Wladyslaw Reymont Biography and List of Works

Polish writer and novelist, whose work offers a vast panorama of Polish life in the last quarter of the 19th century. Reymont was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924, he died a year later. He is best known for The Peasants, an epic four-part novel of peasant life during the four seasons of a year. It is almost entirely written in peasant dialect.

"I still have many things to say and desire greatly to make them public, but will death let me?"
(from Reymont's note to the Swedish Academy, 1924)

Reymont was born in Kobiele Wielke, a small town in southern Poland then under Russian Rule. His father was the village organist, who supported a family of nine children with his meagre income. Reymont left the school after third grade. He was admitted to the tailor's guild as a journeyman in Warsaw. He became interested in theatre and developed a lasting love for the stage. He was expelled from the guild when the Russian authorities suspected him of taking part in a strike in Lodz.

Reymont joined a travelling acting company but found that he lacked the necessary talent. He worked later on the railways and in a factory. Reymont's railroad job paid very little, but it provided him opportunity to write short stories, poems, dramas, and novels. As a writer Reymont relied on experience, and used his adventures as raw material for his fiction. Between the years 1884 and 1894 he kept a diary, which aided his literary apprenticeship.

Having benefited financially from a railway accident, he moved to Warsaw and gained success with his book Pilgrimage to the Mountains of Life (1894). The book explored the mood of a group of people on pilgrimage to Jasna Góra. It attracted the attention of the closed circle of Polish intellectuals and writers with its portrayal of collective psychology. Reymont's first novel, The Comedienne, appeared two years later, and was followed by sequel, Ferments. It tells the story of the rebellion of a young woman, and her eventual acceptance and understanding that a revolt against the laws of society must end in failure.

The Promised Land (1899) concerns the rapidly growing industrial city of Lodz and the cruel effects of industrialization on textile mill owners. It painted a kaleidoscopic view of its people, places, generations, and nationalities. The narrative technique adopted influences from film, cutting from one scene to another. Reymond saw industrialization as a huge beast that swallows human resources, anticipating modern environmental debates.

"For that land people were born. And it sucked everything in, crushed it in its powerful jaws, and chewed people and objects, the sky and the earth, in return giving useless millions to a handful of people, and hunger and hardship to the whole throng."
(from The Promised Land)

At the beginning of the 20th century Reymont was injured in a railroad accident. He received a substantial settlement that brought him financial independence. In 1902 Reymont moved to Paris, where he finished his major work, The Peasants. Its final volume was published in 1909 and was compared to the works of Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola. The narrative structure follows the seasons from autumn to summer and the church holidays and religious rituals interwoven within the rhythm of the season. In the story Reymont focused on the love affair of Antek Boryna, the son of the Maciej, a wealthy peasant, with his father's young and sensual stepmother, Jagna. The love triangle is resolved by the old man's death and Antek leaves Jagna because "one has to plow in order to sow, one has to sow in order to harvest, and what is disturbing has to be weeded out, like a bad weed."

Although Reymont continued to write prolifically he never again found the same popular and critical success that greeted The Peasants. Among his later works are The Dreamer (1910) and an occult novel, The Vampire (1911). Reymont returned to Poland in 1914. He visited the United States in 1919 and 1920, and settled in the 1920s on his own estate, Kolaczkowo. Reymont died on December 5, 1925 in Warsaw.

In his early novels Reymont depicts the life of workers in a naturalistic style with short sentences. Later he became interested in the 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.

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); Wladislaw Stanislaw Reymont by J.R. Krzyzanowski (1972); Reymont: Opowiésc biograficzna by Barbara Kocowna (1973); A History of Polish Literature by J. Krzyzanowski (1978); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3)

PIELGRZYMKA DO JASNEY GÓRY, (1984)