Serfdom

Serfdom is the historical system of landowner power and compulsory peasant labor that forms a crucial background to The Peasants. Abolished in the partitioned territories at different times, it did not erase the inequalities it had shaped: poverty, insecure work, and conflict over land continue to organize life in Lipce, while the memory of past subjection complicates appeals to Polish national unity.

Definition and abolition

Before emancipation, peasants and the land on which they lived were subject to landowners, and peasants owed them unpaid labor for a fixed number of days each week. This arrangement existed within a society where the nobility held extensive privileges, including landownership, judicial authority over peasants, political rights, and exemption from taxes. The system’s power was not only economic: it placed rural workers under the authority of those who owned the estates and controlled local resources.

Abolition came at different times in the three partitions. Serfdom ended in the Prussian partition between 1811 and 1850, in Austria in 1848, and last in the Russian partition in 1864. The change accompanied the decline of the landed class and the arrival of a capitalist countryside. Landowners now had to pay for labor that had previously been compelled without wages. Estates deprived of free labor could decline or accumulate debt, while agricultural workers often received wages too low to live on. Around half the rural population was illiterate, a further barrier to social advancement or alternative employment.

Emancipation and continuing insecurity

The end of legal bondage did not guarantee economic independence. The novel’s village economy is marked by hard-to-find ready money, debts, taxes, and the costs of preparing for winter. Before the St Kordula’s Day fair, households debate which livestock or crops to sell and what clothing, tools, and farm necessities they need to buy. Even farmers with substantial holdings calculate how to meet their obligations; poorer households have still fewer options. Animals are cleaned or fed more generously in the hope of improving their appearance before sale. These transactions belong to a post-emancipation market economy, but they expose how little security many rural families possess.

The same precarity appears in the household of Antek and Hanka after they have been expelled from the paternal farmstead. Three weeks into their exile, they subsist on potatoes and salt, have no money, and face the prospect of selling their cow. Antek refuses an offer of threshing work, while Hanka, nursing a child, worries that they cannot survive the winter without selling their last security. Her account makes clear that poverty is not simply a matter of land or wages: it also determines who must absorb the household’s unpaid work and risk when a man will not earn as a hired laborer.

Labor, land, and inherited authority

The legacy of the old order is especially visible in the novel’s treatment of land. For the peasants of Lipce, secure ownership and a livelihood carry more immediate weight than the abstract cause of national independence. The conflict between the villagers and the manor is presented as rooted in former relations of serfdom and sharpened by later repression and policies that set peasants and nobility against one another. When the manor’s felling of the forest and refusal to employ local workers become rallying points, villagers describe a history of injuries, confiscations, and complaints that have brought them no remedy. Their resistance is therefore both a protest against current decisions and an expression of accumulated grievance.

Old forms of personal domination also remain part of the historical memory. The droit de seigneur, the master’s abuse of power over village women, is identified as one of the gravest humiliations associated with serfdom. The novel’s account of the estate steward likewise draws on the traditional image of an overseer as a despot who abuses authority, an image with roots in brutal practices under the former system. Such references do not mean that legal serfdom still governs the village; they show how the habits and remembered injuries of domination outlast its formal abolition.

Emancipation and the national question

Serfdom’s legacy also complicates the effort to make the peasantry part of a Polish national community. The nineteenth-century ideal of the patriotic Pole was largely shaped around the noble prepared to sacrifice himself for independence. Peasants took part in uprisings against Russia, but many landowners opposed their emancipation, giving peasants reason to distrust a national cause that could ask for their loyalty without securing their rights. The novel stresses that the partitions are not the source of every village grievance: land and a secure life remain more urgent concerns for many inhabitants.

Maciej Boryna took part in the January Uprising, yet this history earns him little standing as a political hero within the community. The uprising is remembered alongside punishment and loss, not as a shared triumph. Kuba, a farmhand in Boryna’s household, explains that he was taken along when others went; the graves of the insurgents lie anonymously by a fence. Jacek, a noble and former comrade-in-arms of Boryna, later acknowledges the damage done to Boryna by the nobility’s conduct. These details unsettle a simple story of national solidarity: participation in rebellion did not dissolve the unequal relationship between landowners and peasants.

The system’s afterlife in the novel

The novel places structural hardship in the rhythms of work and season. When the men of Lipce are imprisoned after the forest conflict, the fields stand fallow just as spring calls for ploughing and sowing. Women must manage crops, livestock, gardens, household tasks, and children, while some are pregnant or caring for newborns. The episode makes the village’s dependence on labor visible: imprisonment removes working hands from the land, and the cost falls across households already short of money and strength.

When neighboring villagers arrive to help, the fields revive. Carts and ploughs move out from the yards, and the communal work proceeds with a solemnity likened to a service. The people sow seed and entrust the next harvest to the earth. This scene does not undo the inequalities inherited from serfdom, but it sets collective labor against the isolation and insecurity that dominate other episodes. Serfdom thus matters in The Peasants not as a surviving legal code but as a historical structure whose effects remain legible in unequal authority, the struggle for land, precarious labor, and the unresolved question of who belongs within the nation.