I watched this adaptation of "The Peasants" by Reymont for the first time in the 1970s when I was a teenager, and it reminded me of my own childhood. I was born and raised in a more eastern than Reymont's Lipce (place of action of the book) part of Poland that is now close to the Ukrainian border. My village was electrified when I was 8 years old; farmers used carts driven by horses, and my grandparents went to school under the administration of a Russian tsar, so the world described in "The Peasants" was still vivid in the memory of people surrounding me. I enjoyed the TV series very much and remembered it well enough to get the passing grades at school without reading the original book. But I read "The Peasants" a couple of years ago and now and then watch a single, random installment of the series on Polish television. Stanislaw Wladyslaw Reymont received the Nobel Prize for his book "The Peasants" in 1924, beating such competitors as Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy. But contrary to Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy Reymont is now partly forgotten, and only a few people read him outside his native Poland. Czeslaw Milosz writes quite objectively about the strengths and weaknesses of Reymont's prose in his book "The History of Polish Literature". When reading the unabridged version of "The Peasants" I was mostly interested in subplots and village customs and wasn't disappointed. On the other hand, I didn't enjoy obsolete and hard-to-understand slang, in spite of the fact that Polish is my native language. I never had problems understanding my grandparents, so I am not sure if Reymont's dialogs are authentical. I was also disconcerted by the great number of anti-Semitic abuses that Reymont was putting into the mouths of his characters. I've certainly heard a lot of bad language in my village years, but never this kind of epithets against other nationalities. It was insulting even for me, but I never tried to find out the reasons behind it. So much for the book. But when it comes to the television series "The Peasants" I have only good things to say. All defects of the book were gone (at least to me). Jan Rybkowski was a skilled film director, so the selection of the actors was excellent, and they all played well, especially Wladyslaw Hancza and Emilia Krakowska. There are no outright heroes or villains in the book, so Jan Rybkowski was using mostly popular in 1970s actors so that the audience could remember the characters they played. Those popular at that time actors also sparked some more life into the somewhat wooden characters of the original book. It was also a great experience for me to watch the outside and inside of village houses, clothes and farm tools. Though both the place of series' action and the area where I was born were in the past parts of the Russian empire, the population was quite different. Before WW2, in my parts around 30% of people were Poles, 30% Ukrainians, 30% Jewish with some Russians and Germans. Apart from the natural curiosity about the past of my native area, there are some several points thanks to which I want to remember this past:
1. My grandparents never used television or social media. But they were happy and active to the end of their days. So they had some different mechanism inside that is worth remembering
2. They had a weaker sense of nationality, which surprised me as a child. But then I understood that people who grew up together with other nationalities simply learned that it was better to cooperate than fight one another. So I think that the citizens of great multi-national empires were in a way forerunners of our present generation (today at least the democratic states don't wage wars against one another and people gather around common values like democracy, free-market economy etc.)
3. Generation of my grandparents had high moral standards. For example even in my days people in the village didn't lock their houses. I also remember a friend of my grandfather who was a veteran of WWI and a soldier of the Russian empire. The soldiers were once ordered to attack the Austrians, and he killed an Austrian in a bayonet fight. But even after 50 years, it bothered him that he had killed another human being who had not done anything wrong to him
So this is why I am interested in all open-air village museums (also in other countries), and books about the lives of simple folks are not boring to me. So I strongly recommend the TV series "The Peasants" especially to the people who are aware of their rural origin. Let me also mention that Isaac Bashevis Singer and his older brother Israel Joshua Singer grew up in the same places I did. They may belong more to Jewish and American literature than Polish literature,but I regard them as my fellow countrymen, and they both belong to the heritage that relates to "The Peasants".
