The Partitions of Poland

The Partitions of Poland were the successive divisions of Polish territory by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, culminating in the abolition of Poland as a political entity in 1795. They form the historical horizon of The Peasants: a nation erased from the map persisted in language, land claims, and the lives of people governed by foreign states. The novel’s conflicts take place at the village scale, but its account of land and power belongs to a much longer history of political dispossession and unequal ownership.

Historical Formation

The partitions came in three stages, in 1772, 1793, and 1795. They followed an alliance between Russia and Prussia, whose secret military cooperation against Poland dated from 1764, and involved Polish aristocrats who supported the two powers’ territorial claims during parliamentary deliberations. Prussia doubled its area and population through land taken from Poland; Russia acquired the largest share.

A treaty agreed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia in 1795 and signed in St Petersburg in 1797 sought not merely to divide territory but to suppress the name and memory of the Kingdom of Poland. Its declared aim was to prevent the former political body from being revived. The language of permanent erasure makes the later restoration of Poland in 1918 a reversal of that intended finality.

Resistance accompanied the process. In 1794, an uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko sought to save the country from Russian power and Polish collaborators. After the uprising collapsed, the final partition proceeded, and Poland ceased to exist as a political entity until 1918. Reymont returned to these events in The Year 1794, a trilogy published between 1913 and 1918, linking the partitions to a history of resistance as well as loss.

Rule and Social Structure

Partition placed the former Polish lands under different monarchies, each with its own language, culture, administration, and dominant religion. Reymont and his family became citizens of Russia because they lived in the territory assigned to the Russian share. The partition was therefore not simply a border change: it determined the political authority under which people lived and the state to which they belonged.

The powers seized Poland during its late feudal phase, when the szlachta held extensive privileges. These included rights to own and inherit land, exercise judicial power over peasants, hold public office, participate in politics, and produce and sell alcohol on their estates. The liberum veto allowed a single member of parliament to end a session and annul its resolutions. By contrast, the bourgeoisie was weak, particularly in the Russian partition, while peasants had been bound to landowners and required to work without pay for a set number of days each week in a system described as effectively serfdom. These ownership rights began to recede with the partitions and the enfranchisement of the peasants, but the account emphasizes how deeply property and status had structured Polish society.

The Historical Frame of the Novel

The political background clarifies the material stakes of village life without reducing the novel’s local disputes to national politics alone. In Lipce, pasture rights are contested through competing claims about what the register records: one speaker insists that the pasture belongs to the villagers, while another complains that people are continually driven away and that animals have been chased off. The death of a cow and the injury of a boy make the dispute tangible, and the suggestion of taking the matter to court or the commissioner shows the villagers seeking recourse within an order they do not control.

Forest rights bring the same tension into sharper collective focus. Boryna looks over the woodland and counts his claim as four morgs, adding the one morgen associated with Jagusia. He sees the trees as both a resource and an inheritance at risk, and imagines the Lord Jesus will not let the villagers be wronged. When news spreads that the squire is felling the peasants’ forest, villagers first doubt it; the timing, in mid-March, seems wrong for cutting as the ground thaws and sap rises. Their eventual resistance is expressed as a claim of ownership and customary right, while their complaints about lost employment, confiscations, and failed appeals to courts reveal the limits of formal remedies.

At the clearing, Boryna addresses the woodcutters from Modlica, Rzepki, and elsewhere, demanding that they stop because the forest belongs to the villagers. The confrontation makes visible a conflict among local users, hired workers, and the manor over who may control woodland and livelihood. It echoes the broader historical structure of the partitions—not as an identical political event, but as a continuing world in which authority over land is unequally distributed and those with weaker standing must make their rights heard collectively.

Political Time and Seasonal Time

The novel’s political history sits alongside a closely observed agricultural calendar. Seasonal change shapes work, scarcity, and the conditions under which people act. In autumn, the pond rises until it overflows onto the road near Boryna’s side of the village, while Lipce’s inhabitants gather cabbages and store them in barns, hallways, and rooms. The swollen water and crowded harvest record a community responding to the pressures of weather and subsistence.

Winter arrives as a force that unsettles the village: soon after St Barbara’s Day, winds race through fields and gardens, strip snow from the ground, and threaten roofs and fences. Later, the novel’s early-spring forest crisis unfolds amid thaw, dark skies, rain, and ice breaking on the pond. By late May, heat has withered vegetables and fallow grass, dried streams, and damaged potatoes, even as winter crops remain comparatively strong. When news of Boryna’s death is followed by warm rain, the rain revives thirsty crops, leaves, trees, streams, and earth. These cycles do not erase the historical pressures on land and labor; they give those pressures a recurring material rhythm, as the village must survive both political inequalities and the demands of each season.

Continuing Significance

The partitions’ effects outlasted their formal political arrangements. The account notes that even the distribution of votes in Poland in the early twenty-first century generally corresponds to the old partition map, despite independence having returned in 1918. This persistence underscores how administrative divisions can leave durable traces in political life.

For The Peasants, the period is thus more than remote background. It locates the story in a Poland whose inhabitants lived under foreign rule and whose rural society carried the legacy of sharply unequal rights to land and authority. The village’s disputes over pasture, forests, and the manor’s power give that history a local form: the question of who belongs to the land is also the question of who can claim it, use it, and compel others to respect that claim.