Sacred land and inheritance across generations

Sacred land and inheritance across generations are inseparable in The Peasants: land is a source of food and security, but also a bond to forebears and a claim on the future. The novel sets these meanings against legal ownership and economic scarcity. In the household of Maciej Boryna, the right to dispose of land collides with the expectation that descendants who work it will inherit it; in the forest, villagers contest the manor’s authority by asserting their own rights and shared dependence. Land is never merely property: its possession determines who belongs, who labours, and who may survive.

Land as livelihood and inheritance

For the farming families of Lipce, a strip of ground carries work, sustenance, and continuity. Antek Boryna articulates inheritance as an obligation extending beyond the living household: when told to find something better if he feels wronged, he refuses because what belongs to his family is there, inherited from grandfathers and great-grandfathers. His claim is not simply that he wants more land. It rests on a history of labour and descent, and on the conviction that a family’s place in the village is rooted in the soil it has worked across generations.

The force of that claim becomes clear in the dispute over Maciej Boryna’s settlement of six morgen on Jagna Paczesiówna. Antek objects that he and his wife work the land like farmhands while Maciej gives it to a stranger. In the confrontation, Maciej insists that the land is his and that he may do as he pleases; Antek answers that it belongs to the children. Their opposing statements expose the conflict between present legal control and anticipated family succession. Maciej’s authority as owner is real, but Antek sees the transfer as a breach of the order by which labour should lead to inheritance.

The dispute is sharpened by uncertainty about whether the settlement can be withdrawn while Maciej is alive. Advice to secure a promise before witnesses and the mention of a possible legal claim show that inheritance is not only a matter of custom or family feeling: it is also subject to documents, proof, and law. Yet the legal argument cannot resolve the emotional and material injury. Antek’s household is already working the land, and its members experience the transfer as exclusion from something they have helped sustain. To them, title and justice do not necessarily coincide.

The forest and contested rights

The same tension between formal authority and lived claims reaches beyond the farm. The villagers argue that the disputed pasture is theirs and point to its registration, while also recalling that others were driven off and a boy was badly beaten. Their appeal to the register joins documentary evidence to experience: a written claim matters, but so does the community’s memory of using the land and suffering when access is denied.

In the forest, Maciej Boryna looks at the trees as an inheritance and a practical resource. He counts his four morgen and Jagusia’s one, selecting the trees with his eyes as he travels through the woods. His calculation makes the abstract dispute intimate: the forest is imagined in measured holdings, attached to particular people and family interests. At the same time, his insistence that the manor may think the villagers’ claim excessive while they themselves consider it insufficient shows that ownership is contested in the very act of measuring it.

The conflict becomes collective when the manor begins felling the forest and refuses to employ Lipce workers. At a gathering, Antek Boryna links the cutting to a wider pattern of grievances: the manor has denied employment, harried the villagers, and ignored complaints made through the courts and to officials. He calls on farmers and hired hands alike, making the forest a rallying point for people whose positions within the village economy differ but whose claims have been injured. When the villagers reach the wood, they shout that it is theirs and demand that the woodcutters leave. Their action asserts a right they believe the formal order does not recognise, although the evidence of their protest does not make the dispute’s legal status simple or settled.

Poverty, work, and communal obligation

The meaning of land is tested most harshly by poverty. Before winter has passed, at least twenty hired hands in the village are desperate for work. The squire’s refusal to hire anyone from Lipce threatens not only wages but the food supply of households already short of money; some villagers have had potatoes freeze, and others eat a hot meal only once a day. The expected felling at Wolf’s Hollow had seemed likely to provide work to all. The manor’s decision therefore appears to the villagers as more than a choice about timber: it removes a source of livelihood at the moment when need is acute.

The consequences of scarcity recur in reports from households affected by imprisonment and the absence of working men. One poor family has no potatoes left and has sold its quilt; its remaining grain must be begged from the miller. Elsewhere, a woman gives birth with no money put by, no help at hand, and fields left untilled because her husband is in prison. These circumstances reveal the dependence of survival on access to land, labour, credit, and neighbours. A family may possess or work a plot and still be unable to manage it when illness, childbirth, or imprisonment removes the labour on which it depends.

The novel also distinguishes private possession from responsibility toward neighbours. A speaker observes that farmers worry about filling their own stomachs or lending at the highest interest, while the poor are left to divine care despite living only across a field boundary. The land that keeps one household secure does not automatically produce solidarity with another. In this contrast, the moral significance of inheritance is not only that property passes down a family line; it is also that a village’s resources and obligations connect households who may otherwise turn away from one another.

From local claims to political belonging

The novel’s historical frame gives these conflicts a broader significance. In the Russian partition, peasant emancipation came in 1864, after serfdom had bound peasants to landowners and compelled unpaid labour. The end of that system changed the countryside, but it did not erase poverty or make access to land equal. Against this background, the question of inheritance concerns more than the fortunes of a single family: it belongs to the longer struggle over whether peasants can become secure and recognised members of society.

The novel also raises the problem of how former serfs might become part of a Polish national community. The political ideal of the patriotic Pole had often been associated with the nobleman prepared to sacrifice himself for independence, while many landowners had opposed peasant enfranchisement. The novel’s appeal to farmers and hired hands as honest Poles gives the forest struggle a national vocabulary, but their immediate demands remain concrete: they want their rights acknowledged, the timber felling stopped, and work made available. The land binds political belonging to material experience rather than to patriotic language alone.

This does not mean that the village’s collective action resolves the larger question. The novel presents the possibility of peasant political agency while remaining sceptical about its emergence as a new class. Its land conflicts bring people together around a common injury, yet household rivalry, poverty, unequal status, and competing interests persist. Land is consequently both the basis for a shared claim and the ground on which divisions endure: an inheritance from the past, a condition of present survival, and an unresolved test of who can claim a future in Lipce.