Boryna family homestead is the household and working farm governed by Maciej Boryna, where livestock, family labor, and the control of land meet. It is not merely a domestic backdrop: the farm’s animals and buildings require constant attention, while the dispute over a land settlement turns the cottage into the setting for a family rupture that ends with Antek Boryna’s household leaving.

Farmyard and Household Work

Maciej Boryna’s rounds through the farmstead reveal its practical scale. In workaday clothes, he checks the horses, cows, barn, and pigs, then scolds Kuba and Witek after calves stray from their stalls among the cows. The episode makes the farm’s order visible as work that must be continually supervised, and establishes Maciej’s authority through his oversight of both property and people.

The homestead’s activity depends on a household workforce. During the same visit, Maciej returns to his chamber to find family members waiting; The Blacksmith's Wife has come to ask him for something. The meeting begins like a hearing, but the cottage is a family room rather than a court: requests, grievances, and competing claims over property are brought before the person who controls the farm.

Land Dispute and Departure

The domestic confrontation between Maciej and Antek escalates into a quarrel over accumulated injuries and grievances. Antek grabs at his father’s arm or collar and appears ready to strike, while Maciej pushes him away and tries to avoid a brawl that would become a spectacle for the neighbors. The shouting draws in the women and children, whose cries fill the cottage; the household’s private conflict spills into the yard, where Kuba and Witek rush to the window but cannot make out what is being said over the uproar.

The dispute centers on the six morgen Maciej has signed over and on other belongings that Hanka regards as part of what her family has lost. Her lament turns the homestead’s property decisions into a question of survival and injury: she fears that she, Antek, and the children will be reduced to begging after having worked like servants. The land transfer is therefore not an abstract arrangement but a change that threatens the security and standing of the household living on the farm.

The expulsion follows amid another crisis at the homestead. While Maciej makes sure that Antek’s family leaves, Kuba is genuinely ill, groaning in his bunk as the horses approach to sniff and lick his face. Witek brings him water and secretly rinses bloody rags in the stream, but Maciej does not notice. Antek’s family packs its possessions and ties them into bundles without a further quarrel; Hanka is nearly faint with misery, and Antek gives her water and urges her to leave quickly, before his father sees them again. The departure transforms the homestead from a shared family residence into a place from which one branch has been driven.

Life Beyond the Homestead

After their expulsion, Antek and Hanka live separately from the paternal farm. In winter, their household is reduced to potatoes and salt, with not two groszy to spare; even Jankiel will no longer extend credit, and selling their cow seems the next necessity. Antek refuses hired work, while Hanka imagines working with her own hands to keep the cow and carry the family through until spring. Their new hardship clarifies what the homestead had represented: not comfort, but access to a farm economy whose animals, work, and stores could sustain a household.

The farm’s importance also belongs to a wider seasonal economy. In Lipce, winter preparations bring disputes over what to sell and what to buy, while taxes, commune contributions, debts, and servants’ accounts press on households at once. Even families with fifteen morgen may have to take a horse or cow to the fair; poorer families face still narrower choices. The homestead’s livestock and labor are thus exposed to the same cash shortages and seasonal demands that shape village life.

Agricultural Setting and Significance

The spring imprisonment of Lipce’s men shows how much cultivation depends on available labor. Women are left to manage fields, gardens, livestock, childbirth, and the many daily tasks of a farm, while the ground waits for ploughing and sowing. When neighboring villagers later come to help, the empty fields revive: carts roll out, ploughs press into the earth, and people sow seed in a solemn, prayerful hush. These are village-wide scenes rather than events confined to Maciej’s farm, but they illuminate the labor system on which a homestead such as his depends.

Across these changes, Boryna family homestead gathers the novel’s central material tensions into one place. Its animals embody ongoing obligations; its land carries security and inheritance; and its cottage becomes the threshold at which kinship gives way to estrangement. The expulsion is consequential because it separates Antek’s family from the farm’s resources, leaving them to face winter scarcity elsewhere while Maciej remains in control of the paternal home.