Father’s authority over family land

Father’s authority over family land is a practical power with intimate consequences: Maciej Boryna can refuse to surrender the farm to his adult son, but can also pledge valuable fields to Jagna Paczesiówna as a condition of marriage. The novel places this authority between a father’s determination to remain master of his land and his children’s claim to their portions. Because the farm is both livelihood and inheritance, a decision about who may control it becomes a judgment about who belongs, who must wait, and who is entitled to command.

Authority and the right to remain on the farm

Maciej Boryna’s refusal to be pensioned off states the rule in its most immediate form. After a meal, as Antek Boryna rises in anger, Maciej makes clear that he will not hand over control of the household and become dependent on his son. The refusal is not merely a disagreement about living arrangements: it rejects a transfer of authority that would leave the older man reliant on the next generation. Antek remains on the porch after the others disperse, while the conflict over who commands the household hangs unresolved.

The episode gives paternal authority a material basis. The person who controls the farm’s land can also resist being treated as an expense or a dependent. Maciej’s determination is sharpened by the account of an older woman who regrets having trusted her children, signed over her plot, and then been neglected and put to work in old age. She describes returning to the orchard she had grafted herself, only to be accused by her daughter-in-law of spying. Her story makes the danger of surrendering land concrete: once property has passed from a parent’s hands, the parent may lose both security and standing. Maciej’s response is unequivocal: he will not sign over a single field.

Inheritance claims and the marriage settlement

The principle is not presented as freedom from all competing claims. In discussion of Jagna’s proposed marriage, a speaker acknowledges that grown children have a right to their portions, even while arguing that Maciej can settle what is his own. The farm’s future is therefore a negotiation between a father’s present control and the expectation that land will eventually be divided among heirs. The tension becomes especially sharp because Jagna’s marriage settlement would direct a substantial share of the property away from the claims Antek and the other children might expect.

The proposed settlement is six morgen of Maciej’s best land, the fields by the road where potatoes had been planted in summer. Maciej initially recoils at the scale of the promise, calling the fields his best and recognizing that six morgen amount to a sizeable holding. The matchmaker recasts the transfer as security for Jagna: while Maciej lives, she argues, no one will take the land from him, and in spring a surveyor can mark it out so he can sow it immediately. This assurance makes the agreement possible by distinguishing a promised settlement from an immediate loss of use. Maciej agrees to sign the land over to Jagna and proposes going to town after the banns are posted.

The arrangement thus shows that his authority is not simply a refusal to distribute property. He can exercise it by choosing a recipient and attaching land to a marriage, even when the choice threatens his children’s expectations. The settlement is at once a provision for Jagna and a decision about the farm’s succession. Its practical terms—six morgen, a surveyor, the ability to sow the fields—make visible how marriage, ownership, and agricultural use are bound together.

The household rupture

When Antek and Maciej’s conflict erupts, the settlement becomes the grievance around which years of injuries gather. Father and son rush at one another, threaten and strike the table; Antek repeatedly grabs Maciej by the arm or collar and is on the verge of hitting him. Maciej pushes him away and tries to avoid a full brawl or a spectacle before the neighbours. Their quarrel is not only about Jagna or personal respect: Hanka’s cries identify the six morgen as the decisive material loss, alongside clothes and beads associated with her mother.

Hanka imagines the consequence as destitution: after working like servants, the family will be driven out to beg. Her response reveals what the legal or household decision means from the position of those who expected to remain on the farm. Maciej’s ability to dispose of land becomes, for Antek’s household, the power to imperil its home and future. The scene does not resolve the rival claims by reconciling them; it exposes how the father’s authority can be experienced by one generation as rightful control and by another as dispossession.

Land, rank, and the limits of the rule

Maciej’s conduct toward Kuba offers a parallel, though not an identical, expression of his belief in ordered ranks. He rebukes the farmhand for pushing to the front at church and tells him that “a farmhand is not a farmer,” insisting that each person has a place that should not be crossed. Kuba answers that he is not a beast and has a mind of his own. The exchange connects household authority to a broader hierarchy in which landholding distinguishes the farmer from the hired worker. It also shows that such order is asserted, not simply accepted: Kuba speaks back, just as Antek challenges his father’s command over the farm.

Maciej’s imagined four morgen in the forest and his insistence that the manor is taking too much likewise place his family’s land claims within a wider struggle over access and ownership. In that setting, he counts his own land together with a morgen associated with Jagna and refuses to accept that the manor’s account should prevail. These claims do not erase the difference between village rights against the manor and a father’s power within his household, but they underline the importance of land as something whose boundaries must be defended and whose allocation carries consequences.

The rule is therefore neither a calm legal formula nor an uncontested privilege. It operates through Maciej’s refusal to be pensioned, his decision to promise six morgen to Jagna, and the clash that follows when Antek’s family sees that decision as a threat to its portion. Land gives the father authority, but the same land makes that authority vulnerable to challenge: it is livelihood in the present, security for old age, and the inheritance through which the next generation measures its future.