Advent

Advent in The Peasants is not merely a date on the church calendar: it sets bounds on celebration, orders religious practice, and intensifies the contrast between the village’s communal rhythms and private longing. Its approach to Christmas gives the season a double character—one of preparation and restraint, but also of expectation, as Lipce moves through winter toward the feast.

Liturgical time and village life

A passage surveying life in Lipce places Advent within the village’s ordinary, densely shared existence. Betrothals, deaths, disputes, work, flirtations, and evening gatherings continually give neighbors something to discuss. A betrothal at the Kłąbs’ is celebrated without music, yet with as much rejoicing as Advent permits. That qualification makes the season a practical limit on festivity: communal happiness remains possible, but it is tempered by the calendar’s religious discipline.

The restraint does not make village life quiet. The same account describes women spinning together through long winter evenings, with laughter, chatter, quarrels, friendships, courtships, and arguments filling the cottages and roads. Advent thus occupies a lived social world rather than suspending it. The season’s rules and the village’s appetite for companionship coexist, giving religious time a visible place within everyday activity.

Desire under religious constraint

During the Christmas Eve narrative, Jagna is suddenly overwhelmed by thoughts of a man she has not seen for months. She tries to turn away from the memory, but her longing persists through her household work and brings her to tears. Her distress is sharpened by the moral language in which she understands her situation: she is Boryna’s wife, the desire is forbidden, and she recalls the priest’s warning in confession that the act would be a mortal sin.

The passage does not make Advent the cause of Jagna’s desire. Instead, the season’s approach to Christmas places her inward conflict beside a public religious calendar and a marriage that defines her obligations. Her household duties continue—she takes bread from the oven and later sees to the cows—but practical work cannot quiet her thoughts. The contrast between outward observance and inward turmoil gives the sacred season a personal, uneasy dimension.

Rorate and Marian devotion

The novel’s explanatory notes identify the pre-dawn Advent Mass as the rorate, named for the opening words “Rorate coeli,” translated there as “Drop down, ye heavens.” During the service, the faithful sing hymns to the Mother of God, represented by a large candle standing on the altar. The practice makes Advent’s waiting tangible through a gathering before daylight, sung prayer, and a single prominent flame.

This account presents the rorate as a communal devotion rather than a private observance. Its Marian focus gives the season a distinct ritual character, while its timing marks the day before ordinary village activity begins. The candle’s place at the altar links the worshippers’ song to a visible sign of devotion; the service’s name, meanwhile, preserves the language with which the prayer opens.

Pastoral practice and the approach of Christmas

A note on pastoral visits places household religious instruction within the wider calendar. It explains that, until the eighteenth century, priests visited the faithful’s homes before Christmas; later, these visits took place after Christmas and continued until the Lenten fast began on Ash Wednesday. The visits could also include an examination of the household’s knowledge of the catechism. The account therefore connects the church year not only to Mass and feast days, but to movement between church and home and to the transmission of religious teaching.

The narrative’s Christmas Eve chapter shows the season’s threshold in a different register. Lipce is already busy from daybreak, while frost, snow, and bright winter light establish the setting for the feast. At Mass, the priest preaches against evil and urges the congregation to consider sin; some worshippers sigh, beat their breasts, or weep. This is Christmas observance, not a description of the Advent rorate, but it reveals how the approach to and celebration of the feast are framed by prayer, penitence, and collective worship.

Narrative significance

Advent helps organize the novel’s movement between communal custom and individual experience. The season limits the music at a betrothal without extinguishing the village’s joy; its pre-dawn Mass gathers the faithful in Marian song; and its moral vocabulary echoes in Jagna’s conflict between desire and marital duty. The season’s significance lies in these overlaps: the same calendar that regulates public celebration also gives private choices a religious measure.

As winter advances toward Christmas, religious time becomes inseparable from the rhythms of Lipce. Pastoral visits, household labor, evening gatherings, and worship all occupy their own places within the season. Advent is therefore both a period of preparation and a framework through which the novel sets restraint against festivity, devotion against longing, and the ordered calendar against the unsettled lives unfolding within it.