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Władysław Reymont (1867-1925) - Stanisław Władysław Rejment | |
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Polish writer and novelist, whose work offer a vast panorama of Polish life in the last quarter of the 19th century. Wladyslaw Reymont was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924; a year later he died. He is best known for The Peasants, an epic, four-part novel of peasant life. It is almost entirely written in peasant dialect. Reymont considered it his best work. "I was twenty-two years old. I was healthy, had only one suit, and boots with holes in them. I had faith in the world and a thousand bold projects in my mind. I wrote feverishly: dramas in ten acts, novels without end, stories in several volumes, poems. Then I tore up everything mercilessly and burned it. I lived in solitude; I had no friends; the authorities as well as my fellow-workers were unfavourably disposed toward me; I did my duties badly. I could adapt myself neither to the mentality of those around me nor to the conditions of my existence. All this was painful and hard for me to endure." (from 'Autobiography', in Nobel Lectures: Literature, 1901-1967, edited by Horst Frenz, World Scientific, 1999, pp. 220-221) Władysław Stanisław Reymont was born in Kobiele Wielke, a
small town in southern Poland near Lodz, a fast-growing industrial
city, which was at that time occupied by Russia. Reymont spent his
childhood in the country and later depicted in his books the life of
the peasants, their customs and work. His father, Josef Rejmont, was
the village organist, who supported with his meagre income a large
family; Reymont was the fift of twelve children. Josef tried to teach
his children to play the piano, Reymont was more interested in reading,
and devoured books whenever he had the change. Among his favorites were
Robinson Crusoe and novels by Walter Scott. Reymont's
family was very patriotic and rigidly Roman Catholic. His mother,
Antonina (neé Kupczynska) had taken with her brothers in the
insurrection of 1863. After third grade, Reymont left the school and his home – he had failed to pass the entrance examinations for a secondary school in Lodz. At that time the schools were also instruments of Russification; students were not allowed to speak Polish inside the school. Reymont was admitted to the tailor's guild as a journeyman in Warsaw. During this period he became interested in theatre and developed a lasting love for the stage. Reymont was not able to finish his journeyman years. When the Russian authorities suspected him of taking part in a strike in Lodz, he was expelled from the guild. At
the age of seventeen Reymont began his wandering years. He
joined a travelling acting
company but soon found out that he lacked the necessary talent. He also
unsuccessfully joined a monastery as a novice. Later he worked in the
railways and in a factory. Reymont's railroad job paid very little, but
it provided him opportunity to write. He produced feverishly short
stories, poems, dramas and novels without end. Like Maxim Gorky,
Reymont relied on experience, and used his adventures as raw material
for his fiction. Between the years 1884 and 1894 he kept diary, which
helped him in his literary apprenticeship. He visited London in 1894
with the homeopathic doctor and theosophist Józef Drzewiecki. ('Reymont in London: A Writer’s Spiritualistic Adventures' by Marcelina Obarska, culture.pl/en, Last updated: Aug 25 2021) Reymont
wrote in his diary: "People wander around like shadows. Dogs sniff, and
dig in the heaps of rubbish. You can see here Hogarth's characters,
houses dripping with dirt, and suspicious people inside them." ('Reymont's The Vampire: the beginning of infernal doom' by Anna Adamczyk, Journal of Education Culture and Society, June 2010, p. 112) After being injured in a railroad accident, Reymont received substantial settlement, that brought him financial independence, without the need to earn a living from other work. In 1893, Reymont moved to Warsaw. There he gained success with Pielgrzymka do Jasnej Góry (1894, A Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra). The author himself attended this pilgrimage, held for the first time in 1711, upon the urging of Aleksander Świętochowski. It started on May 5, 1894, from Warsaw. "I went equipped with as little as possible: my long boots, an old coat, flat hat, and umbrella did not distinguish me much from the crowds gathered on the squares and road in front of the church. Besides, nobody paid much attention to me; everyone was absorbed in their preparations for the journey and instead looked at the horizon." (Ibid., p. 1) The book attracted the attention of the closed circle of Polish intellectuals and writers by its portrayal of the collective psychology. Reymont's first novel, The Comedienne (1896), dealt with theatrical life, and was followed by a sequel, Ferments. It told about the rebellion of a young woman, who realizes that the revolt against the laws of society must end in failure. The Promised Land
(1899) was about the rapidly growing
industrial city of Łódź ("the Manchester of Poland"), the cruel effects
of industrialization on
textile mill owners, and the ruthless struggle for more and more.
Charles Boroviecki (Karol in the original Polish), the hero of the
novel, says: "But
recollect: you are in Lodz. As 1 see, you perpetually forget that you
have the delusion of doing business with civilized people of central
Europe. Whereas Lodz is a forest, a jungle—in which, if you have good
strong claws, you may fearlessly go forward and make away with your
neighbours; else they will fall upon you, suck you dry, and toss your
carcass away afterwards." (The Promised Land, Volume One, translated from the Polish by M. H. Dzirwicki, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 173)
Reymont painted a kaleidoscopic view of people,
places, generations, nationalities. The agents of change are Jews, "who
in trying to turn Poland into their "promised land" corrupt the country
for its (Christian) Polish citizens." (The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture by Ruth R. Wisse, The University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 141)
Moritz Welt, a Jewish businessman, declares: "I am a Jew . . . and am
not ashamed to say so, anywhere and at any time; what should I gain by
denying it? I, like all our people, care nothing beyond my own
interest; it is not in my blood to care."(Ibid., p. 128) The narrative technique adopted
influences from film, cutting from one scene to another. With this
novel, Reymont gave perhaps the first literary expression to the concept of the
"lodzermensch". Initially the type was associated with the
predominantly German-Jewish entrepreneurial class. Reymont saw industrialization as a huge beast that swallows human resources, anticipating modern environmental debate. Noteworthy, Reymont depicted Jews as krajowy cudzoziemiec (the domestic foreigner). The term entered the Polish vocabulary of the turn of the century. The legendary Colonel Berek Joselewicz was intruduced in Rok 1794 (1913-18) as Machabeusz and krajowy cudzoziemiec. Andrzej Wajda's film adaptation of the book from 1974 was not shown in American movie theaters due to accusations of anti-Semitism, but it received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. "Not all of Mr. Wajda's 19th-century excesses sit comfortably in the 20th century. Too many secondary characters are stereotypes of Jews, especially a repulsive, piggish woman with whom Karol has an affair, and her merciless, vengeful husband. There is so little historical perspective on these characters that Mr. Wajda's own judgment seems to have failed him." (Caryn James, The New York Times, February 5, 1988) In 1902, Reymont married Aurelia Szablowska, a nurse he had met while
recuperating from the railroad accident. They went to Paris, where
Reymont finished his major work, The Peasants. It first
appeared in serialized form in the magazine Tygodnik Ilustrowany
(1902-6). Upon the publication of the final volume, it was compared to
the best works of Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola and earned Reymont the Nobel Prize in literature. The narrative structure followed the
seasons (autumn, winter, spring, summer) and the church holidays and religious
rituals interwoven with the rhythm of the season. In the plot Reymont
focused on the love affair of Antek Boryna, the son of the Maciej (Matthew), a
wealthy peasant, with his father's young and sensual stepmother, Jagna.
This love triangle is resolved by the old man's death and Antek leaves
Jagna. He says to himself: "All things must take their course: they must! We plough to sow, we sow to reap; and if anything hinder, we pluck it out like an evil weed." (The Peasants: Summer, translated by Michael H. Dziewicki, Alfred A. Knopf, 1925, p. 279) Because Reymont had used a local dialect, the novel, especially
its dialogue, was not easy to translate into another language. However,
the first volume came out in Russian in 1904 and a German translation
was published in 1912. In France Reymont's work received much attention
through Franck Louis Schoell's translation. Reymont planned to write a sequel to the tetralogy, but never started the work. Although Reymont continued to write prolifically, he did not
gain the same popular and critical success that greeted The Peasants.
". . . his energy seems to have been spent on that major endeavor of his literary career." (The History of Polish Literature by Czesław Miłosz, second edition, University of California Press, 1983, p. 371) Reymont's later works include The Dreamer (1910), about a lonely
railroad employe, and an occult novel, The Vampire (1911),
which deals with spiritualistic problems. London is presented as a city
of nightmare, where the characters of the story wander without a sense
of purpose. London is the vampire of the title, sucking life from its
inhabitats. Reymont returned to Poland in 1914. During World War I Reymont spent much time in Warsaw and Zakopane. He traveled in the United States in 1919 and 1920 in search of materials – Reymont did not speak English but interpreters served as go-betweens. In the 1920s he settled on his own estate, Kolaczkowo. The the first volumes of The Peasants appeared in Swedish in 1920; four years late he was awarded the Nobel prize. By that time he was too ill and unable to travel to Stockholm to attend the award ceremony. The money enabled him to buy a country estate. Reymont died on December 5, 1925, in Warsaw. In his early novels Reymont depicted the life of workers in a naturalistic style with short sentences. Later he became interested in spiritualistic movement and wrote three-volume historical novel ROK 1974, an interpretation of Polish political and social life in the close of the 18th century. The work was meant to equal Henryk Sienkiewicz's famous trilogy about Poland in the middle of the 17th century, Ogniem i mieczem, Potop, and Pan Wolodyjowski (1884-1888). Reymont focused on the last years of the Polish Republic, before its partition among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. He was an ardent supporter of Jan Paderewski, a pianist, diplomat and politician, who was for a short time Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland. For further reading: Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont by Julian Krzyzanowski (1937); "Chlopi" Reymonta by Maria Rzeuska (1950); Les paysants de Ladislas Reymont by F.L. Schoell (1925); 'Reymont, Wladyslaw Stanislaw,' in Encyclopedia of Wold Literature in the 20th Century, Volume 3: O-Z, general editor Wolfgang Bernard Fleischmann (1967); Wladislaw Stanislaw Reymont by J.R. Krzyzanowski (1972); Reymont: Opowiésc biograficzna by Barbara Kocowna (1973); A History of Polish Literature by J. Krzyzanowski (1978); Studie über die "Chlopi" und Dorfnovellen Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymonts by P.M. Boronowski (1994); 'Land of Promise: Reflections on Andrzej Wajda's Merchants of Lodz' by Jan Epstein, in Through a Catholic Lens: Religious Perspectives of Nineteen Film Directors from around the World, ed. by Peter Malone (2007); 'The Peasants (Chłopi)' by Katarzyna Szmigiero, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present, edited by Michael Sollars (2008); "Wskrzesić choćby chwilę": Władysława Reymonta zmagania z myślą i formą = To revive even a moment": Władysław Reymont's struggles with thought and form, redakcja naukowa Mateusz Bourkane, Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn, Agnieszka Sell, Marek Wedemann (2017) - See also: Henryk Sienkiewicz, Polish writer who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905. Selected works:
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