Maciej Boryna—Jagna Borynowa

Maciej Boryna—Jagna Borynowa is presented through a stark late reversal: Jagna blames her husband for the injuries and restrictions of her life, yet when he lies dying she claims the right to watch over him. The marriage, as these scenes render it, holds accusation and obligation together without making either disappear. At Maciej’s death, Jagna’s outward stillness sets her apart from the household’s open grief, leaving their relationship suspended between resentment, care, and an ending she cannot readily comprehend.

A marriage experienced as constraint

When Jagna finds herself isolated and frightened of being turned away wherever she goes, she remembers Maciej as the man who has shackled her life. In her feverish account of the past, she imagines that, had she remained an unmarried girl, others would not have allowed her to be wronged. Marriage, she feels, has brought her neither life nor freedom. The force of this judgment lies in its personal reach: she does not describe the marriage as a single quarrel, but as the condition through which she interprets what has happened to her.

Her anger gathers around specific grievances. Jagna tells herself that the affair with Antek and the Voyt’s later conduct would never have happened if Maciej had not entered her life. She also connects her mother’s temptation by the promise of morgen to the course that brought her into this marriage. These are Jagna’s accusations and counterfactuals, not an impartial account of responsibility. The scene shows her trying to give her suffering a cause, and Maciej becomes the figure onto whom she concentrates it.

That concentration turns into open hostility. Seeing the sick man beneath the trees from the gable window, Jagna runs to him and wishes aloud that he would die quickly. His weak response does not draw her into conversation; she hurries away, relieved to have found someone on whom to vent her grievances. The moment makes the marriage’s bitterness physical and immediate: she approaches her ill husband not to comfort him, but to direct her anger at him.

The vigil beside Maciej

As Maciej’s condition worsens, Jagna’s conduct changes. He recognizes people and speaks consciously at intervals, but then lies for hours as if dead. When he tells the blacksmith that he will not be alive much longer, the household understands that he is failing. Jagna, too, behaves strangely: she stops going to nurse her mother, leaves that care to Jędrek, and remains at home beside her husband. To Hanka and Magda, she insists that watching Maciej is her right.

The vigil does not erase the hostility that preceded it. Jagna stays for hours without moving, while the sounds of people and fieldwork enter through the open window and the warmth and abundance outside contrast with the chamber’s stillness. Maciej no longer speaks or moans; his eyes continue to move and fix on her. Their gaze becomes the scene’s central sign of their closeness: even in silence, she cannot simply turn away or forget him. She is drawn into looking back, as if his eyes hold her attention in an abyss. The narration makes the vigil less a reconciliation than an involuntary confrontation with the dying man’s presence.

Death and an unexpressed grief

When Jagna enters and finds the household dressing Maciej in a clean shirt, she stands as if turned to stone before she can say that he is dead. She is frightened, barely able to breathe, and cannot absorb what has happened. In the moments that follow, she moves in and out of the room, unable to tear her eyes from the corpse; at other times she seems ready to flee but stays. She also goes behind the house and looks out over the fields without seeing them. The repeated movement between the body and the outdoors gives her grief no settled direction.

The household around her gives grief audible form through weeping, lamentation, and sobbing. Jagna alone cannot produce a cry or shed a tear, although every bone in her body seems to quake and pain presses beneath her breast. Her dry-eyed wandering is not presented as proof that she feels nothing: her fear, bodily agitation, and fixed attention on Maciej’s body show the opposite. Instead, the death leaves her unable to make her distress take the familiar form of mourning. Hanka, still weeping, quickly takes charge of practical matters, while Jagna remains vacant and dismayed.

The relation’s unresolved ending

Across these scenes, Jagna’s relation to Maciej moves from blame and a wish for his death to watchfulness at his bedside, then to stunned presence after his death. The sequence does not supply a final exchange, apology, or reconciliation between them. Her insistence that nursing him is her right gives the marriage a last, complicated expression of attachment or duty, but the earlier accusation remains part of the same record. By the time Maciej is gone, Jagna cannot turn that contradiction into a clear farewell: she stays near the corpse, yet cannot join the household’s audible lament. Their marriage ends not in mutual understanding but in a silence shaped by both her grievance and her inability to grieve openly.