The Peasants

Matthias Boryna's death throws Lipka into mourning, and from the first prayers over his body, the novel binds grief to the hard realities of peasant life. Candles, incense, coffin-making, and the priest's blunt arrangements unfold alongside quiet calculations about inheritance, property, and the power land holds over every household. In the heat, rain, and long vigil, the village seems to mourn not only a man, but an entire order of labor, authority, and belonging. Yet the household's sorrow is never simple. Hanka, Yagna, Antek, and the others are pulled between devotion, resentment, jealousy, and survival, while the blacksmith, the squire, and the priest all reveal the web of ambitions and bargains surrounding the dead. As Antek's affair with Yagna collapses into shame and fury, Hanka's fierce loyalty to the farm and children becomes the novel's moral center, forcing him to choose endurance over escape. Even as gendarmes search for the secretive old teacher Roch and Simon slips away toward a future rooted in landownership, the fields remain the true inheritance: ripe, sacred, and inseparable from identity, desire, and fate. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.