Rural Land Shortage

Rural Land Shortage is a persistent material pressure in The Peasants and a source of conflict between households, hired hands, and the manor. It turns acreage into inheritance and security, but also makes access to pasture, forest, and seasonal work essential to survival. The novel links the struggle for land to the household’s need for labor and food, the village’s obligations toward its poorest members, and collective resistance to those who control resources.

Inheritance and the scarcity of acreage

The notes to the novel identify the parceling out of land in the second half of the nineteenth century, together with continuing demand for land, as one of the period’s chief social problems. This scarcity gives inheritance unusual force: a division of land can determine whether a family retains an independent livelihood, while those without land remain dependent on other people’s fields and decisions. The notes also point to the importance villagers attached to distributions of former manor estates, strengthened by the memory of the tsar’s 1863 ukase. The expectation of redistribution therefore belongs not only to private family calculations but to a wider history of contested entitlement.

The distinction between owning land and working it is stark. Hired hands have no land of their own, and the notes explain that they consequently have no easement rights in land held in common by manor and village. Their claim that they too are owed land exposes a boundary in the village’s resource order: the people whose labor is needed in the fields may nevertheless be excluded from customary access. Land shortage thus separates the smallholder’s precarious claim from the landless worker’s still more restricted one.

Household budgets and seasonal pressure

Scarcity is felt in the timing of expenses as well as in the size of holdings. Before the fair on St Kordula’s Day, villagers argue over what to sell and what they must buy for winter. Taxes, commune contributions, debts, preharvest loans, and payments to servants converge at once. Even households with fifteen morgen calculate anxiously; some must take a horse or cow to market, while poorer families face sharper choices. The fair’s bustle is therefore underwritten by the need to turn livestock or grain into ready money before winter, not by surplus.

That pressure becomes severe for Antek Boryna’s household after it is expelled from the paternal homestead. During a hard winter, Antek, Hanka Borynowa, and the children subsist on potatoes and salt, with no money and no credit from Jankiel. Hanka fears that the cow will have to be sold, yet Antek refuses hired work. The family’s loss of its former place is not simply a change of address: it strips them of the farmstead that supported their livelihood and leaves them confronting winter with few resources. The conflict between Antek’s refusal and Hanka’s wish to work until spring shows how a landless or displaced household must negotiate survival through both labor and the remaining property it can sell.

Rights to pasture and forest

The struggle over land also concerns access to resources beyond individually cultivated fields. In one dispute, villagers blame people who drove their cattle away from pasture they say is clearly recorded as theirs. The chase is reported to have exhausted a cow until it developed an inflammation; the speakers also say that Walek’s boy was badly beaten and estimate the loss at three hundred zlotys. Their talk of taking the matter to court or the commissioner reveals the distance between a claimed right and the power to enforce it. Pasture is not an abstract boundary when losing access can injure livestock and damage a family’s means of support.

The forest carries a similarly charged claim. As Boryna rides through it, he counts what he regards as his four morgen there and Jagna’s one, looks over the trees, and thinks that the manor considers the villagers’ claim excessive while the villagers themselves ask too little. His private calculation gives the woodland a place in the same arithmetic of acreage and inheritance as the fields. When the manor begins felling trees and excludes Lipce workers from employment, however, the issue widens: villagers see both a threat to their forest claim and the loss of wages they had expected from the cutting.

At the confrontation in the woods, Boryna leads a crowd of women, men, and youths toward the woodcutters. The villagers demand that the workers stop and leave because they regard the forest as theirs. Their protest draws together customary claims, the manor’s control of the timber, and the immediate need for work. The scene shows how scarcity can make a resource dispute a collective struggle over who may use the land and who bears the cost when access is denied.

Land, labor, and mutual dependence

The crisis of land and livelihood is sharpened when the men are imprisoned after the forest conflict. In spring, fields stand fallow not because the earth has ceased to yield but because the village lacks enough available workers. Women must manage livestock, children, gardens, and household tasks while also trying to meet the demands of planting and fieldwork. The season’s narrow agricultural timetable makes imprisonment consequential beyond the absent men: it threatens the cultivation on which households depend.

Help from neighboring villages gives this labor crisis a brief but important counterpoint. Under the local women’s guidance, the arriving workers spread through Lipce’s fields. Carts, ploughs, horses, and people move across ground that had lain empty; after the ploughs press into the earth, the workers cross themselves and sow seed in a reverent silence. The communal relief restores cultivation for the moment, but it also makes visible how much the village’s survival depends on access to labor as well as land.

Scarcity as a source of collective conflict

Land shortage binds individual insecurity to village politics. Poor villagers face hunger, illness, and a lack of credit, while better-off farmers are described as occupied with their own food and lending rather than relieving their neighbors’ distress. The contrast makes scarcity a question of mutual obligation as well as property: the community’s need is shared, but its resources and capacity to help are unequal.

The same pressure appears in resistance to the possible purchase of Podlesie by German settlers. Villagers propose approaching the prospective buyers together and warning them not to buy; if they proceed, the villagers threaten to prevent sowing and building. This plan treats land acquisition as a danger to the community’s future access and security, and turns shared anxiety into collective action. Across inheritance disputes, contested pasture, forest protest, and resistance over Podlesie, the novel presents land shortage as an organizing force in village life: it sets households against one another, exposes exclusions within the community, and repeatedly draws people into conflicts with the manor and other powerful claimants.