Easter

Easter in The Peasants is at once a major Christian feast, a recurring village ritual, and a turning point in the agricultural year. Its promise of resurrection is experienced through bodily and communal acts—prayer, blessed food, procession, reunion—while the story places that hope beside hunger, absence, and unfinished work. For Lipce, the feast can offer spiritual consolation without immediately ending hardship; its meaning deepens as the fields awaken and the imprisoned men eventually return.

The Feast and Its Ritual Calendar

Easter completes the Lenten fast and begins a period of celebration that the novel presents as more than a single Sunday. The explanatory notes identify the Resurrection Mass as a midnight service marking the end of Lent and the beginning of Easter. On Holy Saturday, baskets of food are blessed; the accompanying account describes a custom in which the blessed food, including eggs shared among those present, could be eaten after the midnight Mass. The feast thus brings sacred observance directly to the village table: fasting gives way to food, and blessing makes ordinary provisions part of the holiday’s religious life.

The celebration also unfolds through associated customs. On Easter Monday, boys traditionally drench girls with water in the observance known as Dyngus, or Śmigus-Dyngus. These rites give Easter a social duration, carrying the sacred feast outward into shared food, visits, play, and the return of ordinary village activity. The annual farming census is also identified in the notes as an Easter census, joining the religious calendar to the reckoning of agricultural life. Easter is therefore both a date in the liturgical year and a recurring occasion for the community to take stock of its households and land.

A Feast Marked by Absence

The sharpest contrast comes when Easter gathers people from across the parish while the men of Lipce remain in prison after the forest conflict. In the church, landowners occupy the sacristy doors, and peasants from other villages kneel in the places where Lipce’s leading farmers normally stand during services and processions. Women search the crowded church for their own husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, but find none. The feast is celebrated all around them, yet its customary promise of family gathering is denied to them.

The narration sets the brightness of the holiday against the women’s circumstances: they are left in darkness, cold, hunger, and grief, and expect to return to empty homes with their festive food. Easter’s general joy intensifies their sense of exclusion rather than dissolving it. The scene makes the absence public and visible: other villagers occupy Lipce’s customary place, while the women experience themselves as abandoned within a crowded religious celebration.

The Resurrection service nevertheless gives the women a form of comfort. As the Parish Priest approaches with the sacrament through incense and ringing bells, the assembled crowd sings and moves together in procession around the church. The narration compares the swaying congregation to a human forest, its many voices briefly joined in one song. This collective ritual does not erase the prisoners’ absence, but it changes the women’s immediate emotional state: tears give way to shared exultation, and their suffering is held within a communal act of faith.

Resurrection and the Return of Spring

Easter’s spiritual imagery is inseparable from the novel’s seasonal landscape. After the feast, the days grow longer and warmer; mornings remain misty, while noon and sunset bring increasing light. The earth receives rain and warmth, winter grain grows, and the village fields begin to demand attention. Spring is not merely scenery around Easter: it supplies a material counterpart to the feast’s language of life returning after death.

The novel makes that parallel explicit in a passage that presents the risen Christ as emerging from darkness and winter, bringing life to the oppressed and fruitfulness to what had seemed barren. Sunlight, birdsong, flowing water, and growing wheat extend the Resurrection beyond the church walls. The natural world appears to join the liturgical celebration, while the image of the earth’s renewal gives religious hope a visible, agricultural form.

That renewal is not effortless. With the working men imprisoned, Lipce’s fields lie fallow just when the soil is ready for ploughing, manure, and seed. Women must manage livestock, gardens, household work, and childcare as well as the tasks ordinarily done by men; spring births among people and animals add further demands. The contrast is consequential: Easter announces life returning, but the village lacks enough labor to bring the land fully back into production. The land’s readiness makes the human absence more painful and gives seasonal renewal an urgent economic dimension.

Household Recovery and Communal Reunion

Easter also marks private changes within the household. Hanka, who has been recovering in bed, regains enough strength to go to churching on the second Sunday after Easter. Although the women around her advise against the outing, she insists and walks after High Mass with Płoszkowa, leaning on her companion because she is still unsteady. Her return to the church is a small but concrete passage from illness and enforced stillness toward renewed participation in village life.

At the Boryna household, the Easter period places Hanka’s work and care alongside Boryna’s continuing incapacity. While others go out to the fields in fine weather, he remains inside, reaching into a ribbon of sunlight with his fingers. Spring advances outside even as his recovery remains uncertain. In another Easter-night passage, words spoken at the household gathering seem, in the narration’s image, to come from the walls, trees, and dead generations of Borynas, as though ancestral voices had been released into the world by the Resurrection. The moment makes Easter a time when the living are imaginatively placed in relation to those who came before them.

The return of the imprisoned men eventually turns the feast’s promise of reunion into a public event. Before the men arrive, Lipce prepares with food, clothing, and vodka bought on credit from Jankiel; villagers climb onto roofs to watch the roads. The men meet the women beneath the birches by the cross, where the first recognition is followed by prayer. Kneeling in a half-circle, the villagers give thanks before the Parish Priest greets the gaunt returnees, embraces them, and speaks with them. Easter’s religious language of return is thus answered by a physical homecoming, though the men’s thin faces preserve the evidence of what their absence has cost.

Meaning in the Novel

Easter brings together three forms of renewal that do not always arrive at the same pace: religious hope, the seasonal revival of the land, and the restoration of family and village ties. The feast’s rites offer a shared language for suffering, but the scenes of the imprisoned men’s absence show the limits of consolation when households still face hunger and labor shortages. Spring gives that tension material force: fields can be ready for seed while the people needed to work them remain behind bars.

The season’s significance lies partly in this contrast. The Resurrection procession joins individual voices into a temporary communal whole; the women’s Easter at first exposes how thoroughly that whole has been broken. Later, prayer at the cross and the return of the men begin to repair the separation. Easter is therefore neither a simple resolution nor merely a symbol. It is a recurring structure through which the novel sets grief against hope, religious ritual against material necessity, and the promise of renewal against the slow work required to make it real.