Reymont, Władysław Stanisław

REYMONT, WŁADYSŁAW STANISŁAW. - Polish writer, b. at Kobiele Wielkie on 7 May 1867, d. at Warsaw on 5 Dec. 1925. Nobel Prize in 1924.

He had a restless and adventurous youth; he was an agronomist, an aspiring monk, a railway worker, an actor; later he travelled in England, France and Italy, gathering a vast body of observations of human life that stamp his work with a powerful vitality. A realist and at the same time pervaded by an epic sense of nature and of life, he introduces with his narratives the most diverse worlds: the convent (Pielgrzymka do Jasnej-Góry "Pilgrimage to Czestochowa") and the theatre (Fermenty, Komediantka); the great industrial city (Ziemia obiecana "The Promised Land") and the peasant village (Chlopy, "The Peasants", and some short stories). In every milieu, with serene and at times ruthless objectivity, R. sees the human soul, the same in all social strata; he analyses its few virtues and its many errors, placing beside the noblest figures the masses with their passions and their greeds. Ziemia obiecana is an indictment of the machine and of industrialization, a novel with a social background, as are the other works of R. In them vibrate a great compassionate sympathy for toil and misery and a lament for the scant human brotherhood, but above all for 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, so as to make of it the poem of the earth. Other notable works of R. are: Sprawiedliwie ("It Is Just"); Z ziemi Chełmskiej (translated under the title: "The Missionaries of the Whip"); Za frontem ("From the Front").

Marina Bersano Begey