REYMONT, WLADYSLAW STANISLAW. — Polish writer, born at Kobiele Wielkie on 7 May 1867, died at Warsaw on 5 December 1925. Nobel Prize in 1924.
He had a restless and adventurous youth; he was an agronomist, an aspiring monk, a railwayman, and an actor. Later he travelled in England, France, and Italy, gathering a vast body of observations of human beings that imbue his work with powerful vitality. A realist, yet at the same time permeated by an epic sense of nature and life, through his narratives he introduces us into the most varied worlds: the convent (Pielgrzymka do Jasnej-Góry, “Pilgrimage to Częstochowa”) and the theatre (Fermenty, Komediantka); the great industrial city (Ziemia obiecana, “Promised Land”) and the peasant village (Chlopy, “The Peasants,” and several short stories). In every setting, with serene and at times ruthless objectivity, R. observes the human soul, identical in all social strata; he analyses its few virtues and its many errors, placing alongside figures of the greatest nobility the mass of people with their passions and their greed. Ziemia obiecana is an indictment of machinery and industrialisation, a novel with a social background, as are R.’s other works. They vibrate with profound compassionate sympathy for toil and misery and lamentation over the scant measure of human fraternity, but above all over the trampled rights of the spirit. In Chlopy, the protagonist is the entire village of Lipce, whose life is identified with that of the countryside, making it a poem of the earth. Other notable works by R. are: Sprawiedliwie (“It Is Just”); Z ziemi Chełmskiej (translated under the title: “The Missionaries of the Whip”); Za frontem (“Behind the Front”).