The Peasants: Autumn

Actually quite an enjoyable read. Makes me want to learn a bit more about Polish traditions around marriage and family. I also now need to read the other three books in this cycle.

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 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, show more 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 The translation is somewhat stilted and out of date, the brittle pages leak fumes and are darkly colored.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