Russian imperial local authorities

The Russian imperial local authorities are represented through officials who enter village life not as a distant abstraction but as collectors, commissioners, and enforcers. Their authority becomes most visible in the dispute over a compulsory school and its tax: although the Lipce villagers debate the proposal and resist being hurried into agreement, the Prefect ultimately announces that the school will be established. The episode makes administration tangible as a sequence of demands, warnings, and commands—and shows how little room the villagers have to refuse them.

Administrative presence in village life

The narrative gives no comprehensive account of the authorities’ structure; instead, their power is encountered through the Notary, the Prefect, and the Gendarmerie. The Notary’s office is a place where farmers are summoned individually and reminded of taxes, unpaid court-building dues, and other obligations. The timing sharpens the pressure: this happens during a harsh preharvest, when some farmers lack even enough money for salt. They bow, explain that they must wait for the harvest or the next fair, and in some cases put a last zloty into the Notary’s hand.

The Notary’s leverage extends beyond collecting what is owed. He threatens some people with the Gendarmerie, makes promises, and asks for goods or favors, including oats, goslings for the Prefect, and straw for rope. The villagers comply despite their reluctance, while he draws acquaintances aside after their business is done to offer advice. The scene presents administration as an intimate and unevenly applied pressure: a farmer may leave the office having paid, promised, or been warned, without any sense that the encounter was on equal terms.

Pressure surrounding the school proposal

At the village meeting, the Notary links the school question to another matter already negotiated with the manor. He warns the Lipce villagers that if they quarrel over the school, the Prefect might become angry and damage their accord with The Squire over the wood. The warning makes a local agreement vulnerable to administrative displeasure, whether or not the school issue is formally connected to the forest settlement. Płoszka replies that the agreement is being made in good faith; the Notary answers with a proverb about nobles acting together while peasants lose out.

The Notary then reads the order establishing a school in Lipce to serve Modlica, Przyłęk, Rzepki, and smaller villages. He presents it as an act of official beneficence, but the practical terms are a charge on the community: the villagers must approve an additional tax of twenty kopecks per morgen to pay for the plot, building, and upkeep, including a teacher. He says that approval would allow construction to begin that year and children to attend the following autumn. The promised benefit and the immediate cost are therefore placed before the villagers together, while their own precarious finances make the tax a substantial burden.

A meeting shaped by coercion

The villagers do not simply accept the proposal. When the Notary calls for someone to come over, no one moves. Later, when he orders someone to fetch fish from the manor, a villager answers that they did not come to run messages. These refusals are small but public assertions that the gathering is not merely an occasion for officials to command and the villagers to obey.

The Prefect, however, makes the limits of that defiance plain. After the meeting grows noisy and divided, he tells the crowd to be quiet and orders them to approve the school. The people fall silent and are seized by fear; the scene describes them as standing as if turned to stone. The Voyt, the miller, and others move among them, urging obedience and intensifying their apprehension. The Gendarmerie is present in the crowd. When the Voyt calls to the gendarmes, the villagers close around them and warn that there are three hundred people, but then part to let the officers through and surge after them toward the Prefect, angry and cursing. Their show of collective strength does not become an attack on the officers; it makes the encounter visibly tense while leaving the officials’ coercive power intact.

In the crowd, someone protests the language of rule: “Every creature has its own tongue, but only we are ordered to use another’s.” The remark connects the school dispute to a wider experience of being ordered about, made to pay, and expected to comply. The authorities’ language of assistance is set against the villagers’ experience of imposed decisions and obligations.

Decision and significance

The final announcement comes after a villager says that a mark was entered despite his having said no, and others affirm that the same happened to them. Some of the more forceful voices call for the papers to be torn up. At that moment The Squire’s carriage arrives. The Prefect reads a letter handed to him by his attendant and declares that there will be a school in Lipce. The narrative does not establish that the letter itself orders the decision; it does show the announcement following the Prefect’s demand, the disputed marks, and the arrival of the letter.

The villagers’ silence after the declaration is not presented as enthusiastic consent. They stand looking calmly at the Prefect without answering. Across this episode, the Russian imperial local authorities are defined by the distance between official claims of public benefit and the coercive means used to secure compliance. The school may be described as enlightenment and assistance, but its costs are assigned to an already burdened community, and its approval is demanded under threat. The village meeting thus reveals both the reach of administrative power and the constrained, sometimes collective forms through which the villagers make their opposition audible.