Władysław Stanisław Reymont (1867–1925)

I think your reaction to Reymont will depend largely on your willingness to be pleased with storytelling. Or, more precisely, storytelling alone. That he received the Nobel Prize (in 1924) for this work over Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy strikes me as peculiar (to put it mildly). My problem with Reymont is precisely that: he is content to describe and, as good as he is at description, as good as he is at evoking a time and place, 900 pages later, there is not much more than that. Indeed, even show more his most fully realized characters lack much psychological depth; Reymont describes their behavior exhaustively but probes their motivations only marginally. There is very little in this work of four novels that provokes much thought notwithstanding his quite evident political sympathies. This may, however, be a matter of taste. I much prefer Marcel Pagnol’s masterwork, L’eau des collines (The Water of the Hills, comprising Jean de Florette and Manon des sources). Pagnol is likewise strong on the natural world…the color and texture of village life and landscape. Both writers each create worlds rich in the traditions and rhythms of life that is inextricably bound to the seasons. These works are as much about the land and everything in it they are about the lives of people. But where Pagnol uses this to fashion a masterful Greek tragedy, Reymont is content to tell a story. And although he is an excellent storyteller, I came away disappointed because I had hoped for more. I expected to come away with more to think about than I did. It may be unfair to blame Reymont for not writing the book I expected to read, but I will do so nonetheless. I enjoyed the world he created and I thought his characters, major and minor alike, were well-drawn. But I also thought that Reymont too often indulged himself; too often, for example, he gets caught up in his own lyricism and spends far too many pages on a scene, becoming repetitive and wearying. In addition, Reymont is overly fond of contrast. There are often lengthy romanticized paeans to nature and peasant life inevitably followed by long sections devoted to the destructive power of nature and the crushing weight of poverty. The first five times, the juxtapositions are impressive and convincing. By the tenth or fifteenth time, the effect is simply tiresome. Peasant life is idyllic but the poverty is cruel; rural nature is transcendent but the weather is atrocious. Over and over and over. Things are either black or white in Reymont’s world and too frequently both. Nine hundred pages of this constant back-and-forth plus scenes that drag on too long detract from otherwise excellent writing. I have no doubt that both extremes existed but Reymont never ceases to make the comparisons.* I am glad I read the work and some of the characters will stay with me. But in the end I think The Peasants is (only) enjoyable and occasionally quite satisfying—my way of damning the work with faint praise (an English idiom meaning to criticize while appearing to praise). It is well-written and easy to read; after reading the first volume in the century old first English translation, I read the rest in the new Zaranko [2022] translation which is extremely well annotated, although the translator’s very peculiar choice to cast some of the dialect in the vocabulary and syntax of the Pennines of northern England—no, I’m (sadly) not kidding—is regularly and predictably more than a little jarring. You will enjoy the books…but I predict that not much will stay with you.
(*This raises a point that I think is fascinating although it is tangential here: the impact of editors on literary fiction. They haven’t been around all that long. The fact that some of the world’s greatest writers wrote and published what they did without the benefit (and I use that word with caution) of a good editor makes their work that much more impressive. I can’t help wonder what our estimation of Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Wolfe would be if Max Perkins had not been their editor. Or Faulkner or Eugene O’Neill without Saxe Commins.) show less

The Peasants is the novel that won Polish author Ladislas Reymont the Nobel Prize in 1924. It was published in four volumes, in total over 1000 pages. Each volume is named for a season: Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer. It takes place over 10 months in a Polish peasant village, a real place that Reymont had once lived. It has been described by Martin Seymour-Smith as the greatest peasant novel ever written, the most authentic. He accomplished what Emile Zola tried but failed in The Earth, to show more re-create an entire farming village with a large cast of characters. In fact the plot of The Peasants slightly resembles Zola, but Reymont is clearly the superior because his people are more real, less grotesque, if not a little more boring, naturally.

I really did get the feeling of what it was like to be a peasant who has little experience of the "outside" world. To know a few things really well, like how to harvest cabbage, as if born with the skill; to be not so much an individual but a part of a whole village where privacy is limited and life's main events, like marriage, happen outside ones control. Small violence's and graces make up the day, dirt and mud is all encompassing, food the almighty task master and currency.

Unfortunately for Reymont and his obvious masterpiece, no one has bothered to publish a modern translation since it first came out in English in 1925. It was never re-published in any quantity, and so its only available in expensive rare editions, the first volume alone cost me $25. The translation is somewhat stilted and out of date, the brittle pages leak fumes and are darkly colored. While I enjoyed it somewhat, I can't justify spending another $75 to read the remainder under these conditions. I sent a note to the New York Review of Books to look into it as possible re-print. An obvious literary injustice, and a Nobel winning novel at that. show less

Truly the climax of the four books. This book, of the four, reminded me most of Tolstoy's style of writing. Truly a masterpiece, and shows the ambiguity of right and wrong as viewed from various perspectives. Punishment and guilt are so often unfairly meted out.

After the first short novel of the book I was concerned a bit if the whole book was like that. But fortunately that`s not the case. Great social critic short stories, some of them deeply moving and tragic.