Boryna’s refusal to transfer land to his children

Maciej Boryna’s refusal to transfer land to his children is both a practical decision about inheritance and a declaration of authority within his household. Suggestions that he hand over fields and retire into his children’s care meet with outright resistance: the land remains his while he lives. That refusal sharpens an existing conflict with Antek Boryna and his son-in-law, and reveals how closely property, dignity, and control are bound together in the family’s life.

Land and household position

The dispute takes place in a household where land measures status as well as material security. Maciej Boryna thinks of himself as a substantial farmer, not an old man ready to relinquish his position: he owns thirty morgen and belongs to the Boryna family. Though he is approaching sixty, he regards himself as hale enough to continue managing his affairs. His age therefore does not, in his view, settle the question of succession; neither does the family’s need or expectation give his children a claim to immediate possession.

The land is also part of a wider pattern of scarcity and risk. Maciej Boryna notices the farm’s losses—the skewbald has been slaughtered, a piglet died, and crows took many of the goslings—and sees these as signs that things are slipping away. The threatened losses intensify rather than soften his resolve. He will not respond to insecurity by signing over even a single morgen; instead, he clings to the land as the basis of his own independence and standing.

The proposed transfer and refusal

The proposal is put plainly: why should Maciej Boryna not hand the land over to Antek Boryna? The suggestion includes a further arrangement, that he pension himself to his children’s care. Jagustynka rejects this as foolish. Maciej Boryna is still vigorous, she argues, and could marry; there is no reason for him to sign his property away. Her response makes the transfer more than an uncomplicated act of provision. Giving up the land would place him in a dependent position while he is still capable of directing his own life.

Maciej Boryna voices the refusal to himself with particular force. While life remains in him, he will not sign over a single morgen or allow himself to be pensioned off to the family. He even imagines that, when Grzela returns from the war, Antek Boryna can go and farm at his father-in-law’s rather than expect land from him. The thought is not a settlement accepted by the family; it is Maciej Boryna’s uncompromising answer to the pressure he feels. He presents the choice as a boundary he will not cross, whatever arrangements his children might prefer.

Family conflict and control

The land question is entangled with Maciej Boryna’s worsening relationship with Antek Boryna. He feels that his son insists on having his own way and answers him with hostility, so that even speaking to him seems to invite a painful retort. Maciej Boryna resents having to live in continual conflict and feels that he has no one to lean on beyond his own labor. The refusal to transfer land thus belongs to a household already divided by quarrels, rather than beginning as a detached legal or financial question.

His anger is also directed at what he sees as a failure of obedience. After his wife’s death, the family began squabbling over the land; he says that he hesitated to impose his authority because he did not want to cause a village scandal. He now regards that restraint as ineffective. In his view, kindness has not secured respect, and he wonders whether he can get anywhere without using force. This bitter reflection links the inheritance dispute to a larger struggle over who commands the household: he insists that his children ought to obey him, yet their resistance makes his authority seem increasingly precarious.

The son-in-law intensifies his suspicion. Maciej Boryna thinks of Antek’s Brother-in-law as someone who encourages the others while pursuing a definite share for himself: six morgen, a morgen of forest, and the rest later. Maciej Boryna refuses that timetable as well as the larger demand for surrender. He will not promise fields now in exchange for a later settlement, and he dismisses the son-in-law’s expectation that he will eventually receive anything while Maciej Boryna remains alive. His resistance therefore concerns not only whether land will be transferred, but who can set the terms and timing of that transfer.

Inheritance and the village’s material pressures

The insistence on retaining land takes place against a landscape of need, but the evidence does not show Maciej Boryna revising his decision in response to that need. During the winter, hired hands in Lipce are desperate for work; some have lost potatoes to frost, have no income, and face a hungry interval before the preharvest. The Squire’s refusal to employ local men for the felling at Wolf’s Hollow leaves people without the work they had counted on. The situation makes visible how land and access to work can determine whether a household eats, yet Maciej Boryna’s own defense remains centered on preserving his property and authority.

Jagustynka later describes poverty within the same village in starkly domestic terms: a cold cottage, windows stuffed with straw, a family crowded into one bed, potatoes gone, and a quilt sold. She also describes a sick mother who has given birth without money, food, or help, while the fields stand fallow because the men are imprisoned. Her account condemns the distance between comfortable farmers and poor neighbors, even when they live only across a field boundary. Set beside Maciej Boryna’s fierce defense of his own fields, this contrast exposes the wider stakes of property without making his refusal a direct cause of those hardships.

The land dispute consequently works on two scales. Within the household, it is a struggle over succession, dependence, and a father’s continuing command. Beyond it, the neighboring conflicts over employment, forest use, and poverty show how access to land and its resources structures village survival. Maciej Boryna’s refusal resolves none of the family’s antagonism; instead, it fixes the inheritance question as a point of confrontation, and makes the farm itself the material ground on which authority is contested.