poverty and the exploitation of peasants by those in power

Poverty and the exploitation of peasants by those in power shape daily life in Lipce as an interlocking condition: insecure food and work leave villagers exposed to landlords, officials, creditors, and the demands of their own community. The resulting hardship is neither a single calamity nor an abstract social ill. It appears in frozen potatoes, empty stomachs, unpaid dues, lost animals, and laborers excluded from work, while the institutions that might offer redress often deepen the burden. Against this pressure, the novel sets protest and mutual aid, but also the indifference that allows deprivation to persist.

Material hardship and unequal exposure

The poor experience scarcity in the most immediate terms: food, warmth, and the ability to keep a household functioning. In one account of village distress, a family has no potatoes left, has sold its quilt, and must beg groats from the miller because no one will lend until harvest. The daughter who seemed close to death is suffering from hunger. In another household, a woman has given birth while sick and impoverished, with no money saved and no milk for the newborn. Her land cannot feed her family when the labor needed to work it is absent. These details make poverty a compound crisis: illness, hunger, childbirth, and inadequate shelter intensify one another rather than arriving separately.

The shortage also reaches those who are not usually described as the poorest. During a harsh preharvest, farmers are called into the chancellery over taxes, court-building dues, and other payments. Some lack even enough for salt; others hand over their last zloty while asking to pay after harvest or at the next fair. Their visible deference—bowing, and in some cases kissing the Notary’s hand—shows how financial need becomes a relation of dependence. The demand does not wait for the harvest that might make payment possible.

Hanka the Farmstead Keeper’s account of a struggling family gives poverty a domestic scale. The cow has fallen sick, the potatoes rotted and had to be bought for planting, wind destroyed the byre, and her son’s wife remains ill after childbirth. The losses span livestock, seed, shelter, and health. Hanka’s return to her children is not presented as an escape from these pressures: she returns because she is their mother and cannot leave them alone in such misery. The household’s prospects remain exposed to events it cannot control, and are left to Providence as much as to human effort.

Work, land, and the shifting of risk

Work is a critical line between subsistence and hunger, but access to it is controlled by those with greater power. During winter, at least twenty hired laborers in Lipce are desperate for employment. Several have lost potatoes to frost, have no money coming in, and face a preharvest expected to be especially lean. Villagers had counted on the squire’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide jobs for everyone. Instead, the manor refuses to hire a single man from Lipce after a complaint has been lodged against it. A dispute over the forest therefore becomes a dispute over wages and survival: the decision to exclude local workers imposes the cost of the conflict on households already near hunger.

The same struggle combines customary claims to resources with the need for immediate income. Maciej Boryna looks across the forest and reckons the land in morgen, counting his own four and Jagna’s one. He believes the manor’s claim is excessive and that the peasants are being wronged; his attachment to the woodland is both material and tied to a contested understanding of rights. At the confrontation with the woodcutters, the crowd’s complaint is that the manor is felling the villagers’ forest, denying them employment, and repeatedly driving them toward ruin. Previous complaints and court action have not produced a remedy they can recognize. Their anger grows from accumulated injuries, but the immediate pressure is visible in trees being cut and work being withheld.

The dispute also reveals how easily a claim to justice can collide with a livelihood. One villager argues that the squire might relent if someone honestly explained how many people would suffer; another refuses to beg and insists that no fir should be cut until the manor reaches an agreement. The villagers do not face a choice between a simple legal principle and a simple economic interest. They are contesting who can decide how forest resources are used, while relying on the same forest conflict to open access to paid work.

Extraction through institutions and exchange

The novel portrays official power as operating through repeated, ordinary demands as well as direct coercion. While the village waits during a difficult preharvest, the Notary privately reminds farmers of taxes and unpaid public dues. He is also shown using threats of the gendarmes, promises, and personal favors to extract goods and concessions. His requests range from oats and goslings for the Prefect to straw for rope. The smallness and variety of these demands do not make them harmless: together, they draw on households’ stores and obligations when even basic food may be scarce.

The proposed school levy extends that pressure into a public decision. The Notary describes a school serving Lipce, Modlica, Przyłęk, Rzepki, and smaller villages, then explains that land, construction, upkeep, and a teacher will require an additional tax of twenty kopecks per morgen. He presents the measure as evidence of official benevolence and promises that approval will allow construction to begin that year, with children attending the next autumn. Yet the villagers have just been shown struggling to meet existing obligations. The promise of a future public benefit is therefore inseparable from the immediate weight of a new charge, and the official presentation leaves little room for the villagers’ capacity to pay.

Economic relations beyond the chancellery also carry unequal risk. A Jewish rag-picker struggles to push a loaded barrow through heat and sand, with rags, boxes, a basket, and a cage of chickens. He asks Antek the Lover for help and offers payment and goods in return. As they make their way toward the forest, he observes that the farmer lives off the land, the merchant off trade, the squire off the grange, the priest off the parish, and the official off all of them. Antek objects that each person should live justly rather than swindle the next. The exchange does not resolve their disagreement, but it frames extraction as a chain: one person’s livelihood may depend on the resources and labor of others, while hardship is passed along rather than removed. Antek helps push the barrow and buys sweets for the children, making his practical assistance a pointed contrast to the harsher transactions elsewhere.

Solidarity, protest, and the limits of relief

Mutual aid answers some needs that neither the market nor official institutions meet, but the novel does not present it as a sufficient remedy. When an impoverished woman’s children cry from hunger, she says she would steal from the altar if that were what it took to feed them. She accepts an offer of a bushel of potatoes that can be worked off at harvest, and credits Hanka the Farmstead Keeper with preventing the family from starving. The help is concrete and conditional on future labor, yet it brings food within reach at a moment when money and credit are unavailable. Hanka’s care is not simply an expression of sentiment: it responds to particular losses and keeps the household going.

The account of neighboring families reveals the limit of this assistance. Farmers have troubles too, but some are occupied with how to fill their own stomachs or whom to lend to at the highest interest. The poor live in the same village, separated by little more than a field boundary, while their suffering goes unattended. Religious language can become a way of explaining away this neglect: the poor are left to Jesus’ care, and deprivation is attributed to divine order, even as those better provided for protect their comfort from the sounds of complaint. The criticism does not deny faith; it exposes the gap between invoking Providence and accepting a duty to help.

Collective protest attempts to make that neglected suffering audible. At the forest confrontation, the crowd gathers behind Maciej Boryna, and its grievances encompass lost rights, denied work, confiscations, and repeated harassment. In another discussion, villagers propose approaching the Germans together to warn them not to buy Podlesie, threatening to prevent sowing or building if they proceed. Such plans show collective action being used to resist decisions made over the peasants’ heads, although they also carry the danger of escalation. The novel’s account of poverty thus links survival to control over land, work, and the rules governing both. Its sharpest contrast is between the ease with which power can impose costs on vulnerable households and the uncertain, labor-intensive solidarity required to keep those households fed.