Land as sacred order and an engulfing force

Land in The Peasants is at once the material basis of life in Lipce and a sacred principle used to make the village’s social arrangements seem inevitable. The novel’s agricultural earth promises work, inheritance, and belonging, yet dwindling access to it deepens poverty and conflict. Its rhythms are so powerful that the characters and the narration can seem to submit to them as natural law; at the same time, that language of sacred and timeless order can conceal the economic relations that distribute land and hardship unequally.

Land as the village’s sacred order

The world of Lipce is organized around three mutually reinforcing pillars: religion, land, and language. The novel’s opening greeting, spoken by the parish priest as he supervises ploughing and greets Agata on her way to beg, joins religious blessing to agricultural labor. The scene makes the land more than a setting: it is part of the order through which the community understands work, faith, and everyday life. The language of what is ordered gives this arrangement the appearance of permanence, as though its rules belonged to the world itself rather than to a history of human decisions.

That appearance has consequences. When inherited norms and beliefs are treated as sacred, social arrangements can be experienced as unchangeable rather than as things people might contest. Religious language may offer consolation, but it can also frame hardship as something to endure instead of something the community could address. The land’s sanctity thus carries a double meaning: it expresses the peasants’ profound attachment to the ground they cultivate, while helping naturalize the conditions under which they struggle to secure it.

Jagna’s refusal of land’s authority

Jagna makes the limits of this sacred order visible because she does not share the village’s reverence for land as an overriding obligation. Beautiful, strong, wealthy, and unusually free within her family, she is not presented as someone whose life is wholly governed by the need to obtain a portion or settlement. Her independence persists after her marriage to Boryna: she insists that her hair not be cut and withholds relations with her husband. The contrast between her freedom and the community’s expectations makes her conduct disruptive well beyond the private sphere.

Her most direct challenge comes when she tells Dominikowa that land is all her mother can think about and means almost nothing to her. The statement does not offer a program for changing property relations, but it refuses to recognize land as the unquestioned measure of a person’s choices. Later, during her quarrel with Hanka, Jagna throws down the settlement that entitles her to six morgen of fields. Hanka is shaken by the gesture: to her, Jagna has casually discarded a substantial portion of land, as if it were a broken jug. What one woman experiences as a rejection of property’s authority, the other can barely comprehend.

The narration links Jagna’s inward life to the earth itself, describing a soul of hidden depths, immense power, and seasonal awakening. Yet this affinity does not mean that she simply conforms to the village’s land-centered morality. Rather, her desires move without respect for the boundaries the community treats as sacred. Her seduction of Jasio, the organist’s son and a future priest, extends this transgression from property and marriage into religious authority. The community’s response to her is therefore not only a judgment of sexual conduct: it is also a forceful defense of the social boundaries that her independence unsettles.

The earth as an engulfing force

The same earth that gives life and identity can appear to take possession of the people who depend on it. After imprisonment and the forest conflict, Antek returns to Lipce and abandons the possibility of sustained rebellion. His return is figured as a surrender to the power emanating from the land. The earth’s invitation echoes the appeal made to the dying Boryna, but neither man’s relation to it is simply a free choice: the land draws them back into a world whose demands they cannot escape.

That pressure reaches its clearest expression in the stern voice Antek hears within himself: “Everything must take its course, everything. We plough to sow, sow to reap, and what obstructs needs plucking out like a bad weed,”. Agricultural sequence becomes a model for social necessity. Ploughing, sowing, and reaping are acts of labor, but the image of pulling out a weed also makes exclusion seem natural: what interferes with the established order appears fit to be removed. The narrative’s personification of the earth gives it a kind of agency, while also showing how easily economic and communal decisions can be disguised as the demands of nature.

The final test of this order comes when Jagna is expelled. The villagers’ violence is framed as collective authority, and Antek, once her lover and a challenger of his father, takes the village’s side. He accepts that the community may cast Jagna out or honor her, as it chooses. The episode reveals how the language of belonging and tradition can absorb individual dissent: the group treats exclusion not as a political act but as an enforcement of the world’s supposed order. Land’s sacred status is bound to a social order that can protect its own cohesion by making a person into the obstruction to be removed.

Scarcity, work, and contested rights

The material pressure beneath this sacred language is visible in the conflict over the forest near Wolf’s Hollow. Hired hands in Lipce face a hard winter, frozen potatoes, little or no income, and the prospect of a disastrously lean preharvest period. They had expected the squire’s timber felling to provide work; instead, they learn that the manor will not employ local men. The dispute is therefore not only over who may claim the forest but also over who will bear the costs of lost work and hunger.

The villagers describe a broader pattern of injury: complaints and legal action have achieved nothing, while the manor continues to fell the forest and refuse employment. At a gathering, a speaker appeals to farmers and hired hands alike, naming the felling, the denial of work, and the manor’s repeated pressure on the community as connected injustices. The crowd answers with demands to drive the workers off and stop the cutting. Its anger rises from the gap between customary claims to the forest and the manor’s power to decide how the woodland will be used. Land is sacred in the community’s language, but access to it is also an immediate question of rights, livelihood, and power.

The account of poverty among Lipce’s poorest residents makes the cost of scarcity more intimate. A family has no potatoes left, has sold its quilt, and must beg for groats; a sick mother gives birth while the fields stand fallow because the men who might work them are imprisoned. Her newborn son may not survive, and she has no milk. These circumstances show that land alone cannot secure survival: people also need labor, food, credit, and assistance. Where neighbors and village institutions fail to provide help, divine order becomes a language that can leave suffering suspended rather than relieved.

The contradiction within the land’s order

The novel holds two realities together without resolving their contradiction. Cultivated land sustains a way of life organized by sowing and harvest, and its seasonal rhythms offer an image of continuity. But land is also scarce, unequally controlled, and implicated in conflicts over inheritance, employment, and forest use. The more completely the community treats its arrangements as sacred and timeless, the harder it becomes to distinguish a natural cycle from an economic system maintained by human authority.

Jagna’s resistance exposes the possibility of not submitting to land as the highest measure of value; Antek’s return shows how quickly that possibility can narrow under the combined force of attachment, necessity, and community pressure. The villagers’ resistance to the manor, meanwhile, demonstrates that the language of injustice can become collective action when access to land and work is threatened. Yet the same community that protests its own powerlessness can exercise harsh power over Jagna. Land as sacred order and land as an engulfing force are therefore inseparable: the earth binds the people to livelihood and belonging, while the social world built around it can make its inequalities appear inevitable and its dissenters expendable.