He that takes for a wife one that might be his daughter, for his pains gets a fiend who will scorn holy water.
Poland at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution experienced a cultural nostalgia that Wladislaw Reymont satisfied with his four-volume saga The Peasants—Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. With pastoral settings as vivid as a Monet, cultural and colloquial details as comprehensive as a guidebook, and plotlines of mythological proportion, his won the 1924 Nobel Prize for literature fifteen years after the quartet was completed.
I discovered his work as part of a self-education drive in preparation for a someday-trip to my ancestors’ homeland. In addition to learning the language, I want to understand the world my grandmother was born into. I began with the second volume because that was what the library had on hand. Having now read some of what it that was like, I’m grateful she emigrated but also eager to read the other three volumes.
Jumping into Winter without first having read Autumn was not difficult. The beautifully rendered storm of the first chapter alone had me hooked. Then there was the drama of watching a young housewife try to turn a dirt-floored hovel into a home for her newly dispossessed family, kicked evicted from her father-in-law’s wealthy farm because her husband is in love in with Dad’s teen bride. What follows is a drama of hatred, passion, forgiveness, and endurance as they all find ways to survive the cold that threatens from without and within their homes.
Last made into a film in 1972, a new animated version of this story—from the creators of Loving Vincent—is set to be released in 2022 with English subtitles, and I cannot wait.