Maciej Boryna–Antek Boryna

The relationship between Maciej Boryna and Antek Boryna is the central family conflict over land and inheritance: a father determined to retain authority meets a son who sees that authority as the cause of his dependence. Their quarrel is fought over meals, fields, and marriage as much as over affection. It reaches a breaking point when Maciej marries Jagna Paczesiówna and transfers land to her, but later actions disclose a bond that the conflict has never wholly extinguished.

Identity and Stakes

Maciej is Antek’s father and the head of the household whose land and resources determine the younger family’s security. Antek and Hanka live under Maciej’s authority, and their access to the farm’s food and property remains contingent on his decisions. The arrangement makes inheritance an immediate domestic question: land means not only future status, but also the ability to feed a household and avoid dependence on someone else’s favor.

Antek measures his father’s idea of a successful man against the acreage and livestock that command respect in Maciej’s eyes. To Antek, this standard exposes the imbalance between them: the father holds the property, while the son must argue for a share and endure reproaches over what he consumes. Their relation is therefore neither a simple generational disagreement nor merely a dispute over money. Maciej’s power over family land gives ordinary exchanges the force of judgments about who belongs in the household and who has a claim to its future.

Household Authority and Resentment

At a meal, Maciej turns the bread Antek eats into a reminder that it is his bread. He tells Antek to seek better fare on Hanka’s three morgen, making the contrast between Maciej’s control and the younger couple’s limited property painfully concrete. Antek and Hanka resent the scrutiny of every husk and peel; their frustration is sharpened by the thought that the farm could support them if its resources were theirs to manage.

The exchange moves from complaint to physical tension. When Antek springs up and calls out to his father, Hanka catches him around the waist and pulls him back down. Maciej glares, crosses himself after the meal, and declares that he will not be pensioned off by his son. The gesture and refusal reveal the opposing fears beneath the quarrel: Antek sees no secure path to independence within the household, while Maciej resists a future in which his son’s support might require surrendering command. Neither side resolves the dispute; the meal ends with the household hierarchy intact and resentment deepened.

That dependence is also visible in Hanka’s distress as she looks across Maciej’s fields. She sees good land that could sustain the family but belongs, in practical terms, to someone else. Antek tries to reassure her that some land is theirs, yet her wish for even half the holding, together with the house and cabbage field, makes clear how much their security depends on a transfer they cannot compel. The landscape is not a distant symbol: its fields mark the boundary between the property under Maciej’s control and the life Antek and Hanka hope to establish.

Jagna and the Deepening Breach

The conflict becomes more acute when Maciej’s marriage to Jagna changes the expected distribution of land. The first banns are announced while the children already know what has been arranged, and Maciej has signed six morgen over to Jagna at a notary’s office. The transfer gives his marriage a material consequence for Antek’s household: property that might have formed part of a settlement with his children is assigned instead to Maciej’s new wife.

Antek’s response is shown as sustained torment rather than a brief outburst. He cannot sleep, eat, or occupy himself; he paces through the room, yard, and farmstead, then sits for hours staring ahead. Around him, Józka cries and moves about the cottage like a captive bird, while the household falls into disorder and the livestock wander without proper care. The family’s grief resembles mourning, but its cause is a living decision: Maciej’s marriage and land arrangement have made the break within the household visible to everyone.

Jagna later interprets her own unhappy circumstances through the same marriage and property bargain. In anger, she says that Maciej has shackled her life and blames him for the troubles involving Antek and the Village Head. Her accusation does not settle the question of responsibility, but it shows how Maciej’s decision binds together conflicts that might otherwise appear separate: Antek’s forbidden involvement with Jagna, Jagna’s constrained position in the marriage, and the family’s struggle over land. The arrangement that gives Jagna property also becomes, in her view, the source of a life she did not want.

Hidden Aid and an Unfinished Relationship

The later crisis exposes a less public side of Maciej’s relation to Antek. Hanka tells Rocho that the money she has brought includes her mother’s beads and funds Maciej had once given to Jagna, apparently taking them back afterward. She says Maciej gave the money to her after Easter and instructed her to keep silent because it was meant to rescue Antek. The bundle amounts to four hundred and two roubles and five zlotys, still short of the pledge needed to secure his release.

Hanka is prepared to sell the sow, a barren cow, and some wheat; Rocho encourages her to gather the necessary sum gradually and promises to accompany her when the time comes. Maciej’s secret gift does not undo his refusal to surrender control of the farm or repair the harm of the earlier estrangement. It does, however, complicate any account of him as simply indifferent to his son. Even amid conflict, he acts to help Antek, entrusting that help to Hanka and asking that it remain undisclosed.

The relationship ends without a spoken reconciliation. As Maciej lies dying, those around him regret that Antek did not see him alive. The detail makes absence the final measure of their divided life: the son whose future had been bound to his father’s decisions is not present for his father’s last moments. Their story leaves both truths in view—the injuries created by land and authority, and the concealed act of aid that survives beneath them.