Boryna declines to attend the anti-logging council

Maciej Boryna declines to attend the anti-logging council at which the farmers of Lipce plan their response to the manor’s timber cutting. The refusal exposes a fault line between his public standing as the village’s leading farmer and his private effort to secure compensation on his own terms. He voices agreement with the villagers’ grievance, yet chooses to pursue a separate settlement; later, when they gather to defend the forest, he returns to the center of their action.

The forest and the competing claims

Boryna’s reluctance to join the council takes shape against a longstanding dispute over land and access. Earlier, complaints about the manor’s pasturage include the death of a cow after it was driven from contested grazing ground. One speaker insists that the pasturage belongs to the farmers and is recorded as theirs, while another puts the loss at three hundred zlotys and proposes appealing to the commissioner. The animals’ injury and the threat of legal action establish the practical stakes behind Boryna’s later calculations: the forest dispute is not an isolated grievance, but another contest over resources and the manor’s power to enforce its claims.

Boryna also sees the forest as land bound up with his own holdings. As he rides through it, he counts four morgen as his and adds the one morgen belonging to Jagusia. He looks over the trees as property that might be lost, while appealing to divine protection and insisting that the farmers will not accept being wronged. This personal claim sits alongside the villagers’ collective claim to the woodland, making his position consequential to both his own interests and the community’s ability to act together.

The invitation and his public assent

The elders approach Boryna because they regard him as the community’s natural leader, even though he holds no official office. They say that everyone looks to him and describe the planned felling as an injury to all. Their immediate concern is that the manor has sold timber at Wolf’s Hollow and intends to begin cutting after Epiphany. The trees have already been marked and the forest measured, so waiting for official proceedings risks leaving the villagers with nothing to defend.

Boryna initially responds in terms that sound aligned with the farmers. He says the manor must not be allowed to get away with the cutting and agrees that the matter requires a communal decision. Kłąb invites him to a council at his home the following day, where the farmers are to meet after church. Boryna does not openly reject the cause or the invitation at first. Instead, he says that he cannot attend because he has promised to go to Wola, where relatives are dividing a farm and disputing over it. He presents himself as a fair-minded adjudicator, responsible for ensuring that no poor person is treated unjustly, and says he will stand by whatever the villagers decide.

The elders leave dissatisfied because they recognize the gap between this assurance and genuine participation. Boryna has affirmed their complaint, but he has not committed himself to deliberating with them. His courteous promise preserves the appearance of solidarity while placing the decision, and the risks attached to it, at a distance from him.

A separate bargain behind the refusal

Boryna’s private reasoning makes clear that the trip to Wola does not explain his absence as fully as he claims. He doubts that the village’s other influential figures, including the Voyt and the miller, will support the farmers. More importantly, he believes that if the manor understands he is making no collective demands, it may pay him sooner for the cow and seek a separate settlement. The personal compensation claim thus competes directly with the forest campaign: a collective confrontation could entangle his interests in a wider dispute, while a private bargain might produce a quicker payment.

He also calculates that the farmers may gain leverage by waiting. In his view, allowing the manor to begin cutting and then applying pressure through legal proceedings or detentions could squeeze a better offer from it than an early agreement. He privately dismisses the council as an effort that could proceed without him and expects the manor to hear that he is not making demands. His position is not simple indifference to the woodland. He has just counted his own four morgen and Jagusia’s one, and has spoken against the manor’s actions. Rather, he treats the timing and form of resistance as matters to be judged against his immediate financial advantage.

After the elders depart, the household goes to bed while Boryna remains up late, writing and reckoning with chalk on the bench. The image gives material form to his calculation: where the elders have asked him to join a collective decision, he is weighing figures and possible outcomes. The next morning, he orders the farmhand to harness the sleigh. The account follows his preparations but does not make his stated role in the Wola dispute an adequate explanation of the strategy already disclosed in his thoughts.

From absence to leadership

Boryna’s refusal is limited to this council; it does not amount to a final withdrawal from the forest resistance. When the villagers later assemble for action, they wait for the elders to fetch him. The gathering treats his presence as essential: he is described as the first farmer in the village, and the farmers will not move without him. This later dependence sharpens the significance of his earlier absence. The community’s need for his leadership persists even when his own choices have temporarily divided him from its deliberations.

Once present, Boryna leads the mobilization rather than standing aside. He addresses the crowd by invoking the injuries suffered by farmers and hired hands, including the manor’s refusal to employ them and the failure of complaints and court actions to remedy their grievances. He calls for the whole village to go to the forest together and stop the felling. The villagers answer with a common cry, prepare sleighs and horses, and set out armed with poles and farm tools. When they reach the woodcutters, Boryna rushes forward at the head of the crowd and declares the forest theirs.

His eventual leadership does not erase the earlier refusal or its self-interested logic. Instead, the contrast shows how his pursuit of an individual settlement coexists with a role that the villagers understand as indispensable to collective action. At the council stage he tries to preserve room for a private bargain; at the forest, he becomes the public leader through whom the villagers make their claim visible. The refusal marks a tactical separation from communal decision-making, while the later confrontation demonstrates that the boundary between his interests and the village’s struggle is unstable.