Antek Boryna–Szymek

Antek Boryna’s support of Szymek Pacześ makes a decisive difference between Szymek’s exclusion from his family’s land and the possibility of establishing a farm of his own. When Dominikowa refuses him a settlement and drives him from her house, Antek urges him toward a concrete alternative: purchase six morgen from The Squire at Podlesie, with payment by instalments. Antek and Mateusz the Young Villager offer to guarantee the arrangement, converting solidarity into financial backing and helping Szymek imagine a future beyond his mother’s authority.

The crisis behind the support

Szymek’s need for assistance follows a rupture with Dominikowa. He feels wronged because she denies him land inherited from his father, turns him out, and refuses him a settlement. In despair, he cries that he will not surrender what is his, even if resistance sends him to prison. His anger is inseparable from material insecurity: without land or a home, he cannot readily build an independent life with Nastusia.

The proposed purchase offers a way around that impasse. Nastka suggests buying six morgen from The Squire and paying in instalments. The proposal gives Szymek a possible route to ownership outside the inheritance controlled by Dominikowa, but it immediately raises practical questions. Nastusia has a thousand zlotys for a down payment; Szymek and his supporters must still reckon with the costs of a cottage, livestock, tools, and seed. The plan is promising, not self-executing.

Antek turns encouragement into a commitment

Antek responds by urging Szymek not to waste time hesitating and to approach The Squire about the land. Szymek insists that he can make a farm work: he says that he ploughed, sowed, and brought in the harvest on his mother’s land, and asks his companions to judge his labor for themselves. His appeal is not simply for pity. He offers his record of work as evidence that, given land, he can support himself.

The decisive assistance is Antek’s offer to stand surety alongside Mateusz the Young Villager. Their guarantee addresses a central obstacle to buying on instalments: Szymek needs others to vouch for him. Antek therefore does more than affirm Szymek’s capability or encourage him to bargain. He accepts a concrete responsibility that helps make the purchase feasible. Mateusz joins him in that commitment, while Nastusia is moved enough by Antek’s kindness to want to kiss his hands.

Antek explains his help through experience of hardship. He says that he has suffered enough to know how misery tastes to other people. The remark links the immediate act of assistance to his own acquaintance with poverty, without making the help a mere transaction: Szymek’s need becomes something Antek recognizes and answers. Antek leaves after the discussion, but the proposed surety remains a practical pledge rather than a passing expression of sympathy.

From shared hardship to material aid

The support belongs to a broader pattern in which economic distress is not abstract. In the village, hired hands face winter without work or money, some households have lost potatoes to frost, and the coming preharvest period threatens hunger. Elsewhere, accounts of poverty describe families begging for grain, children suffering from hunger, and fields left fallow when men are imprisoned. Against that backdrop, Szymek’s lack of land is both a personal crisis and part of a wider vulnerability: the ability to work does not itself provide a livelihood when access to land is blocked.

Antek has also spoken against the manor’s treatment of the villagers, joining complaints about the felling of the forest and the refusal to employ local men. His public appeal names farmers and hired hands together as people who have suffered injustice. The guarantee for Szymek gives that language of shared injury a more intimate, material form. Rather than resolving the village’s general poverty, Antek helps one household secure a possible foothold of its own.

Evidence that the arrangement bears fruit

A later conversation confirms that Szymek’s purchase was not left at the level of hopeful discussion. Nastusia explains that Antek stood surety with The Squire for their land and helped them in other ways. The exchange also points toward the future farm: fields associated with Antek are still untilled while people await the division following Maciej Boryna’s death, whereas Szymek’s land is spoken of as theirs. The contrast marks a change from dependence on Dominikowa to a separate claim and prospect of cultivation.

The later account extends the sense of mutual aid beyond the guarantee. Hanka Borynowa has given Nastusia a young sow, which Nastusia describes as a welcome gift because it is fertile. That gift is Hanka’s, not Antek’s, but it shows the practical support surrounding the new household. Antek’s distinctive contribution remains the surety that helps Szymek acquire land; the later reference confirms the consequence and places his intervention within a wider network of assistance.

Significance of the relationship

The relationship is defined less by kinship than by Antek’s decision to recognize Szymek’s capacity and share the risk of his attempt to become independent. Szymek asks for land because he believes his work can make it productive; Antek backs that claim with a guarantee. The arrangement does not erase the cost of starting a farm or prove that every hardship has been overcome, but it changes what is possible after Dominikowa’s refusal.

In a story where land secures livelihood and independence, surety has consequences beyond a gesture of friendship. Antek helps Szymek reach a form of ownership unavailable to him through his mother, and the later account of the land confirms that this support had an enduring result. Their alliance makes solidarity tangible: another person’s confidence becomes the condition under which Szymek can begin to establish a home and farm of his own.