Russia

Russia appears chiefly as a political power governing part of partitioned Poland, not as the village setting of The Peasants. Its rule shapes the historical conditions behind the novel: the loss of Polish statehood, the emancipation of peasants, and the unresolved question of how a rural population might become part of a national political community.

Partition and imperial rule

The disappearance of Poland as an independent political entity followed three partitions, in 1772, 1793, and 1795, carried out by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Russia took the largest share. The final partition followed the defeat of the 1794 uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko; a treaty signed in St Petersburg in 1797 declared the Kingdom of Poland suppressed and committed the three powers never to include its name in their rulers’ titles. Poland did not regain independence until 1918.

Partition placed the former Polish lands under different monarchies, administrations, languages, cultures, and dominant religions. For inhabitants of the territory assigned to Russia, imperial rule was not a distant diplomatic fact: it determined their citizenship and the authority that administered their rights. Władysław Reymont and his family, born in the Russian-controlled portion, were citizens of Russia, as were the inhabitants of that portion of the former kingdom.

Emancipation and rural change

Russia’s rule carried a consequential contradiction. The partitions had been imposed by imperial powers, yet it was the Russian government that carried out the most important emancipation of peasants in its Polish territories. The process began in 1864, or, according to the tsar’s decree of 2 March 1863, earlier. Across the partitioned lands, abolition came at different times: in the Austrian partition in 1848, in the Prussian partition between 1811 and 1850, and last in the Russian partition in 1864.

Ending serfdom altered the economic relation between landowners and rural workers. Landowners now had to pay for peasant labor rather than command it without payment, while estates deprived of free labor could decline or accumulate debt. Agricultural wages remained too low to sustain many workers, and widespread illiteracy restricted access to other forms of employment. Emancipation therefore changed the legal order without removing the material insecurity and unequal access to land that shaped village life.

Russia in the novel’s political horizon

The Peasants places village experience within a Poland that no longer existed as a sovereign state. Its rural community can seem self-contained, but its historical and economic circumstances are inseparable from the structures created by partition and emancipation. The Russian administration is also part of the novel’s political background: it had become the authority responsible for rights and freedoms in the Russian partition, including the change that freed peasants from serfdom.

That history complicates any simple opposition between foreign rule and peasant welfare. Russia was an occupying power, but Russian government action also delivered emancipation that the Polish landed class had often resisted. The novel’s account of rural life does not reduce peasant political passivity to Russian occupation alone; it emphasizes the community’s poverty, injustice, and limited political readiness, as well as a persistent acceptance of the world’s established ordering.

National identity and significance

The loss of statehood left the creation of a Polish national identity among former serfs as a pressing political problem. Earlier patriotic ideals, shaped by Romantic writers and by failed uprisings against Russia—including the November Uprising and the January Uprising—had centered on noble sacrifice. Peasants also took part in uprisings, but landowners’ opposition to peasant enfranchisement could foster reluctance or hostility among rural people. Political thinkers consequently argued that a strong, free Poland required a national consciousness that reached the peasantry.

Russia is thus significant in the novel’s historical frame not only as the power that governed the territory, but as the state whose policies helped define the changing status of the rural population. The contrast between political subordination and legal emancipation exposes the uneven making of modern peasant life: freedom from serfdom did not by itself resolve land hunger, poverty, or the difficult work of imagining a shared national future.