The Russian Authorities’ Imposition of a Non-Polish-Language School

The Russian Authorities’ Imposition of a Non-Polish-Language School makes education a test of political authority in Lipce: officials present a school and its tax as benefits to the village, while villagers challenge both the coercion behind the proposal and the language in which their children would learn. The meeting’s movement from silence and refusal to fear shows how the state’s command can bear down on local opposition without resolving the deeper question of whose language and interests a school serves.

The school proposal and its setting

At the assembly, the Voyt announces that the Notary will read the document concerning the “so-called school.” The order proposes a school in Lipce that would also serve Modlica, Przyłęk, Rzepki, and smaller villages. The Notary describes its anticipated benefits and explains the material requirements: land with a field, construction, upkeep, and a teacher. Funding would require an additional tax of twenty kopecks a morgen. He adds that, if the villagers approve the tax that day, building can begin that year and children can attend the following autumn.

The official account frames the plan as assistance: the authorities supposedly seek to support, enlighten, and defend the people. But the proposal asks the village to pay for an institution whose terms are set elsewhere. The tax is not an incidental detail. It makes the promise of education a direct demand on households already conscious of the burdens placed upon them, and it gives the villagers a concrete decision to contest.

The proposed school belongs to a wider political problem in the novel. In the Russian partition, Polish educational and administrative institutions are in Russian hands, while the question of building national identity among peasants newly freed from serfdom remains unresolved. The school meeting therefore brings that broad question into the village’s ordinary political life: education may offer children learning, but an institution imposed from above also raises the question of what they will be taught and in whose language.

A meeting staged through refusal and command

The gathering does not begin with a unified response. The majority lean toward voting against the school, and discussion in the square grows louder and more heated. When the Notary calls for someone to go to the manor to collect fish that had been expected that morning, nobody moves. A bold voice answers that they did not come to run messages. The refusal is small in scale, but it marks the meeting as a place where villagers will not automatically perform errands for authority.

When the Notary reads the order, the villagers listen until a voice interrupts to say that they do not understand a word. The Notary then explains the school’s proposed coverage, expenses, and tax. After he finishes, nobody answers at once. Each person weighs the announcement, hunched as if already carrying the burden of the new levy. The pause matters: the officials have delivered a formal decision and its price, but the villagers have not yet granted their agreement.

The Prefect breaks that pause with an imperative: “Approve the tax, at once – I haven’t time to spare.” His impatience replaces deliberation with a demand for compliance. The crowd wavers, and alarm spreads. Grzela, however, states the opposition plainly: “We’ll not approve a single grosz for such a school.” A hundred voices support him, insisting that they will not approve it and do not want it. The scene places a collective refusal against the authority of the Prefect, who frowns threateningly, while the Voyt and Notary are visibly unsettled.

Language as the central dispute

The villagers’ objection is not simply a refusal to pay. Płoszka states the demand directly: “I’ll say it again: in our school, they must do their learning in our tongue.” The phrase “our school” claims a local right to shape the institution, while “our tongue” names the condition under which education might belong to the community rather than merely be imposed upon it. Another voice makes the imbalance explicit: “Every creature has its own tongue, but only we are ordered to use another’s.” The complaint turns a school order into an unequal rule about who must accommodate whom.

The meeting makes that conflict audible through opposed registers. The Notary reads slowly and clearly from a document; the Voyt announces proceedings and tries to manage the assembly; the Prefect moves from a reportedly sweet manner to an imperious command. Against these official voices, villagers speak in direct, forceful terms about language, payment, and obedience. When the Voyt calls for the gendarmes, the peasants close around them. They then part to let the officers through, but surge after them before the Prefect, cursing, shaking fists, and maintaining an angry presence. The crowd neither attacks the gendarmes nor simply disperses; its movement gives visible form to resistance under pressure.

The scene’s concern with a language of one’s own also resonates with the novel’s broader narrative form. The translation’s account of Reymont’s method describes movement among a detached omniscient voice, the intimate voice of a village raconteur, and a stylized, expressionistic register, alongside extensive peasant dialogue. The dialect is an artistic effect rather than a faithful reproduction of one regional variety; its vocabulary and syntax give the peasants a way of expressing their own thought, not merely an imperfect version of someone else’s. In that light, the school debate’s demand for instruction in the villagers’ tongue echoes the novel’s insistence that their speech has its own expressive authority.

Collective action and its limits

The school assembly can be read beside the villagers’ earlier mobilization against the manor’s felling of the forest. At that gathering, people wait for Boryna because he is regarded as first in the village and the person expected to lead them. When he addresses the crowd, he calls its members Christian folk, Poles, farmers, and hired hands, and urges them to defend what they regard as theirs. They rush home to prepare, then set out together by sleigh, horse, cart, and on foot. The forest protest gathers a broad body of villagers around a shared material grievance and a recognized leader.

The school meeting also produces collective speech, but its action is less settled. Grzela articulates opposition, Płoszka specifies the language demand, and the crowd stands together when the gendarmes are summoned. Yet the assembly is vulnerable to disorder and intimidation. After villagers argue over the school and other disputes, the Prefect again orders them to approve it. The crowd falls silent, suddenly afraid and apparently unable to oppose him; officials and their allies move among them urging obedience and stoking fears. The sequence distinguishes the existence of a shared claim from the ability to secure it. The villagers can name the injustice and briefly make their opposition public, but official authority can still make consent appear to follow from fear.

The episode thus makes the imposed school more than a question of a building or a tax. Its terms expose a conflict over material costs, political voice, and the language through which the next generation will learn. The villagers’ resistance asserts that education cannot be separated from the right to speak and think in their own terms, while the meeting’s fearful close shows how precarious that assertion remains under Russian authority.