Land as the foundation of identity and life

Land as the foundation of identity and life is presented as both material security and a ground of belonging: it is inherited from a father, defended against displacement, and worked through the generations. The idea reaches its most solemn expression in Boryna’s last night, when he gathers earth in his shirt and sows it across his fields as though returning his life to the ancestral soil.

Inheritance and the refusal to leave

For Szymek, the claim to land is not an abstract argument about ownership. After he is turned out, Mateusz urges him to come away, but Szymek refuses to move from the spot. He insists, “The land’s mine, from my father – I’ll stay on what’s mine, I’ll not give it up!” His fingers grip a corner stone as he speaks, making the threatened bond physical: even while dispossessed from the household, he holds to the place that his father’s inheritance has made his own.

Szymek’s refusal persists when Mateusz returns with another possibility: joining the Germans. Mateusz reminds him that Nastusia is waiting and that he was supposed to bring money for the banns, but Szymek answers that he is going nowhere because the land is his, from his father. The exchange sets a marriage and a possible new life against the inherited patch of ground. Szymek does not treat departure as a practical solution to hardship; to leave would mean abandoning the basis on which he understands his claim and his place.

The belongings gathered after the expulsion sharpen the scene’s contrast between what can be carried away and what cannot. Jędrek collects the clothes thrown out, ties them in a sheet, and puts the bundle timidly beside Szymek. He weeps and offers to go with his brother into the world. The clothes can be packed, and Jędrek can imagine accompanying Szymek, but neither gesture resolves Szymek’s attachment to the land. The scene makes displacement a rupture in home and kinship, not merely a change of address.

Need, purchase, and the value of labor

The dispute over Podlesie presents a competing definition of who may claim land. A German purchaser declares that land belongs to whoever pays for it, and says that Podlesie has been bought and will remain his. Rocho answers that the land should belong to the person who needs it. When the purchaser dismisses this as a demand for land without payment, Rocho replies, “With these ten fingers, price enough!” The exchange opposes money as the measure of acquisition to need and the capacity to labor as grounds for belonging.

Rocho’s answer does not deny the importance of work or offer a detailed legal settlement. Instead, the appeal to ten fingers makes labor itself a form of payment: the hands that will use and cultivate the land carry their own claim. His solemn insistence also gives the argument a moral register, while the purchaser’s statement rests on the completed transaction. When the purchaser orders the disputants to keep away, Grzela erupts with the demand to keep hands off their land. The confrontation turns the dispute over purchase into a conflict over whether a deed alone can settle the meaning of possession for those who need the soil.

The soil as work and ancestral continuity

Boryna’s final night transforms this practical claim into an image of life’s return to the land. In an enchanted spring night, he kneels in a field, holds out his shirt, and gathers earth as if it were grain prepared for sowing. After crossing himself, he swings his arm and begins to scatter the soil. He moves along the field, blessing each clod and stalk, and continues sowing even when he stumbles or falls, unaware of anything but the overwhelming need to sow.

The action is at once recognizable as agricultural labor and radically altered by its object: Boryna sows earth rather than seed. The work is described as barren and useless, yet its futility does not cancel its force. His movements retain the gestures of cultivation—gathering, casting, moving across the field—while the earth becomes the substance he gives back to the ground. The field is not an interchangeable possession in this scene. It is bound to the labor of a lifetime and to the generations whose land he is sowing.

As the night thins toward dawn, Boryna forgets to gather more earth and sows with an empty hand. The narrative figures this as sowing the last of himself upon the fields of his ancestors: his lived days become the final offering, returned on the wheatfields to God Eternal. The image joins bodily exhaustion, inherited land, and religious surrender without reducing one to another. The act remains a farmer’s motion, but its meaning has widened from producing a crop to giving a human life back to the soil that sustained it.

Death and the meaning of belonging

Boryna’s sowing ends not with a harvest but with death. He pauses, spreads his hands as during the Elevation, gives thanks to God, and falls on his face before the Most Holy Majesty. He dies as dawn rises. The sequence brings agricultural labor and religious gesture into close relation: the man who has spent the night scattering earth ends in a posture of prayer, and the field becomes the setting for the end of his life.

Together, Szymek’s stillness and Boryna’s movement show two dimensions of the same bond. Szymek insists on remaining where his father’s land gives his claim substance; Boryna, at the end of life, moves through ancestral fields and sows until even his strength and days are spent. In one scene land is what a displaced heir will not surrender; in the other it is the ground to which a farmer returns himself. The concept therefore joins inheritance to labor and material possession to a deeper sense of identity: land is not simply something a person owns, but the place through which family continuity, work, and mortal life acquire their form.