REYMONT, WLADYSLAW STANISLAW

He had a restless and adventurous youth; he was an agronomist, a would-be monk, a railway worker, an actor; later he travelled in England, France and Italy, gathering a vast body of human observations which imbue his work with powerful vitality. A realist and at the same time imbued with an epic sense of nature and life, he introduces, through his narratives, into the most diverse worlds: the convent (Pielgrzymka do Jasnej Góry [Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra] and Pellegrinaggio a Czestochowa) and the theatre (Fermenty, Komediantka); the great industrial city (Ziemia obiecana [Promised Land]) and the peasant village (Chłopi [The Peasants], and some short stories). In every setting, with serene and sometimes ruthless objectivity, R. sees the human soul, equal in all social strata; he analyses its few virtues and many errors, placing beside the most noble figures the masses with their passions and cupidities. Ziemia obiecana is an indictment of machinery and industrialisation, a novel with a social background, as are the other works of R. They vibrate with a great pity, sympathy for toil and misery, and lament for the scarcity of human brotherhood, but above all for the trampled rights of the spirit. In Chłopi the protagonist is the entire village of Lipce, whose life is identified with that of the countryside, so much so as to make it the poem of the earth. Other notable works by R. are: Sprawiedliwość (Is it Just?); Z ziemi Chełmskiej (published in English as The Missionaries of the Scourge); Za frontem (translated as Behind the Front).