In praise of The Peasants (for World Book Day)

There are some books that stay with you for a long time, maybe for ever, because something about them makes your fingers tingle as you turn the pages, whether that something is narrative development (A Fine Balance, Life and Fate, Middlemarch), character development (Lucky Per, Middlemarch), the turn of phrase that conveys an emotion perfectly, most often through parcity (A Passage North, Chanson Douce, Middlemarch), or maybe all three (Middlemarch). These books conquer you, and you remain in their thrall.

And there are some books which, when you turn the last page and read the last words, you close with a thud, breathing out hard, a bit like when you reach the summit of Skiddaw, of which the lower reaches are actually the steepest but where the climbing is stays quite tough until very close to the top. These are the books that you conquer.

I have only read a few of these (Life and Fate, The key Kafka trilogy, Alone in Berlin), but I did the-thud-and-breathe out thing last month with Władysław Reymont’s Polish epic, The Peasants (Chopli), in Anna Zaranko’s wonderful newish (2021) translation.

Written in the first years of the 20th century, The four volumes of The Peasants narrates the often vodka-fuelled lives, across the four seasons of 1883–84, of the inhabitants of Lipce, a half fictional village [1] in central Poland under Russian rule, and 20 years or so after the official ending of serfdom.

At the most obvious level, the main plot thread concerns the more-or-less arranged marriage of the beautiful, young, sensitive and artistically inclined Jagna to a dry and calculating widower, her subsequent ‘infidelities’ (modern readers might see these as her suffering sexual violence) and her final violent expulsion from the village when her interest in a young novice priest is found, conveniently for some, to be a step too far.

This is, understandably, the key focus of the 2023 intricately animated feature film which has followed the translation amidst a new wave of interest in the work from outside Poland (and perhaps within, although it has long been held as a national classic there).

But there is so much more to the 900 densely packed pages than that.

Amidst the lyrical and often long descriptions of the slow-changing seasons, in which shades of light are of constant importance and where nature acts as a backdrop to the deeper theme of how change can both creep up and rush in with terrible power, a large array of characters live out their village-bound lives, often in quiet enmity with each other — an enmity which helps them cope with the broad powerlessness of their place in the world.

The world of these ‘peasants’ (and their even more powerless hired hands) is a world of pained contradiction, from which it is either religious submission or domestic violence, or both, which gives the only relief.

At the level of village politics and its economics, the rarely enunciated, ever present contradiction is that though the Russian Tsar declared that serfdom was over some twenty years previous to the action, the shift away from free labour for the manor and the consequent declining wealth of the gentry has created uncertainties around long agreed norms of land use for firewood and grazing; this leads to conflict, despair and the ‘fear of freedom’ that we now associate with manipulation by forces of the far right (and indeed the displays of deep xenophobia to immigrants seem especially relevant for our current times). Economic liberation ‘imposed’ by occupying forces brings, for those without the existing resources to make the most of it, brings only hardship, as the old social order does what it has to do to compromise with the advent of early capitalism, in a way not so dissimilar to the shifts so skilfully drawn out in Lampedusa’s The Leopard (I mention this mainly because the new Netflix adaptation is likely to lead to many re-readings).

And at the character level also, lies constant contradiction. The strongest, the most vocal for change, turn out to be the weakest, while those who are weakest and most submissive to the ‘way things are’ at least have the consolation of their submission. Those with at least half- formed beliefs about what might change fail, while those that accept their fate die happiest. Those who are the most honourable and honoured are the cruellest when it comes to it, while those who are known for their dishonour (not least “the Jew” in the village) are the kindest. The gossiping, vindictive old crone turns out to be the wisest interpreter of events.

In the end, the key question that this long, intricate novel asks, over and over through a complex interplay of characters’ battles against the forces of both society and nature, is something like “Is (good) change possible in our times?”. And for the most part, the answer is “No, it’s not”.

And yet, and yet……….It’s only when I’d closed the book with a thud and breathed out, and then ruminated for a few days, that I realized that this isn’t the final prophetic message of the book at all. The real message is that ‘revolutionary’ change is possible, but that it will most likely come from the most unexpected source.

There are two characters who drift in and out of the book, but at whose new dwelling the whole novel concludes; they long seem marginal, and indeed they are entirely written out of the film version, but I think on reflection that they are the key bearers of Reymont’s prophetic message.

They are Syzmek, the quiet, older brother to the apparent main character Jagna, and Nastusia, the girl from a landless family that Syzmek is determined to marry, against the will of the same mother who has arranged Jagna’s wedding for profit.

He does marry, Nastusia, but that is only the beginning.

For it is the quiet, put-upon couple (one of the few in the novel who do not have a relationship characterized by what we now call domestic violence) who are the only ones to seize the opportunity created by wider economic shifts, by doing a deal with the local manor for use of their land to build a new dwelling beyond the boundaries of the old village, and through the sweltering summer engaging in a true ‘labour of love’ to make a new life for themselves. It is in this new dwelling that the novel finishes, with the badly beaten Jagna and the mother Symek has inadvertently blinded, taken in to (presumably) recover. It is because Syzmek and Nastusia have forged a new life, in a way that goes beyond unchanging contradiction and becomes revolutionary change, that this summer is the only season that does not finish with a death scene (the 2023 film, while not faithful to the narrative, gets this spot on in terms of final tone).

So what’s love got to do with it?

Well, as the post-closing thud period extended, and I reflected further on the depths of the novel, it occurred to me that Reymont’s examination of what might bring revolutionary (emancipatory) social change bears quite close resemblance to the four ‘domains’ in which Alain Badiou suggests, in his brilliant though flawed Being & Event (1992), revolutionary events might occur, and which might then demand ‘fidelity’ in order to make them true and lasting.

For Badiou, these domains are politics, science, art and love and (I accept I might be wishing this on the novel a bit more than is merited) these four domains are ‘tried and tested’ in The Peasants; political violence is tried, but fails at least in direct terms (though it does open the door to Symek’s land use revolution by stopping manor plans), the artistry of Jagna, while admired, fails to counterbalance the quasi-reasoning out of hatred towards her, and science — at least in the form of new, non-religious learning from outside the village imported by the novice priest — also fails to impress and create change. Only unassuming love conquers all, but the reader may be left with the impression that at other times it might have been different.

And maybe, maybe, it’s that Badiousian flavour to the novel that is the real prophetic message: that real change can come from the most unexpected source, that human agency does exist as a force for good (there can be heroes [2], but that we have to be ready for it, see it early and embrace it.

The Peasants is set at a time just on the cusp of the wider social shift to capitalism, and it is this that gives the narrative much of its power by allowing ‘fear of freedom’ to be seen off, if only the once, by love of freedom, and freedom of love. Now, in the 2020s, we seem to be on the cusp of a major shift away from capitalism to some kind of strange and threatening techno-feudalism [3], where those with existing capitalist resource get to exert ever greater power of us. Maybe Reymont’s message is that, while change for the good seems impossible, and efforts to seek it may do us more harm than good, we still need to be ready as wanabee ‘subjects’ (in the Badiousian, agential sense of the term), when the event happens, and a new being becomes fleetingly possible.

Look out for own Syzmeks and Nastusias, as and when they show up.

I am fortunate enough to have had a quick online chat with the translator, Anna, whom I approached about one particular textual oddity (see here), and she asked me casually what I, as a Brit with no connection to Poland, thought of the novel, because Polish friends of hers might be interested in what was in it for someone like me, presumably given how exceedingly Polish it is (and without Anna’s copious explanatory notes it would have been much less penetrable for someone like me).

Above, for what it’s worth, is my overly wordy answer for World Book Day, but the tl;dr version is: it’s a great Polish novel — not perfect, it does sag a little in places and you can tell Reymont was struggling on those days — but it’s a great world novel of surprising hope, which you can close with a thud and a big breath out when you’ve conquered it like Skiddaw.

Notes

[1] There is a real Lipce, now called Lipce Reymontowskie in Reymont’s honour, but it appears to bear little resemblance to the Lipce in the book. The real Lipce is near where Reymont worked at a railway crossing before making it as a writer, but there is no railway, or any mention of railways, in the novel.

[2] This brings me into disagreement with the excellent introduction to the translation by Ryszard Koziołek, which is a bit unfortunate, given that he knows a lot, lot more than I do about stuff, but heh ho, it’s only a World Book Day book review. My essay The New Peasantry, will like remain in my head.

[3] It might be noted that Reymont wrote The Peasants after witnessing, and being astonished by, the rapid technical change era of Victorian London.