Antek and Maciej Boryna

The relationship between Antek Boryna and Maciej Boryna turns on a bitter contradiction: Antek is expected to honor his father’s authority, yet he believes that authority has been used to wrong him and his family. A dispute over the settlement and Maciej’s marriage becomes a contest over who may claim justice within the household. Once father and son come to blows, the conflict leaves the home and settles into exile, poverty, and Antek’s enduring resentment.

Family Authority and the Demand for Submission

The strain is already evident when Antek seeks counsel from The Parish Priest of Lipce. The priest urges him to master his anger and warns him against taking vengeance on the head of his family. He frames resistance to a father as both a grave family offense and a sin against God. Antek knows the rule being invoked, but that knowledge does not reconcile him to it: he cannot accept that being the head of a family gives a father permission to act without answerability to his children.

The priest’s appeal to meekness only sharpens the disagreement. Antek rejects the expectation that the wronged must quietly endure whatever their elders do. His protest is not simply a refusal to obey; it is a challenge to the moral order that makes obedience the child’s duty while leaving the father’s conduct beyond challenge. His anger gathers force from this unequal arrangement, and he voices the possibility of leaving rather than continuing to submit to it.

The Settlement Dispute and the Household Confrontation

The conflict becomes immediate when the blacksmith’s wife arrives with others to speak to Antek about the settlement. Maciej’s wedding is set for Sunday, and the settlement has already been made; the visitors’ concern, however, is not the wedding itself. Their arrival brings the family’s competing claims into the room, where Antek insists that he and the others will stop what they consider a wrong, by force of their opposition if necessary and through the court if need be.

Maciej answers the legal threat with a threat of his own. The dispute quickly expands beyond the settlement into a reckoning over past injuries: father and son enumerate grievances, shout, threaten one another, and strike the table with their fists. Antek repeatedly grabs Maciej by the arm or collar and seems ready to hit him. Maciej initially pushes him away and restrains himself, unwilling to turn the quarrel into a spectacle for the neighbors and the village.

The restraint collapses amid the wider household uproar. Hanka cries out over the family’s hardship and the six morgen Maciej has signed over, tying the settlement to the prospect that her household will be left to beg. When she insults Jagna, Maciej shakes her; Antek steps in to shield his wife and joins in the attack on Jagna. Maciej punches his son in the face, sending him against a glazed cupboard, which breaks as Antek falls. Antek rises bloodied and lunges back at his father. They seize each other by their shirts, drag and hurl one another across the room, and crash into beds, chests, and walls. The women try to separate them, but neighbors have to pull them apart. Antek is carried away exhausted and bleeding, his face cut by the broken glass.

Expulsion and the Break with the Homestead

The next morning, Maciej orders Antek out of the house. Antek is still in bed with his face bound in a bloody cloth; he gets up but does not answer as his father demands that he leave and directs him to pursue his complaint through the law if he wishes. Maciej sets midday as the deadline. The command converts the night’s violence into a decisive change in the family’s living arrangements: Antek, Hanka, and their children must leave the paternal homestead.

They go without another quarrel. The family packs its belongings and ties them into bundles; Hanka is nearly overcome by misery, while Antek revives her with water and urges her to leave quickly. He borrows a horse from Kłąb rather than use his father’s, and takes the family’s things to Hanka’s father, at the other end of the village. Farmers led by Roch come to try to make peace, but neither father nor son will accept reconciliation. The attempted mediation thus confirms the depth of the breach: their separation is not merely a pause after a fight but a refusal, on both sides, to yield.

Grievance After Separation

Three weeks after the expulsion, the rupture still governs Antek and Hanka’s home. Their poverty is severe: they subsist on potatoes and salt, have no money, and face the possible sale of their cow. Yet the narrative presents their silence as more than a response to want. Their words remain trapped in anger; neither looks the other in the eye, and the old injury remains as sharp as when they were forced from the homestead. The cold, damp room and the thawing snow on its clay floor give material form to the insecurity that has followed the family out of Maciej’s house.

Antek’s response to the separation differs from Hanka’s. She frets over the children and the household’s survival, while he is described as caring little for his own poverty so long as there is a roof over his head. What consumes him is the injury itself. He collects every remembered wrong and rehearses them like a prayer, turning memory into a means of keeping resentment alive. He believes the village has shunned him after the fight, and treats its apparent rejection as another addition to the case against his father.

A Bond Hardened into Feud

The later account shows that Antek’s anger has not simply transferred to Jagna. Her memory fades beneath the stronger, more painful grievance he bears toward Maciej, whom he regards as the person responsible for the injury lodged in his heart. The account does not show the father and son repairing their relationship during this period. Instead, Antek lives in a fever of revenge, neglects work and tomorrow’s needs, and sometimes leaves his bed at night to wander the village lanes and brood on retaliation.

The relationship therefore becomes a feud in which the original dispute is sustained by the way each injury is remembered and answered. The settlement and the expulsion are concrete blows to Antek’s household; the continuing resentment makes them an ongoing inner conflict as well. Their estrangement reveals the cost of Maciej’s authority when it is experienced by his son as unaccountable, and the cost of Antek’s refusal to let grievance loosen its hold. Father and son remain bound to one another through the very injury that has driven them apart.