The Peasants
A Polish national epic that follows the seasons while depicting the life and conflict of a village community. The cycle of nature and human desire collide within the same flow of time.
Work Information
As the seasons turn, rural life reveals the force of the village community.
Widely known as Reymont’s signature work, it does not idealize peasant life but includes desire and conflict. Rich descriptions of nature are matched by strikingly vivid human feeling.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Published
- 2025-06-10
- Pages
- 976 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.9 x 4 x 19.7 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780241524244
- ISBN-10
- 0241524245
- Price
- 4365 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/United States/Classics
One of Poland's most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature A Penguin Classic In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride – but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons – Autumn to Summer – the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek ... Richly lyrical and thrillingly realist, at turns comic, tragic and reflective, Wladyslaw Reymont's magnum opus is a love song to a lasting dream of rural Poland, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart. Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (1867–1925) was a Polish novelist and the 1924 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his four-volume epic The Peasants (Chlopi), which was originally published between 1904 and1909. Anna Zaranko (translator) is a Polish-English translator based in the UK. She has translated Kornel Filipowicz's The Memoir of an Anti-Hero , for which she received the Found in Translation award in 2020.
Reviews
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How the lower classes lived cross the whole of Europe
It seems long winded, but stay with it and t will be clear why the author deceived a Nobel literary prize for it!
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Nobel Prize winning work of fiction.
I was so happy to be able to obtain this largely forgotten classic of world literature in a complete unedited version. The author won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1924 largely on the strength of this novel. It is a work that deserves to have a much wider readership, and, thanks to Penguin Books, it is now available. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read.
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poor condition
book arrived promptly but from p 741 pages torn at the bottom
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Great, Richly Detailed Writing
If you like great writing and rich detail, this book is for you. The guy can go on for three pages or more just describing the wind at the beginning of winter. And I love that. I'm guessing the translator plays an important part, but the writing is simply amazing. And since I know next to nothing about Polish peasant live in the late 1800's, it's very enlightening. There are great footnotes for learning many obscure references.
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Cover and first few pages were torn, spine is chafed
My book arrived with a damaged spine and the first few pages were torn at the bottom. This book is definitely not in new condition.