The January Uprising of 1863–64 was a revolt against Russian rule and a failed attempt to restore the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In The Peasants, it is both a buried history of violence and a test of national belonging: the uprising’s memory reaches into village life, while the novel questions whether peasants—recently freed from serfdom and still estranged from landowners—could be made into citizens sincerely attached to Poland.

Historical Setting and National Stakes

The uprising belonged to a longer struggle shaped by the loss of Polish independence and repeated resistance to Russian power. Polish Romanticism gave that struggle a political mythology in which the patriotic Pole was imagined as a noble ready to risk death in battle or conspiracy for national freedom. The uprisings of 1794 and 1830–31 had already established that ideal; the January Uprising extended it, but also exposed the divide between the szlachta who initiated such movements and the peasants whose support could not be assumed. Many landowners opposed peasant enfranchisement, encouraging reluctance or outright hostility among some peasants toward revolts carried out in the name of liberation.

That divide gives the uprising a particular significance in the novel’s late-nineteenth-century village setting. After emancipation, the political problem was no longer only how to recover independence, but how to build a shared national identity among people whose experience of the Polish landed class had included coercive labor and resistance to their freedom. The novel makes this an open question rather than treating the peasantry as an already unified patriotic force: its village politics and memories reveal competing loyalties, grievances, and understandings of who has a claim to speak for the nation.

The Uprising as Buried Village Memory

The uprising does not appear only as distant political history; it survives in the village as graves, family loss, and memories spoken aloud. At the cemetery, Witek the Stork-Keeper points toward a light among the graves and insists that someone is there. The graves belong to people killed in the forest fighting, including the dead speaker’s kin and mother. Ambrozy, Jagustynka, and old Kłąb kneel beside them, where two lamps flicker against bare sand. The graves have no crosses or trees, and their lack of markers gives physical form to a political erasure: participants in the uprising were forbidden burial markers and were soon forgotten, while the authorities’ deportation of insurgents’ families to Siberia helped leave their graves neglected.

At those graves, Kuba recalls his mother Magdalena and the family life that preceded the violence. His father had owned land but worked as a coachman at the manor; after his death, Kuba’s uncles took the land, and Kuba minded pigs before serving the manor with horses. The young squire later gave him a shotgun, and Kuba remembers being taken away with the household during the fighting. He describes carrying the wounded squire, then returning on foot through snow after being shot in the leg. The manor buildings had burned, and the old master, mistress, his mother, and a maid lay clubbed to death in the garden. His broken recollections make the uprising’s history intimate and brutal: political violence is carried not by an abstract nation but by a wounded man remembering his family and home.

The novel’s notes identify the graves as those of the insurgents of 1863–64 and connect the reported killings to the Russian army’s pacification of parts of Congress Poland near the end of the fighting in 1864, under the command of Count Fyodor Berg. Elsewhere, a reference to going about the forest is explained as a veiled way of referring to participation in the uprising. Such allusions place the rebellion within ordinary village speech while showing how danger and repression shape what can be named directly. The cemetery scene, with its extinguished lamps, wind-scattered prayers, and remembered dead, makes the uprising present as grief rather than triumph.

The Forest Mobilization and the Limits of Solidarity

The uprising’s legacy also throws the village’s later resistance into relief. When the manor prepares to fell the disputed forest and refuses local workers employment, the villagers gather in the square before the inn. They wait for Maciej Boryna, whose standing as the village’s foremost farmer makes him the expected leader; the crowd’s patience reflects an established order of authority, even as anger gathers beneath it. The blacksmith and the miller try to turn the people back, warning of imprisonment, but the crowd distrusts them because they are known to have interests aligned with the manor.

The call to action joins several kinds of grievance rather than a single national program. Addressing Christians, Poles, farmers, and hired hands together, the speaker names the manor’s logging, its refusal to hire villagers, and the accumulated injuries and failed complaints. The appeal is to defend what the community considers its right and justice: since courts and petitions have brought no remedy, the villagers must act together. Their response becomes physical and collective. People hurry home to change and harness animals; peasants, farmhands, women, and older children assemble with poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes, then move toward the poplar road, where Maciej Boryna waits with Płoszka, Kłąb, and the other leaders. This is not a replay of the January Uprising, but its remembered language of resistance and its suspicion of authority give the forest action a historical echo.

That echo is politically unresolved. The villagers can unite against a concrete injustice, yet their common cause is rooted in customary claims, work, and survival rather than an articulated national program. The uprising’s earlier association with landowning leaders is especially consequential in a community whose history includes peasant labor under the manor and whose contemporary disputes still pit villagers against landed power. Their capacity to assemble is real; the novel’s wider account of village politics nevertheless questions whether such mobilization can become a durable, shared national consciousness.

Language, Authority, and the Memory of Rebellion

Later disputes over education and official authority show how the question of national belonging persists beyond armed revolt. At the school-tax meeting, villagers debate whether to support the proposed school, and when the notary calls for someone to run an errand to the manor, nobody moves. A voice answers that they did not come to run messages. The refusal is small in scale, but it rejects the assumption that villagers are merely available to serve those who govern or own the land. In another confrontation, a villager objects that people are ordered to speak a language other than their own. The complaint makes linguistic rule tangible: political subordination enters daily life through the words people are required to use.

The political meaning of resistance remains contested within the village itself. During the school debate, a farmer from Przyłęk accuses Rocho of standing with the gentry and turning people against the officials; others shout him down, but the accusation is not simply erased. It exposes suspicion about who speaks for the community and whether opposition serves villagers or another powerful group. Set beside the uprising’s graves and the villagers’ later collective actions, this disagreement makes the novel’s central national question difficult rather than ceremonial: memories of resistance can preserve a claim to freedom, but they do not by themselves settle whose interests define the nation or unite peasants across their divisions.

Repression After the Uprising and Its Political Afterlife

The defeat of the January Uprising left its mark not only in ruined homes and unmarked graves but in the rules governing everyday life. Under directives aimed at the Russification of education in Congress Poland, teaching Polish history was forbidden. Hanka and Rocho’s caution about checking the road reflects how that prohibition made even informal instruction something to conceal. The absence of Polish educational and administrative institutions, alongside the villagers’ distrust of authority, narrowed the means by which national identity could be openly fostered.

Religious life was also subject to restrictions. The Society of Jesus was forbidden to operate in Russia and, after the uprising failed, was banned in Poland; the fraternity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and services devoted to the Sacred Heart in church were prohibited as well. These measures show how the post-insurrectionary settlement reached into institutions that might otherwise have sustained shared cultural and spiritual practices. In 1866, the Russian-partitioned lands were reorganized into ten gubernias, with the voivodeships abolished, further recasting the administrative landscape in which village life took place.

Against this setting, the uprising’s importance in The Peasants lies partly in what its memory cannot accomplish. The dead and their families preserve the cost of resistance, while later restrictions expose the power that followed its defeat; neither automatically creates agreement about who represents Poland. The novel thus places peasant national belonging between two pressures: Russian rule that constrains language, education, and religious association, and a local history in which the landed class had often denied peasants freedom and security. The remembered revolt remains a claim to liberation, but the village’s experience makes clear why that claim cannot simply be inherited as a unified political identity.