Antek's Brother-in-law

Antek's Brother-in-law is a blacksmith whose practical influence in Lipce comes from moving between households, councils, and public gatherings, always with an eye to land, money, and advantage. His advice to Antek Boryna about Maciej Boryna’s settlement begins as an apparent effort to manage a family dispute; it ends in an angry rupture when Antek recognizes that the blacksmith has his own designs on the inheritance. Thereafter, the blacksmith repeatedly takes positions that give him leverage: he joins a profitable timber-transport arrangement with The Voyt and the miller, works to turn village anger against Antek, and waits for an opportunity to get hold of Maciej Boryna’s property.

Identity and Methods

The blacksmith is identified in the narrative chiefly by his trade and his place among the village’s influential men. He moves readily between private business and public life: he enters Antek’s room with advice, works a crowded wedding gathering with conspicuous energy, participates in councils, and visits Maciej Boryna’s household. His presence is often active rather than ceremonial. He persuades, provokes, curries favor, and looks for a financial opening.

His advice is practical but not disinterested. When Antek threatens to take his dispute over the land to court, the blacksmith tells him that anger will not move Maciej Boryna and proposes a face-to-face discussion with the blacksmith’s wife present. He stresses that, although Maciej has signed a settlement, he may still withdraw it while alive. The warning is grounded in the immediate situation, but the blacksmith’s own later words expose the interest behind his intervention: he says he will not let the land go. The advice therefore offers both a strategy for Antek and a way for the blacksmith to stay close to a valuable family dispute.

From Adviser to Antek’s Enemy

The alliance breaks in the same conversation in which the blacksmith tries to guide Antek. Antek calls him a thief and a Judas and advances on him; the blacksmith flees. Once on the road, he interprets the confrontation as evidence that Antek has seen through his schemes and might expose him to Maciej Boryna. He vows to prevent that, even as he resents Antek for rejecting what he describes to himself as brotherly advice. The episode makes their conflict more than a disagreement about how to approach an obstinate father: both men understand the land as something to secure, and neither trusts the other’s account of whose interests are being served.

The blacksmith does not simply abandon his efforts to influence the household. On a later occasion, he appears at a family gathering in Sunday clothes, moving rapidly among the guests, drinking, toasting, chatting, and drawing attention as he goes. In the surrounding family tension, Hanka Borynowa is quietly working at her loom while the blacksmith’s wife waits for Maciej Boryna; news arrives that Maciej and Jagna Borynowa have invited the organist’s family and the priest to their wedding. The blacksmith’s presence places him within the same social world in which marriage, reputation, and land transactions overlap, even when he is not the principal party to the exchange.

Business and Village Alliances

At a crowded gathering in the inn, the blacksmith’s local influence appears alongside the tensions over timber and employment. Villagers from Rzepki sit apart from the main groups, while Bartek from the Sawmill reports what the priest has told the workers and condemns the squire. The blacksmith is elsewhere in the village’s web of alliances: when Mateusz warns that he is entering with a gendarme, the two arrive arm in arm, already drunk, and are led from the bar to a private room. The scene links him socially with an agent of authority at the very moment that other villagers are debating the manor’s conduct.

His political and commercial alignments become explicit when The Voyt tells Maciej Boryna that he, the miller, and the blacksmith have made an agreement with the manor. The three are to transport wood to the sawmill and planks to town. Maciej replies that others blame them for shutting other villagers out of the chance to earn money. The arrangement makes the blacksmith a direct beneficiary of cooperation with the manor, while ordinary villagers see the agreement as restricting access to work. His business interests thus help explain why he is suspected of standing with powerful partners rather than with the wider village.

The blacksmith and the miller also hold a council without Maciej Boryna, a fact Maciej uses to deny that he took part in their deliberations. Their exclusion of him deepens his anger at not having been consulted, while reinforcing the blacksmith’s position inside a narrower circle of village and manor business. At another point, the blacksmith tries to sour Maciej against Jagna Borynowa and ingratiate himself with him again. As Jagna becomes increasingly resentful of her treatment in the household, the blacksmith’s visits form part of the pressure gathering around the marriage, although the evidence does not make him the sole cause of its breakdown.

Accusation and Collective Anger

After a fire, the blacksmith turns suspicion of Antek into a public campaign. He tells the peasants that Antek had long threatened to set a fire and that Maciej Boryna had kept watch at night. He insists that witnesses will testify and presents Antek not only as a suspected arsonist but as a danger to the whole village: he accuses him of encouraging farmhands against their elders and betters and demands severe punishment. His denunciation folds together the fire, Antek’s earlier conduct, and the affair with Jagna Borynowa, amplifying each charge until they seem to form one case against him.

Rocho points out the inconsistency in the blacksmith’s vehemence: only the previous day he had been drinking with Antek at the tavern. The blacksmith answers that anyone who might have ruined the village is his enemy, but Kłąb observes that he does not treat the squire as an enemy. The exchange makes the limits of his claimed public-spiritedness visible. His outrage is selective, and other villagers already have reason to see him as aligned with the manor.

He presses the accusation with such force that the crowd begins calling for Antek to be chained and handed to the law; some men look for sticks and want to drag him from his house. The Voyt, the Soltys, and older villagers try to calm them, but their words are lost in the uproar. Later, when the village gathers around the forest dispute, the blacksmith and the miller again try to deter collective action, warning that the whole village could be jailed. Their intervention fails: villagers know they are in the manor’s pocket and believe their own interests are at stake. Across these scenes, the blacksmith helps turn private advantage into public argument, but he cannot control the anger that argument unleashes.

Property, Greed, and Narrative Role

The blacksmith’s pursuit of advantage becomes clearest during Maciej Boryna’s prolonged illness. Hanka Borynowa takes responsibility for caring for the sick man, while the blacksmith and his wife call repeatedly, ostensibly to see whether he is improving but in practice watching for signs that he might speak or divide his property. Whatever the blacksmith can get his hands on, he takes; Hanka has to wrest old equipment from him and watch his movements. Their quarrels make the household itself a contested space, with the sick man’s possessions treated as prizes before his death.

He also tries to recruit Jagna into the search for money. He tells her that the organist has let slip that Maciej Boryna once intended to lend five hundred roubles before Yuletide, and suggests that the money must be hidden somewhere in the cottage. He urges her to watch Hanka and secretly search the corners of the house. As he speaks, he prowls the chamber and looks behind pictures under the appearance of indifference. The specific sum gives shape to his calculation: he is not merely waiting for an inheritance to be settled but actively imagining where cash might be concealed and how to reach it first.

When Hanka secures her position in the household, the blacksmith’s threats do not keep her from entering or guarding the property. She understands that whoever takes possession of the inheritance first may be difficult to dislodge and may have the law behind them. The blacksmith is angry that she has forestalled him, but she holds her ground, guarding what she regards as her own and Maciej Boryna’s. His recurring role is therefore not that of an uncontested village leader but of a persistent broker of influence, whose claims to good counsel and public concern are repeatedly tested against his pursuit of land, work, and money. Through him, the novel shows how material interests can travel under the cover of family advice, business cooperation, and moral denunciation.