Jagustynka

Jagustynka, identified as a Pryczek kinswoman, is one of Lipce’s most uncompromising voices: a woman who punctures the village’s pretences and challenges the idea that its injustices are simply the way the world must be. Poor herself, she moves through household work, village gatherings, quarrels, and crises with a sharp tongue and a close knowledge of other people’s lives. Her satire can be cruel, but it is joined to a persistent attention to suffering—and to a conviction that the community’s habits could be different.

Identity and Place in Lipce

Jagustynka occupies an exposed but socially alert position in the village. She is often where people gather, and others may fear what she knows and what she will say. At a drinking place, she may have no money for a drink; sometimes one acquaintance or another buys her a pint. Even then, she commands attention. When Franek is drunk and tries to act boldly, she threatens to pull out his curls and reminds him that she knows things about him and the way he runs the mill. He falls silent. Her authority is not official or financial: it comes from memory, observation, and the risk that she will say openly what others prefer to leave unspoken.

Her everyday presence is also tied to work. She spins with a distaff beneath her arm, winds the thread, and checks the geese, pigs, and byre, sometimes with Łapa beside her. The scene places her within the practical rhythms of a farm household even as she remains a restless commentator on village life. After Antek’s family is evicted, she moves in because Józia cannot manage the household alone. She helps Ewka cook and looks in on Boryna, who is struggling to manage things himself. Her movement between homes gives her a view of domestic life that supports her reputation as a knower of other people’s troubles.

Her frankness is not limited to serious disputes. At a gathering, with a drink in her, she stands with her arms akimbo, taps her feet to the rhythm, and needles those around her. Elsewhere, she jokes that Boryna might take a third wife and makes a spiteful remark about Jagna’s appearance. She can be shrill, insolent, and eager to find someone to tease. That comic and abrasive side matters: the village’s critic is not presented as a detached moral authority, but as a participant with her own sharpness and uneven sympathies.

The Village’s Truth-Teller

Jagustynka’s force as a character comes from her readiness to break through what the narrative calls the community’s false pretences. She knows Lipce’s shameful family secrets and local history; her statements can expose leaders’ hypocrisy as readily as private misconduct. She criticizes the richer farmers, but she does not idealize the poor, whom she can mock just as mercilessly. Her voice therefore refuses the comfort of a simple division between virtuous poor people and corrupt people with means. What she attacks is the conduct and self-excuse she sees across the village.

Her skepticism extends to religious explanations that turn suffering into an unquestionable providential order. When others respond tenderly to the story of Burek, moved by the dog’s apparent fidelity to the Lord, Jagustynka listens and then laughs. She also mocks Rocho’s confidence in a merciful, redemptive future. In her bleak alternative, the Second Coming would bring the Antichrist, who would mete out justice without mercy. Rocho is outraged and answers at length, as though delivering a sermon from the pulpit. Their exchange sets two interpretations of suffering against each other: Rocho’s hope in divine protection and Jagustynka’s suspicion that promises of salvation can console people while leaving present misery untouched.

Her criticism becomes especially pointed when she disputes the claim that social arrangements are eternal. Speaking with Boryna about Magda, a pregnant girl driven from home in winter who nearly dies after giving birth, Jagustynka challenges his assertion that the world has always been ordered this way and cannot be changed. She recalls an earlier time when the village had a hospital for the poor, and argues that the supposed apparatus of the world is historical, not universal: it depends on human arrangements and the will of the majority. The memory matters because it makes collective care imaginable. Boryna’s fatalism treats abandonment as inevitable; Jagustynka answers with evidence that Lipce once organized assistance differently.

Poverty, Care, and Mutual Obligation

Jagustynka’s anger at social neglect is grounded in the material particulars she sees. She describes the hard winter facing hired hands, including people whose potatoes have frozen and who have no money coming in. Some expected the squire’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide work, only to learn that no men from Lipce would be hired. She stresses what that refusal means before spring: a lean preharvest, hot food only once a day for some, and people going to bed hungry. Her argument connects a decision about employment to its consequences in village kitchens, rather than treating the matter as an abstract dispute over work.

She likewise condemns the way prosperous farmers live beside poverty without accepting responsibility for it. In her account, one farmer worries about filling his own belly while another calculates how much interest he can charge; neither troubles over poor neighbors who may die at their fences. People leave the poor to Jesus’ care and call the existing arrangement divine order, she observes, even as they protect their own meals and warm themselves against the cries of the hungry. Her objection is not that faith has no place in village life, but that religious language can become an alibi for withholding help.

The stories she recounts give that accusation a human scale. She describes a freezing cottage with straw stuffed in the windows, one bed shared by people huddling together, no potatoes left, and a quilt already sold. The daughter of a family is not dead, she says, but hunger has brought her close to it; even a quart of groats must be begged from the miller, while credit and loans are unavailable until harvest. Jagustynka goes to help when called, including when Florka Pryczkowa is about to give birth, despite saying that her own children have wronged her. In the account, urgent need overrides the claim of private resentment.

She is not exempt from the precarity she describes. Her grandchildren’s hunger is more than a figure of speech: she says she is accustomed to going hungry herself, but cannot bear to hear the little ones cry that there is nothing to eat. When she emerges from the forest bent almost double under a bundle of wood, Hanka offers her a bushel of potatoes to be worked off at harvest. Jagustynka accepts and blesses her; she says that without Hanka the poor would have starved. Her willingness to repay the potatoes matters alongside the gratitude: assistance becomes an exchange grounded in need and future labor, not a distant promise of charity.

Women, Sexual Morality, and Unequal Judgment

Jagustynka’s most explicit social judgments concern the unequal standards applied to men and women. She objects to a moral order in which a man may leave his wife for years, behave as he pleases, and yet be ready to punish her if anything happens; the woman receives the blame while the man escapes public censure. Her point is not that women should bear no responsibility. If both lovers have sinned, she argues, both should answer for it. What she rejects is a system that makes the consequences fall on the woman alone, while treating the man’s desire as ordinary and forgivable.

She extends that demand for reciprocal accountability into a deliberately harsh proposal: if a man takes another man’s woman, he should have to keep her, and if he refuses, he should be beaten and jailed. The severity is part of her polemical voice, but the principle beneath it is clear: sexual conduct cannot be called a shared sin when punishment is reserved for only one party. She describes how women are left with the weeping and the disgrace while men sow their wild oats without a word against them. Her criticism is unusually direct because she questions not only an individual man’s behavior but the rules by which the community decides who must suffer for it.

Her treatment of Jagna is more complicated than a consistent defense of women. Jagustynka can speak spitefully about Jagna’s appearance and make cutting insinuations about the conduct of Jagna’s mother. Yet she also defends Jagna against a blanket condemnation, calling her exceptionally good and clever, and emphasizing that she has suffered and borne many crosses. These positions do not resolve into simple approval or disapproval. Jagustynka can take part in gossip and cruelty, while still recognizing the injustice of reducing a woman to the village’s accusation against her. The contradiction keeps her criticism rooted in the imperfect social world she inhabits rather than turning her into an uncomplicated mouthpiece.

Narrative Role and Significance

Jagustynka’s influence comes through words, but the novel repeatedly sets those words beside work and care. She spins, helps cook, attends to people in distress, gathers wood, carries berries to Józia, and prepares a paste from buckwheat flour, unsalted butter, and egg yolks for the sick girl’s face and neck. The specific treatment is offered as part of a household’s improvised response to illness; it also shows Jagustynka’s practical presence in a crisis. Her scolding and mockery are not the whole of her character, any more than her acts of help erase her spite.

Even in scenes of death, her mixture of attention and irreverence persists. She joins Ambrozy and Agata in attending to a dead person’s soul, yet rebukes someone for praying for the dead while keeping an ear cocked for gossip. At another moment of mourning, she predicts that before the year is out she will be singing a new hop-song to someone she addresses. Humor, grief, ritual, and gossip share the same social space; Jagustynka moves among them without adopting the solemnity expected of a moral exemplar.

Her narrative function is consequently double. She makes hidden contradictions audible—between religious consolation and material abandonment, between claims of unchangeable order and memories of collective provision, and between shared wrongdoing and unequal punishment. At the same time, her own inconsistencies show how readily a community’s habits can live inside the people who criticize them. Jagustynka is capable of ridicule, prejudice, and sharp personal attack, yet she notices what the more comfortable villagers prefer not to see and acts when hunger or illness demands a response. The force of her presence lies in that uneasy combination: she punctures Lipce’s moral self-image, but she does so from within its daily work, its poverty, and its compromised forms of neighborly care.