Divine will and the peasants' fatalism

Divine will and the peasants’ fatalism is a recurring way of interpreting hardship, illness, and death in Lipce. It offers a vocabulary of submission when human control seems exhausted, most starkly in the villagers’ acceptance of Boryna’s decline and death. Yet the novel also shows that appeals to providence can coexist with anger, practical resistance, and criticism of those who leave the poor to suffer. Fatalism here is neither a simple rule that everyone obeys nor an uncomplicated expression of piety: it is a contested response to conditions shaped by poverty, unequal power, and the limits of individual agency.

Belief Under Material Pressure

The villagers’ sense of powerlessness has concrete causes. During a hard winter, at least twenty hired hands in Lipce are desperate for work; some have lost potatoes to frost, and families are already eating a hot meal only once a day or going to bed hungry. They had expected the Squire’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide employment, but hear that he will hire no one from the village after a complaint was lodged against him with the commissioner. The refusal turns anticipated relief into another source of insecurity, with the lean preharvest period still ahead.

In that setting, divine will can name what people cannot readily alter, but it does not erase their perception of who has made their situation worse. One speaker refuses to beg the Squire and stands by the complaint, insisting that no fir should be cut until the manor reaches an agreement with the villagers and gives them what is theirs. The exchange holds resignation and defiance close together: hardship may seem unavoidable, but the decision to withhold work and exploit a disputed forest is recognized as a human and political act.

Poverty, Providence, and Responsibility

The scale of suffering becomes even clearer in an account of poor households during the men’s imprisonment. Filipka’s eldest daughter is thought to be dying, but hunger, not a fatal illness, is the immediate danger. The cottage is cold, its windows stuffed with straw; the family has run out of potatoes and sold its quilt. They must beg the Miller for groats, while credit is difficult to obtain before harvest. Filipka’s husband is in prison, leaving the family without a dependable source of support.

The account continues with Florka Pryczkowa, who has given birth to a healthy boy but is sick, penniless, and too weak to work her land. She has no help, no one to cook, and no milk for the child; her husband, Adam, is also imprisoned, and the fields lie fallow as spring approaches. The speaker wishes that Jesus might grant the poorest an easy death rather than prolong their suffering. The prayer conveys compassion, but the surrounding circumstances show that hunger and labor shortages are not merely abstract trials sent by providence: they are intensified by the absence of family members, money, food, and assistance.

The same speaker directly challenges the village’s habit of treating poverty as someone else’s concern. Farmers, she says, attend to their own food or to lending at high interest, while poor neighbors live nearby without disturbing anyone’s sleep. People leave the poor to Jesus’ care and invoke divine order while protecting their own comfort from the sight and sound of need. She points to the Miller, the priest, the organist, and others as people who could help. In this criticism, fatalistic language risks shielding human indifference: trust in God becomes morally inadequate when it replaces aid that people with means could provide.

From Resignation to Collective Protest

The forest dispute gives another form to the tension between endurance and action. Addressing farmers and hired hands, a speaker gathers their grievances into a shared account: the manor is felling their forest, has refused them employment, and has repeatedly driven them toward ruin. Previous complaints and court proceedings have achieved nothing, and the cutting of the wood is presented as the last injury. The villagers answer with cries to drive the workers off and stop the felling; raised fists and a hundred roaring voices make their anger visible as collective action rather than private resentment.

Their protest does not discard religious or customary ideas; it turns on a claim that the forest is theirs and that no one recognizes their right. The earlier refusal to beg the Squire and the later appeal to farmers and hired hands both reject passive acceptance of decisions made above them. The novel thus places collective resistance alongside fatalistic speech, showing that belief in an order beyond human control does not prevent people from contesting the actions of the manor. Instead, the limits of appeal to courts and complaints sharpen the sense that the villagers must act together when no authority stands up for them.

Boryna’s Decline and the Language of Fate

As Boryna lies near death, fatalism becomes intimate and subdued. Kłąb whispers that death comes to everyone; another response accepts that it is God’s will and says there is nothing to be done, while observing that Boryna might have lived longer had it not been for the wood. Kłąb reflects that Boryna dies while others will flourish from it. The exchange does not settle whether his death should be understood as fate, the consequence of the forest conflict, or both. Instead, it lets the villagers hold a belief in divine inevitability beside a concrete recollection of the event they think shortened his life.

The setting intensifies this resignation. The visitors look at swaying fields, distant woods, green arable land, and a bright, warm spring day, yet their souls turn to stone as they submit to God’s will. The contrast is not between a dead world and a living one, but between the world’s visible renewal and the human sense that an individual life cannot be reclaimed. After the visitors part, more people come to see Boryna, but he recognizes none of them; eventually they stop coming. The end of recognition and visitation gives the language of fate a social as well as a spiritual dimension: the living approach, then withdraw, as his departure becomes unavoidable.

Death as Surrender and Sacred Encounter

Boryna’s decline is anticipated through an image of a lamp burning more strongly just before it goes out. Though he is shriveled and sometimes refuses even milk, the speaker says that a soul intent on leaving the world cannot be stopped by tears. The family is told to have a coffin made and to be ready for death at any time. This outlook does not make the approaching loss emotionally easy; it frames preparation as a recognition of the limit beyond which care, food, and grief cannot hold a person in life.

At the moment of death, the narrative transforms that limit into a vision. Boryna experiences the fields, wheat, furrows, clods, trees, thistles, and stones as if the whole world were rising against him and calling him to stay. A flash of lightning reveals God the Father on a throne of sheaves, reaching out to welcome the weary farmhand. Boryna hesitates, spreading his hands as during the Elevation, then gives thanks to God, falls before the Most Holy Majesty, and dies at that hour. Dawn rises, and Łapa howls mournfully.

The scene gives divine will a consoling and sacred form: Boryna’s death is represented not only as bodily extinction but as a passage welcomed by God. Yet the vision remains rooted in the material world of his life. The sheaves, fields, wheat, and furrows accompany him to the threshold, joining religious imagery to the labor and land that have shaped his existence. Against the villagers’ earlier sense that fate cannot be changed, the final encounter does not promise that suffering can be prevented; it renders the unavoidable passage meaningful within their Christian imagination.