Land, peasant livelihood, and identity

Land in The Peasants is never merely property: it feeds households, anchors social standing, and gives labor a place to take root. Its scarcity makes private ownership a source of security and conflict, while customary claims to pasture and forest use bind individual survival to the village community. The contrast between a fertile holding and a barren plot, or between a farmer and a hired hand, shows how closely livelihood and identity are joined. For Szymek Pacześ, acquiring land is not the end of hardship but the beginning of a future he can build with his own hands.

Subsistence, cash, and seasonal pressure

Land’s value is tested by the demands of the household and the agricultural year. Before the St Kordula’s Day fair, families in Lipce weigh what they can sell against the clothing, tools, farm goods, taxes, communal contributions, and debts that must be paid. Even households with fifteen morgens may have to take a horse or cow to market; poorer families face still narrower choices. The effort to clean and feed a thin cow before selling her makes the pressure visible: an animal’s appearance, like the crop itself, can affect whether a household gets through the winter.

That dependence becomes acute in Antek Boryna and Hanka’s home after they are expelled from the paternal farmstead. They have only potatoes and salt, no ready money, and cannot obtain credit from Jankiel. Hanka fears that the cow will be their next sale, while Antek refuses hired work and sits at home or leaves to wander. Her distress is not simply over a missing wage: without his labor, the household may lose the animal that helps carry it to spring. The scene links landlessness, scarcity of cash, and the unequal burden placed on a family when its working capacity is impaired.

Land also requires labor at the right moment. When the men of Lipce are imprisoned after the forest conflict, the fields lie fallow just as spring growth calls for ploughing and sowing. The remaining women must manage gardens, livestock, firewood, children, and domestic work as well as field labor; pregnancies, calving, hatching, and farrowing make the season more demanding still. The crisis is therefore not only that food is scarce, but that the people needed to make the land productive are absent. When neighboring villagers arrive to help, carts and ploughs move across the fields again. The first furrows and the sowing of seed restore work to the land, turning relief into a communal act of agricultural renewal.

Rights, forest, and collective livelihood

The boundary between personal property and shared subsistence is contested in the disputes over pasture and forest. A complaint about a cow that died after being chased from grazing land rests on the claim that the pasture belongs to the villagers and that this right is recorded. The loss is given a concrete value—three hundred zlotys—yet the grievance also concerns repeated exclusion: villagers say that manor authorities drive them and their animals away from land they consider theirs. Their proposed recourse to a court or commissioner shows that formal complaint exists, but does not guarantee that their claim will prevail.

The same tension governs the forest at Wolf’s Hollow. Maciej Boryna counts four morgens as his own and includes the adjoining morgen associated with Jagna in his mental reckoning, while looking over the trees as resources embedded in a disputed landscape. To the Squire, logging is an estate decision; to the villagers, the forest is connected to customary use, work, and the security of households. When Lipce workers are excluded from the felling, the refusal has immediate consequences for hired hands already facing frozen potatoes and a hungry preharvest season. The villagers’ argument against the logging thus joins access to resources with access to wages.

At the forest confrontation, Boryna presents the felling as the latest in a series of wrongs: complaints and court action have not stopped the villagers from being harried, he argues, and now the woodland itself is being cut. The crowd converges on the woodcutters, demanding that they leave because the forest is theirs. The scene shows how a claim that might have remained a dispute over boundaries becomes collective resistance when livelihoods and customary rights seem to be disregarded together. A related proposal to approach the German buyers of Podlesie collectively, warn them not to buy, and prevent sowing or building if they proceed reveals the village’s readiness to defend access to land through coordinated pressure as well as formal complaint.

Holding land and becoming a farmer

Szymek Pacześ’s new holding gives the connection between land and identity its clearest individual form. The Squire sells him six morgens at sixty roubles per morgen, a low price, and promises assistance with wood and other necessities. Yet the land is a wasteland, broken by old clay pits, rubble, stones, boggy hollows, and weeds; even the Squire and Mateusz discourage him. Szymek accepts it anyway. His decision makes ownership less a reward for already established success than a chance to create a household where no secure home yet exists.

At dawn, before work can begin, Szymek rests by a roadside cross. Touching the dewy ground keeps interrupting his prayers because he is overcome by the thought that the land is now his own. He studies the six morgens with the devotion of someone who expects to remain attached to them for life. Walking the boundaries marked by branches, he plans the order of work and the place for a cottage. The practical choices matter: he wants the village opposite and the forest beside the house, both for access to wood and for shelter in winter.

He marks the cottage’s corners with stones, crosses himself, and starts clearing and leveling the ground. He addresses the stones as material for his house and the weed-covered land as something that can be fed and made fertile. This is not evidence that the plot is already productive; it is the language and labor of a person beginning to make it so. His attachment grows through work. When he surveys the field, he thinks of the home he will build for himself and Nastusia and of a future for the Pacześ family. He prefers a hut of his own to remaining someone else’s hired hand.

Household, inheritance, and security

Ownership offers a measure of autonomy but cannot remove the risks that surround agricultural life. Szymek and Nastusia still face the question of how they will get through winter. He points to the fact that their six morgens are secured and promises to find a way to provide for the rest; the exchange holds confidence and material anxiety together. He imagines making a cottage from available trees, branches, clay, and sand, and vows to complete it through his own labor. The holding supplies a base for household formation, but shelter, food, and productive soil must still be made from limited means.

A conversation about a valuable meadow sharpens the issue of land as both income and protection against dependency. The meadow can be cut twice a year, and a miller has offered a thousand zlotys for it. The speaker has prevented the sale, fearing that once the land passes into the wrong hands it may be difficult to recover, while still hoping that another buyer with money may appear. The exchange also recalls Maciej Boryna’s interest in the meadow because it adjoins Jagna’s fields. Adjacency matters: land’s value is shaped not only by its yield or price, but by what it borders and how it might enlarge or secure a holding.

The danger of losing control over a household is especially plain when Antek contemplates what may happen if he is sent to Siberia. He worries that his wife may not be able to manage alone and that everything will fall into ruin. His fear makes land security inseparable from family labor: a holding needs someone to tend it, and a household’s survival can be threatened by the absence of one member even when its claim to land remains.

Meaning and narrative significance

Across these episodes, land is both material and moral. It means food, a place to work, and a defense against dependence; it also carries remembered claims and expectations about who may use a pasture, profit from a forest, or pass a holding into the future. The difference between an owner and a hired hand is not only a difference in income, but a difference in the ability to direct one’s labor toward a home of one’s own.

The narrative holds several scales together: the fair’s hurried household calculations, the labor crisis of the imprisoned village, the crowd’s defense of forest rights, and Szymek’s solitary clearing of an infertile plot. Land does not guarantee prosperity—Szymek begins with stones and bogs, and Lipce’s access to resources and work remains contested—but it gives struggle a durable object and a possible direction. His determination to improve the holding makes identity an ongoing practice: belonging to the land is expressed in boundary-walking, building, clearing, and sowing, not simply in possessing a deed.