Land scarcity and longing for land

Land scarcity and longing for land are not merely economic concerns in Lipce: they determine whether families can feed themselves, whether the next generation can establish households, and whether villagers can claim a secure place in their community. The fields are finite, but households, debts, and needs multiply. Against that pressure, the manor’s holdings seem at once a possible source of relief and a reminder of how little control the Lipce peasants have over the land on which their survival depends.

A fixed resource under growing pressure

Bylica remembers a Lipce that once had fifteen farmers; Rocho answers that it now has forty. The increase makes scarcity visible as a demographic and generational problem: more people are living from the same village land, and new farmers are waiting for plots, but the land does not expand with them. Bylica fears that within a few years there will not be enough to go around. When the boys marry, he adds, there may not be a single morgen left for their children. Rocho’s suggestion that they go out into the world meets the practical question of what people with bare hands could do there. The problem is not simply that land is valued, but that a household without access to it has few apparent means of making a future.

The novel sets that long-term pressure beside the immediate calculations of an autumn fair. With winter approaching, villagers debate whether to sell cattle, grain, or smaller livestock, while needing clothing, tools, and farm supplies. Taxes, commune contributions, debts, pre-harvest loans, and payments to servants all fall due together. Even farmers with fifteen morgen have to calculate what they can spare; poorer households face still narrower choices. Some try to make a poor cow look saleable by rubbing its flanks clean and feeding it clover or boiled barley with potatoes. Others try to pass off a blind, bony horse. The effort to get through the winter turns livestock into cash, but selling the animals that support farm work can deepen the insecurity that made the sale necessary.

Land, labor, and household survival

Scarcity is intensified by the way land and labor depend on one another. When the men of Lipce are imprisoned, the usual hunger, disease, quarrels, and deaths continue, but Rocho regards the fields standing fallow as the gravest new crisis. Spring has arrived; the higher fields are drying, water is receding, and the earth is ready for ploughing, manure, and seed. Yet the working men are in gaol. Women have to manage children, livestock, gardens, potato planting, drainage, manure, wood, and household work, while some are also nearing childbirth. Even after their exhausting labor, the most important task—the work in the fields—remains undone. Land cannot sustain a household simply by existing: it requires hands at the right point in the agricultural year.

The pressure also appears within the household of Hanka Borynowa and Antek Boryna after they have been turned out of the paternal homestead. Three weeks later, they remain bound to the grievance, but their immediate need is food and money. They are living on potatoes and salt, have no spare groszy, and fear that the cow will be the next thing sold. Stacho offers Antek paid threshing work arranged through the organist, but Antek declines. Hanka sees the refusal against the possibility of losing the cow and of having to endure winter without a reserve. The scene shows how the desire to retain a place among farmers can conflict with the humiliating necessity of taking work as a hired hand. Hanka imagines that, if she were a man, she would work without sparing herself to save the cow and carry the family through until spring.

The manor’s land and the promise of redistribution

The manor’s holdings sharpen the contrast between crowded village households and land that appears underused. Bylica points toward the manor fields beyond the mill, where land near Lipce seems suitable for purchase and, in his estimate, could make thirty farms. The prospect remains conditional: the Squire may not sell, especially if he has no need of money. The discussion is not a report of land actually being redistributed, but it makes the possible conversion of large holdings into smaller farms imaginable. The number of people in need is set against the scale of the fields held by one landowner.

A related anxiety surrounds German settlement. Rocho recalls reports that Germans at Słupia have bought land from the Squire and are building a settlement of sixty morgen. Bylica contrasts their apparent wealth and ability to buy land with the constricted position of Lipce, where people are already crowded. The reference to Podlesie brings the issue closer: land beside the village is described as suitable for the thirty farms that Lipce could use, yet it remains in the Squire’s hands. In this conversation, the threat is not only that outsiders might acquire land, but that a nearby resource which could relieve local crowding may remain unavailable to the people who need it.

Work, customary claims, and collective resistance

Land hunger also shapes expectations about employment and access to shared resources. At least twenty hired hands in the village are said to be desperate for work during a hard winter; some have already lost potatoes to frost, and the pre-harvest season promises hunger. Villagers had expected that the Squire’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow would employ them. Instead, he is said to have resolved not to hire anyone from Lipce, in anger over a complaint made against him to the commissioner. The issue joins wages to local entitlement: villagers are not asking only for abstract ownership, but for work from an operation on land and forest that they understand as bound up with their community’s claims.

That understanding helps explain the force of the protest against the felling. At a gathering, a speaker addresses Christian Poles, farmers, and hired hands, assembling their grievances: the manor is cutting the forest, refusing them employment, and driving them toward ruin. Earlier complaints and legal proceedings have brought no remedy, he argues; the logging is the final injury. The crowd responds with calls to stop the work and insists that the forest is theirs, even though no one recognizes their right. The forest conflict therefore grows out of the same material pressure as the shortage of fields. Access to woods, employment, and cultivable land all belong to the village’s struggle to secure the means of survival.

Renewal, mutual aid, and the meaning of return

The narrative contrasts the failure of village labor with the revival made possible when help arrives from neighboring communities. After the imprisonment leaves Lipce’s fields idle, outside workers come under the women’s guidance. Carts roll from the yards, ploughs move along the paths, and people spread across potato patches, barley fields, stubble, and weed-grown fallow ground. When the ploughs finally press into the earth and turn the first dark clods, the workers cross themselves and begin sowing. The moment joins practical relief to reverence for the soil: the seed is entrusted to the earth, but only after people have supplied the labor that the imprisoned villagers could not.

For Hanka, being back on the farm carries the weight of hunger, grievance, and Antek’s infidelities, all of which she remembers as part of the suffering she has survived. Her return to the land is presented as a decisive change in her circumstances: she is again on the farm, and the thought that anyone could tear her away now registers how strongly security there has become bound to her survival. The longing for land thus runs through both collective and domestic life. It can appear as a claim to divide the manor’s holdings, a demand for work and forest rights, a fear of losing the family cow, or the determination to remain on a farm. The turning of the soil gives these pressures a recurring form: land is a livelihood only when access, labor, and the possibility of inheritance come together.