Peasants

One of Poland's most engrossing twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride - but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons - Autumn to Summer - the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek ... Richly lyrical and thrillingly realist, at turns comic, tragic and reflective, Wladyslaw Reymont's magnum opus is a love song to a lasting dream of rural Poland, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.

Reviews

A virtuosic new translation... Reymont seeks to draw the reader into the natural flow of this microcosm of society, as well as the community's rich harmony with nature... We lose ourselves in quotidian affairs that unfold at just enough remove in space or time as to enchant us anew... That [Anna] Zaranko manages to sustain this spell over nearly 1,000 pages testifies to her exceptional talents as a translator