Jagna

Jagna is a young woman whose longing for love and freedom repeatedly collides with the claims of marriage, property, and communal reputation. As Maciej Boryna’s wife, she is the center of his affectionate attention, yet her thoughts return to Antek Boryna, and later her devotion to Jasio becomes so consuming that it takes on the language of prayer. Her trajectory ends not in reconciliation with the village but in collective punishment: a crowd tears her from her mother’s house and casts her beyond Lipce’s boundary. The contrast between the inward intensity of her attachments and the public violence directed at her makes Jagna a measure of the village’s power to judge and exclude.

Identity and Marriage

Jagna is the daughter of Dominikowa and becomes Maciej Boryna’s wife. In the household, Maciej is besotted with her: he watches her, seeks her advice, and indulges her, while village talk makes clear that his tenderness toward her contrasts with his usual hardness toward others. His farm is prosperous and orderly, and he appears content to have Jagna at the center of his domestic life. For him, she is an object of near-reverent admiration; for her, his devotion does not settle the question of what she wants.

The difference between Maciej’s attachment and Jagna’s feelings is evident in the household’s daily rhythm. She is impatient with his romantic attentions, grows cross with the people around her, and shifts work to Dominikowa or Józka. She finds reasons to leave the room, whether to check the oven or visit the colt, but above all wants to be alone with her thoughts of Antek. The domestic work and responsibility surrounding her marriage do not extinguish that longing; they become the setting in which it keeps returning.

Antek and the Persistence of Longing

Antek remains vividly present to Jagna even when they have no way to speak. She recalls that months have passed since she saw him, apart from their fleeting encounter on the road beneath the poplars. In that brief passage, Maciej drives the sleigh and Jagna and Antek catch one another’s eyes before they are carried apart. The meeting lasts only a moment, but it returns to her as a charged memory: she wonders why Antek, rather than Mateusz or another man, has come so forcefully into her mind. She knows that seeking him would violate her marriage and the priest’s warning about mortal sin, yet the prohibition sharpens rather than quiets her sense of separation.

At Christmas Mass, the distance between them briefly narrows without becoming a reunion. Antek stays at the back of the church instead of taking his former place among the farmers, then presses through the crowd until he is beside Jagna. She does not see him at first; when she catches sight of him during Mass, she is so moved that she stays bent low for a long time before looking directly at him. His haggard appearance and sorrowful expression awaken compassion as well as joy. The scene makes their attachment visible through small gestures—his movement through the crowd, her delayed recognition, their shared proximity—while the church setting keeps their encounter within the limits of silence.

Jagna’s gratitude toward Antek also surfaces when she believes he has defended her against Mateusz. Her anger at Mateusz is accompanied by a rush of tenderness and unspoken thanks to Antek for not letting her be wronged. Yet her emotion has no safe outlet: she takes it out on Józka and Witek, and Maciej notices that something is troubling her. The episode shows how private feeling spills into the household even when Jagna cannot openly act on it.

Desire, Jasio, and Devotional Love

Jagna’s longing is not confined to her memories of Antek. On a holiday when the village is full of people, songs, and noise, she feels restless and unhappy. She goes between cottages and fields, changes her clothes several times, and finds no relief. Walking along the poplar road at sunset, she encounters Jasio, the organist’s son. She cannot make herself flee or look away as he approaches; hearing his voice leaves her physically shaken.

After Jasio’s departure, she follows the tracks of his carriage. She watches his face and blue eyes, and her own response is described as a kind of enchantment: she walks after him almost helplessly until the carriage turns onto the poplar road and they lose sight of one another. In the later course of their connection, she learns the lonely places where he reads and thinks and imagines finding him there. Her desire becomes a constant expectation, expressed in the prayerful hope that she will see him again.

The religious imagery surrounding this love is both intimate and unsettling. At Mass, Jasio’s appearance in white amid incense and colored light seems to Jagna like the arrival of a living angel; she presses her lips to the place where his feet have passed and experiences the moment as a glimpse of paradise. When she later kneels before him, he lists the sins his mother has reported and asks whether they are true. Jagna denies them with such apparent sincerity that he believes her, then confesses her love and surrenders herself to his mercy. Jasio trembles and tells her that what she is doing is sinful. The exchange sets the intensity of her devotion against the religious judgment that constrains it, without making desire and faith simple opposites in her experience.

Widowhood, Hanka, and the Settlement

Maciej’s death changes Jagna’s position in the household. She repeats that she is a widow and breaks down in tears behind the cottage, weeping despite the rain. Hanka responds with sympathy rather than immediate hostility, bringing her inside and acknowledging that Jagna’s grief must be especially hard. This moment of kindness is important because it precedes their later rupture: the women’s relationship is not defined by a single, unchanging response to one another.

Their confrontation escalates into competing accounts of Jagna’s relationships and conduct. Jagna insists that Antek pursued her and says that he loved her to distraction and was sick of Hanka; these are her claims in anger, not an independently established account of Antek’s feelings. She speaks with startling confidence, while Hanka collapses under the words. The scene shows Jagna using speech as a weapon, but also reveals the painful stakes of a dispute in which both women’s security and dignity are entangled with their relationship to Antek and the household.

Property becomes part of the break. When the settlement paper is brought into the confrontation, Jagna throws it at Hanka and tells her to take the land and gorge herself on it. Ignoring Dominikowa’s protests, she hurriedly ties up her belongings and carries them into the yard. The exchange makes the settlement more than a document: it is folded into the struggle over who has a place in Maciej Boryna’s home and who can claim its material security. Jagna’s departure from the household follows the quarrel, though the paper’s fate is not established by the scene itself.

Exclusion and Narrative Significance

The village’s treatment of Jagna moves from gossip and scrutiny to organized violence. During the upheaval that precedes her expulsion, Antek works in the fields while listening to the distant murmur of people gathering. He thinks that the moment may have come and nearly throws down his scythe to go to her aid, then restrains himself, reasoning that the guilty should bear punishment. His hesitation establishes that the assault is not simply a private conflict between Jagna and Hanka: it unfolds before a community whose judgment has become a force in its own right.

The crowd descends on Dominikowa’s house, led by the organist’s wife and the Voyt’s wife. Dominikowa is trampled as she blocks their way, and Mateusz is knocked unconscious when he tries to defend the storeroom. Jagna has been shut inside. When the door is torn down, she stands pressed against the wall, white and silent, making no attempt to fight the crowd. A mass of hands seizes her and drags her into the yard. The description gives her neither a triumphant escape nor a final speech: the violence is rendered through the helplessness of her body and the crowd’s many grasping hands.

At the boundary mounds beneath the wood, the villagers lift the boards of the cart and throw Jagna down with the dung. She does not move. The Voyt’s wife kicks her and warns that dogs will be set on her if she returns, while others justify the attack as punishment for injury to their children and shame brought on the village. Jagna’s expulsion thus converts gossip and moral accusation into a physical banishment from Lipce. Her story exposes the gendered cost of communal authority: the village treats her desire as grounds for public punishment, while the mob’s violence becomes the final and most visible expression of its power to define who belongs.