The United States enters The Peasants as a distant possibility, not a narrated destination: a place across the sea that promises departure from Lipce’s hardships but demands the abandonment of home, children, land, and village ties. Its significance lies in that unresolved choice. For Antek Boryna, emigration is at once a conceivable escape and a terrifying severance; when he raises it with Jagna and later with Hanka, the imagined journey exposes what he cannot simply leave behind.

A destination beyond the village

The novel does not take its characters to the United States or describe their lives there. Instead, the country exists in conversation, under the colloquial name Hamerica, as a horizon beyond the familiar world of Lipce. The distance is emotional as well as geographical: leaving would mean quitting home, children, land, and village life for an unknown future. A speaker recoils at the thought of going out into the world forever, even while another voice observes that some emigrants leave willingly and do not wish to return. The contrast makes the destination neither a guaranteed refuge nor a simple threat. It is an imagined alternative whose meaning depends on the person contemplating departure.

That alternative carries particular weight in a story organized around attachment to land and the routines of village life. The United States stands outside the community’s immediate order, but the novel supplies no account of what awaits there. Its force comes instead from what a departure would sever. The prospect compresses a vast unknown into a stark personal question: whether escape from present troubles is worth surrendering the relationships and material ties that make a life recognizable.

Antek’s imagined escape

The possibility of crossing the sea is presented as practicable, not merely fanciful: a conversation points to a journey that could be made within three weeks and refers Antek to Jankiel for information. Yet the prospect immediately provokes dread. The speaker dwells on the scale of leaving everything behind, and the fear of permanent separation unsettles any easy calculation of emigration as a solution to hardship.

The destination also enters Antek’s relationship with Jagna. In an emotionally charged exchange, he asks whether she would go away with him, even to Hamerica. Her question about what he would do with his wife brings the proposal’s concealed obstacle into the open. The imagined departure cannot erase the existing marriage or turn their desire into an uncomplicated shared future. Antek’s sudden recoil at Jagna’s question marks the limit of the escape he has proposed: the distant country offers no easy resolution to the commitments and consequences waiting at home.

Later, Antek tells Hanka that there is nothing for it but to sell up and run away, even to Hamerica. Here the idea is attached to selling their property and leaving as a family, not solely to a lovers’ flight. Hanka, standing pale before him, refuses to go or let the children go to perdition. She makes her opposition a solemn vow before the holy pictures and threatens desperate violence if he forces the children to leave. Antek then says he is only talking. The exchange shows that the suggestion has immediate power even without becoming a plan: it brings the danger of separation into the household, and Hanka’s answer makes clear that the children and their future cannot be treated as incidental to his escape.

Emigration and the limits of escape

The United States is therefore associated with more than material hardship or the hope of better prospects. It tests competing claims on a person: private desire, marriage, parenthood, possession of land, and belonging to a village. Antek’s proposal to Jagna founders on the fact that he already has a wife; his proposal to Hanka founders on her refusal to uproot the children. In each conversation, the imagined destination sharpens a conflict that cannot be transported away or solved by distance alone.

The possibility also contrasts with the novel’s concentrated setting. Although the wider world exists beyond Lipce, the narration remains focused on the village and does not accompany those who leave or return. The United States consequently remains outside the reader’s view, defined by the departures people imagine and the attachments they fear losing. That absence matters: emigration can be spoken of as a route across the sea, but its outcome is not supplied as an answer to the characters’ difficulties.

Historical and narrative significance

The novel’s treatment of emigration sits alongside a broader historical problem: how peasants in the Russian partition might become participants in a Polish national community after the end of serfdom. The account of that problem emphasizes the weakness of Polish educational and administrative institutions under Russian rule and the difficulty of creating a shared national identity among people formerly subordinated to landowners. Against this background, the United States represents a possible direction away from the village, while the novel’s principal attention remains on the peasant community and its struggles over land, authority, and belonging.

That contrast does not make the destination a political program or establish that any character emigrates. Rather, the country serves as a measure of pressure within village life: when Antek imagines leaving, he names a way out of immediate circumstances, but the conversations expose the human ties and obligations that make departure costly. The United States remains distant and undescribed, while the consequences of contemplating it are intimate and present. Its narrative role is precisely this tension between an open horizon and the lives the characters cannot leave behind.