Partitioned Poland

Partitioned Poland was a land without a sovereign Polish state, divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria and governed under different political and cultural systems. Its absence as an independent polity shapes the historical frame of The Peasants: the novel asks how a peasantry marked by serfdom, unequal landholding, and foreign administration might become part of a Polish national community.

The Partitions and the Loss of Statehood

The division took place in three successive acts, in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The final partition followed the collapse of the 1794 uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko. A treaty signed in St Petersburg in 1797 confirmed the annulment of the Polish political body and committed the three powers not to include the name of the Kingdom of Poland in their rulers’ titles. Poland ceased to exist as a political entity until 1918.

The partitions placed different parts of the former kingdom under different monarchies, with distinct languages, cultures, administrations, and dominant religions. Władysław Reymont and his family became subjects of Russia because they lived in the portion assigned to it. The divisions outlasted the loss of formal statehood: a later map of Polish election results in the early twenty-first century still broadly corresponds to the former partition boundaries, despite Poland’s restoration of independence.

Land, Class, and the Peasantry

The partitions occurred as the old feudal order was changing. Before that transformation, the Polish nobility possessed extensive privileges, including rights over land and inheritance, political participation, public office, and judicial authority over peasants. Peasants, by contrast, were tied to landowners through compulsory unpaid labor, a system that effectively amounted to serfdom.

The end of serfdom came at different times in the three partitions: in Austria in 1848, in Prussia between 1811 and 1850, and in the Russian partition in 1864. Emancipation changed rural labor relations but did not remove poverty or inequality. Landowners now had to pay for labor, while agricultural workers often received wages too low to live on; widespread illiteracy further restricted routes to other kinds of work. The peasantry’s political position thus emerged from a contradiction: legal emancipation had loosened the old relations of ownership, but material insecurity and limited access to education continued to constrain social advancement.

National Identity and Political Belonging

The question of how to build a Polish national identity among people formerly subjected to serfdom became urgent before independence returned. In territories under Russian rule, a symbolic language of Polish citizenship had developed over centuries, regardless of ethnic identity. Polish Romanticism gave that language a revolutionary charge, linking imagination, individuality, rebellion, and resistance to tyranny with the recovery of national independence.

The patriotic ideal was shaped by the failures of successive uprisings against Russia, including the November Uprising and the January Uprising. Although the nobility initiated the uprisings, peasants also took part. Yet many landowners opposed peasant enfranchisement, helping foster reluctance or hostility among some rural people toward the rebellions. Political thinkers therefore recognized that a free Poland could not be secured through elite patriotism alone: it required a national consciousness among the peasantry, whose interests and memories did not automatically coincide with those of the landowning class.

Partitioned Poland in The Peasants

Reymont’s novel makes this unresolved political question part of its rural world. Alongside the marriage of the wealthy farmer Maciej Boryna to Jagna and her affair with Boryna’s son Antek, the conflict over a forest sold by its owner despite the peasants’ claim to shared ownership gives collective grievance a material focus. When the villagers protest the felling, they recall a wider history of injuries, confiscations, failed complaints, and exclusion from employment. Their appeal is not an abstract declaration of national identity: it rises from contested rights, work, and the land on which village life depends.

The novel also tests the limits of political alliance. At a gathering over resistance to the manor, a farmer from Przyłęk accuses Rocho of standing with the gentry and turning the people against officials; the charge is shouted down, but it exposes suspicion about who speaks for the villagers and whose interests political agitation serves. The village’s collective voice is therefore neither simple nor securely unified. Reymont presents the possibility of peasant political agency alongside the class divisions and distrust that obstruct it, making Partitioned Poland not only a historical condition but the setting for an unfinished struggle over who can belong to, and act in the name of, the nation.