This two-volume edition translated by M.H. Dziewicki. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.

I reviewed the author’s first novel, The Comedienne (and was lukewarm about it) here.

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The Incident at Bucholc’s Factory

“What does it matter to me, if one more man goes to the devil?” says Charles Boroviecki, a brilliant chemical engineer and manager of the dye works in a large textile factory in Lodz (the Polish Manchester) at the turn of the 20th century.

Charles (Karol in the original Polish of Nobel Prize-winner Władysław Stanisław Reymont‘s 1899 novel The Promised Land [Ziemia obiecana]) has just finished turning down a fellow man of industry seeking a loan to keep his factory from going under. But they are still printing textiles (and money) in the factory of Bucholc, an old German and Charles’s boss. How sumptuously Reymont describes this factory!—the “transmission belts like pale yellow serpents of interminable length,” which are “running at furious speed just beneath the ceiling, whirling round above the double line of coppers, gliding along the walls and crossing one another so high up as scarcely to be visible through the pungent fumes that continually mounted from the cauldrons below, and dimmed the lights, and escaped into the rooms beyond by every outlet available”—to sample just one of the author’s whirling, crossing, gliding sentences.

The detail with which Reymont portrays industrial Lodz, paragraphs on paragraphs of the “furious clanking of the centrifugals, as they drove the moisture out of the drying stuffs” or the “dingy rays filtered athwart the tiny panes, much soiled with dust and steam,” is magnificent smokestack poetry, however much Czesław Miłosz in his History of Polish Literature (1969) decried the poetic style of Reymont and his fellow 1924 Nobel contender, Stefan Żeromski. (Myself, I was curious to see what else M.H. Dziewicki translated. Apparently a very archaic-sounding translation of Adam Mickiewicz‘s Conrad Wallenrod and some Medieval Latin tracts. Well, he did a splendid job here.) One can imagine looking upon all this vivid motion, and thinking, “Capitalism is really something.”

But just two paragraphs after Charles makes his disdainful remark, an episode occurs which is as disquieting for how it ends as it is shocking for how it starts. It’s worth quoting in full:

Boroviecki merely looked round, and was about to enter the elevator on his way to the ground-floor, when a terrible human cry was heard for an instant.

One of the driving-wheels had caught hold of the blouse of a workman who had incautiously come too near, whirled him aloft, flung him upon the machine, spun him round and round, crumpled him up, broken him on the machine, crushed him, smashed him, and thrown the shattered mass aside, never stopping in its course for one moment. His blood spurted up to the ceiling, flooded the machine, some of the goods it was shearing, and the working-women who stood by. An immense outcry followed; the machine was stopped, but all was over now. A bleeding bulk hung on the axle of the driving-wheel; other pieces had fallen heavily on the floor from various parts of the machine; they still were quivering with the tremors of the life that had been there. The man was literally torn to pieces; it was absurd to think of doing anything. He lay like a great lump of flesh—a bloody stain on the white ground of raw percale stuff.

Women wailed low; some of the older workmen knelt down by the side of the remains, and began to say aloud the Litany for the dying; the workmen took off their caps; some made the sign of the cross; all gathered round the dead man. There was no anger in their eyes, only the numbness of stunned apathy. The chamber was hushed, except for the weeping of the women, and the dull murmur of the neighbouring rooms, where everybody was work as usual.

As soon as the factory surgeon on duty came in, Boroviecki withdrew. The foreman of the department also came hurrying in. He, seeing the workers idle and crowding round the remains, cried out from the doorway: “Back to the machines!”

And they all dispersed, like birds at the swoop of a hawk. Presently the machines were all working again—all except that one, blood-stained with the crime it had committed; but workmen at once began to cleanse it.

“Confound it! So much good stuff spoiled!” the foreman cursed at the sight of the percale goods, spotted with gore. And he rated the workmen for their carelessness, and threatened to make the whole chamber pay for the loss.

This Boroviecki did not hear. The elevator had taken him down, quick as lightning, into the dyeing department. The accident had made no impression upon him, accustomed as he was to that sort of thing.

Imagine: a human being has just been torn apart. The foreman says, How dare you get blood on my merchandise! Charles, the manager, who is presumably supposed to be managing things, quickly exits the scene. Berating employees for dying on the job is a task he leaves to a middle manager, at least one more middling than himself. Blame is ascribed to the machine, or better, to the workers’ carelessness. Industrial accidents are the worker’s fault, and this assertion has the power of truth; it’s not like today, in the age of labor laws and Human Resources, when one can imagine HR’s legal representatives quickly following up with a battery of questions: Was the dead man using the machines according to specifications? Were proper procedures followed? Is there one iota of human negligence we can find to avoid being liable for this?—because that’s how it would be handled today. But in Lodz at the turn of the 20th century, the worker’s responsibility for not dying—and the obviation of any similar responsibility on the part of the employer to prevent said death—can simply be stated as a fact; the blood and guts are cleaned off the machine, the workers return to their stations, and the factory keeps humming right along. Textile production at the factory of Bucholc is too important to be delayed by a person’s death.

The Thrill of Capitalism: A Vehicle for Critique

By starting my review with this graphic incident, I risk making readers think that Reymont’s The Promised Land is a screed or jeremiad against capitalism; it is no such thing. Rather, it is a sprawling Realist novel which (like most Realist novels that sprawl) endeavors to recreate a world with all its complexities; true, the novel’s verdict on capitalism is quite negative, but this is brought out more by world-building than by preaching. The above gory scene is singular in how Reymont actually shows it while it’s happening, but at other points we hear of accidental beheadings, of scaffolds collapsing and killing five men at a blow. But the novel also shows the trials and rewards of being in business, especially in the large sections devoted to the efforts of its three main characters to do that. While framing the novel as a drama about whether its main characters will succeed in business, Reymont is able to show the social conditions surrounding that drama, which allows the horribleness of those conditions to be both incidental and entirely the point.

The main plot is in itself interesting. Three partners in business—Charles Boroviecki, a Pole, Max Baum, a German, and Moritz Welt, a Jew—plan to strike it rich in Lodz’s world of millionaire bankers and factory owners by starting their own factory using Charles’s mastery of the chemical arts to produce higher quality textiles than the competition. Charles is portrayed as your classic underling-who-could-do-it-better (the modern equivalent would be leaving X Megacorporation to build your own startup), but the partners face the same challenges any startup faces of finding financiers and suppliers, building your infrastructure, finding markets in which to sell the product. A reader for whom the minutiae of such things constitutes compelling drama might really enjoy these sections of the book; I felt a twinge of pride for Charles when in Volume II he finally gets to start construction of his factory, watching as the remains of old Meissner’s factory are transformed and given new life. There’s an air of the sea story in watching the three intrepid business partners working alongside their men, when Max has occasion to shout, “Hey, my nobleman! bring four stout fellows here to man the windlass—and look sharp about it!”

Lodz itself is depicted in grandiose terms. Reymont’s powers of poetic description clearly came along remarkably since he had written The Comedienne four years earlier. Reymont tells us in a short autobiographical essay for the Nobel Committee that he explicitly went to Lodz “to study conditions in heavy industry,” which is to say, he deeply researched and absorbed the place while writing his book, and it shows in the impressive detail he gives of the place. Here is his depiction of the main street in Lodz at its busiest period of the day:

Great numbers of workers, in black silent swarms, would issue suddenly from side streets that looked like canals of sable mud, and out of houses which arose on the skirts of the town, as so many huge dust-heaps; and they filled Piotrovska with a confused noise of footsteps, of twinkling, jingling tin lanterns, with the dry clatter of wooden soles, and with the sucking squash of feet in the slushy mire.

On they poured, overflowing the whole thoroughfare, filling the side-walks, plodding along through the mud and water-pools in the middle; some to join the straggling mobs outside the gates of their factory, whilst others, walking forward in long files, disappeared within the gates.

Out of the profound gloom, light after light began to appear. Black squat masses of building blazed in a sudden with hundreds of flaming windows, like so many eyes of fire; and all at once electric suns shone and dispelled the shadows where they were suspended, scintillating in the vacuum of their globes.

It is a shame that there currently exists no English translation for Ferments (1897), the novel situated between The Comedienne and The Promised Land in Reymont’s oeuvre, and where (I can’t find the source for the assertion) he is said to have first tried to create a wide ranging novel depicting all strata of society. The transitionary work between the two novels would be most interesting to read, since the amplification of his narrative powers in The Promised Land is amazing.

The Lives of Eminent Lodzermenchen

Parallel to the “Will our heroes strike it rich?” plot of the novel is an elaborate web of what might be called rich people marriage plots, which add to the compelling late 19th century themes of the novel (socio-economic and gender equality) a lot of time spent on blander mid-19th century issues of marrying for love or for money. Although in fairness to the genre (which includes the excellent Jane Austen), such stories are often really about a middle class person trying to marry a rich person, with the novel acting as a “vehicle” of wish fulfillment for middle-class readers who dream of marrying rich. (Entire libraries of criticism have been written on this subject; it is what the Victorian novel is known for. That, and poor people living in squalor.)

To summarize (so as not to bore you, reader): Our main protagonist, Charles, in addition to being a brilliant chemical engineer and aspiring business mogul is also a dashing conversationalist with a serious way with the ladies. Back when he was still living in his pastoral hometown of Kurov, he became engaged to a pretty woman (and, as we later find out, a rock of morality amid this festering swamp) named Anne. But Lodz is whole different world from Kurov, and Charles quickly loses patience with Anne’s goodness and clear sense of right and wrong. As he travels in society, making his appearance at the theater, paying house visits ostensibly to talk business with the business barons of Lodz, he makes the acquaintance of Lucy Zuker, the most beautiful woman imaginable—who happens to be married to the old millionaire Zuker; Lucy is the mistress he can’t quit, she sends him letters and he is unable to stop himself from going to their secret meeting places for another rendezvous. (The translation I read of the novel was released in a time when it was impossible to portray actual sex in print; the Post Office had made its views clear with regard to Ulysses; and so we have lengthy passages of imagistic euphemism to hint to readers, yes, they were having sex.) But Charles is also be courted by the Müllers, a family of German millionaires who see promise in the talented manager and want him to marry their daughter Mada. Charles could marry into the Müller family and easily become a millionaire, but he is tied down by his engagement to Anne and his affair with Lucy Zuker.

Yet Charles is hardly the only character involved in a love triangle (or quadrangle in his case), and these marriage plots are enmeshed in numerous subplots about the fortunes of each family, to rehearse all of which would be tiresome. (There must some 30 characters on the list of characters given at the back of Volume I.) Like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester, Lodz was a tiny hamlet transformed by the end of the 19th century into an industrial boomtown with over 200,000 inhabitants. The novel serves as a tour of the various families of Lodzermenschen, the rich industrialists of Lodz—the Polish Rockefellers and Carnegies, if you will. Men like Izrael Poznanski (1833 – 1900), whose fictional counterpart in The Promised Land is the Jewish magnate Shaya Mendelsohn, whose lackeys treat him with the solemnity of a god, who forces Jewish workers to participate with him in his own private minyan, and whose real-life neo-classical palace and ornate factory gate do not go unmentioned by the realist Reymont. (Polish critics have posited a half dozen real-life counterparts for characters in the novel.) We are shown grand balls, palaces that no one lives in, villas and castles and manors with servants aplenty. (Aside: Conspicuous consumption is the ultimate weapon against arguments from necessity, because nobody needs a palace, or a megayacht, or a private jet. And we are told that our economic system needs to obey the whims of such people as buy these things–or, what? Are they going to go Galt because you deprived them of their yacht? This is magic and mysticism, not logical argument.)

The depradations of these capitalists are frequently depicted in the novel. We see the modern phenomenon of out of pocket fees in how the Jewish banker Groslik arbitrarily decides to make his employees pay for the tea that he previously provided complementary. On another occasion, he pays workers in bills that he knows are worthless, much like a modern investor will sell off worthless assets to the next fool who comes around. An especially notable (and unexpected instance) is when Shaya Mendelsohn chastizes the doctor Vysocki (who he employs to treat people in his factory) for providing too much medical care to his workers. One does not expect to find a 19th century novel raising ideas with such resonance with current events!

Bucholc: A Socialist’s Idea of a Capitalist

None of these eminent Lodzians is quite as awful as the President of the factory Charles works for in Volume I, Bucholc (supposedly modelled on the German industrialist and Lodzian “cotton king” Karl Scheibler.) Early on Charles is shown visiting the shabby mansion of this decrepit Mr. Burns-soundalike (he’s suffering from rheumatism), who is comically unlikable: He is verbally abusive to Augustus, his personal attendant, who wraps the master in woolen bandages and dotes upon his illness. Bucholc is liberally bigoted against broad swathes of people—Jews, Poles, his workforce—basically anyone who isn’t Bucholc. Here’s how he speaks in conversation with Charles, whom he shows a modicum of respect for out of pure utilitarianism:

“Sit down. I like Poles, but there is no talking to you people. A word offends you—and off you go! Softly, softly, Mr. Boroviecki; do not forget that you are in my employ.”

“Mr. President mentions the fact too often for me to forget it for even one instant.”

“Do you, then, think the reminder is needless?” Bucholc asked with a friendly smile.

“That depends on those to whom and before whom it is made.”

“What if I gave you horses to drive without whip or bridle?”

“A very good comparison; only it is scarce applicable to everyone in your service alike.”

“I apply it, not to you, nor to some (some, mind you) of your associates, but only to the mass of ignorant workers.”

“Yet this mass of ignorant workers consists of men.”

“Of brutes, of brutes!” he cried, striking at the stool with all his force with his stick. “Don’t look like that: I have the right to say what I say; I, who give them the bread they eat.”

“True, but that bread is earned. They can claim it as a right.”

“They earn it, but through me. I give them work to do, where would they all be but for me?”

“They would find work elsewhere,” Boroviecki said quietly, but his blood was beginning to simmer in his veins.

“They would die of hunger, Mr. Boroviecki; die like dogs!”

There is much that seems cartoonish to us in the 21st century about Bucholc (though maybe less cartoonish in the era of Trump.) There is the over-the-top letter sorting scene, where Charles reads off letters from various people made desperate by Bucholc’s business, and one-by-one Bucholc mocks and scorns them. Of the widow of a husband who was decapitated in Bucholc’s factory, and sought Charles’s help to feed her starving children:

“That woman, your protegee—let them give her two hundred roubles—to get drunk with! She’s not worth fifty—she and her brats thrown in too!”

Then there is the scene where Horn, Charles’s young friend, gets fed up with Bucholc’s impudence and tells off the old man and storms out of the place, and Buchold takes out his anger at Horn on his assistant:

“I order you to drive that dog out; why did you not?”

And when Bucholc, half-dead with exhaustion, left off thrashing the man, and lay groaning in his chair, Augustus proceeded to wrap his master’s legs again in the flannel bandages that had slipped off during his tempest of rage.

Virtually any employer today can raise their hand and say, “Nope, I don’t physically assault my employees. Me and Bucholc have nothing in common.” And yet there are some commonalities, such as the potential retribution Bucholc can exact on Horn that Charles discusses with a colleague the next day:

“Bucholc has a long arm, that he can stretch out even to Warsaw. He may find how to—interest—certain people in Horn’s doings. Yes, Horn may find himself in a very cold place indeed, and for long enough to cool down thoroughly.”

Today there are more tools than ever at the disposal of the brotherhood of employers to keep troublemakers like Horn “in a very cold place indeed.” First, there is the regular practice of asking for references from past employers. (“You don’t want me to talk to them, eh? Well, begone with ye!”) There’s the rather silly and one-sided norm that the former employee is not allowed to badmouth the employer, but the former employer is perfectly allowed to badmouth the employee. (“What? Your former employer was a Bucholc-like asshole who deserved every bit of the tongue-lashing you gave him? Look here, young fool! This is your resume—in the trash can!”) This double-standard is actually getting worse: these days potential employers are having potential employees sign authorizations that specifically allow the former employers to badmouth them without suffering legal repercussions for doing so. It’s an utterly corrupt arrangement, like a pre-employment arbitration agreement. Frankly, we should pass a law.

The Mindset of a Captain of Industry

But it is Bucholc’s attitude towards his workers which most endures into the present day; he is much like the handsome-but-miserly industrialists in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels, whose sentiments in turn are not at all different from those you’ll privately hear from similar captains-of-industry today. I, who give them the bread they eat, and not the other way around. The employer deserves 100% of the credit—I built that!—not the employees, because his was a labor of the mind, not the hands; he organized, he took the risk—which is something that (it follows) ought to be worshipped by people who’ve had nothing to organize, and no risks to take except that of possible starvation (or dismemberment in one this Bucholc’s machines.) Their risks are less important, because they concern life-and-death as opposed to money, which easily exceeds the finite worth of human lives. Like a demented Jesus, Bucholc says, They earn it, but through me. Well, and you earn it, but through them. Where would they all be but for me? Where all would you be but for them? There is no logic here that can give precedence to the chicken or the egg, and yet Bucholc (and those who parrot his arguments today) would give all of the credit to one side (that of the wealthy man.) Yet one can take the perfectly reasonable position that both credit and reward for the enterprise should be shared (along with the decision-making process determining how it’s shared) without being the bastard spawn of Vladimir Lenin.

Few people in business are as ostentatiously evil as Bucholc, and in fact, few of us set out to treat other people poorly. Treating people like garbage is something we do passively. We do it because there is a way things must be done, a procedure to be followed, even if it’s just a mental one. Even without external procedures, our minds are already supply lines of self-justification, our stock phrases its semi trucks, and our preferred media sources its distribution centers, all delivering to us what we already know; and if mere homespun ideas can make us evil, how much more evil are we capable of when our procedures are corporate, bureaucratic, or fiduciary—that is, formulated by people almost completely remote from their effects? And the people we are harming—we being those who did not formulate the procedures, and therefore are absolved of responsibility for their effects—are customers, clients, employees—mere numbers, in other words. “A million deaths is a statistic,” said a man with, after all, only one brain; even he can’t fathom what he does through others. There is safety in not being able to fathom, in having eyes for only seeing what’s right in front of you. Those who formulate evil procedures never have to witness their effects. Those who perform them have the excuse that they didn’t come up with them. Neither ever has to tell a cancer patient, “I don’t think your life is worth saving,” because the former have the latter talk for them, and the latter are just doing what they’re told. Morality is verboten—thanks for calling.

And yet, one cannot quite exonerate today’s industrialists from the malice of Bucholc. They have underlings now to enact their cartoonish violence, known by the space alien-friendly name of Human Resources. They have procedures that they didn’t write. They promote “culture” on behalf of bosses who have none. Finally, they serve as an additional layer of separation between the businessman’s actions and their effects, without which he couldn’t perform them. Think about it: If we had to think through the second and third-order effects of our actions—and by think about them, I mean have them constantly in front of you, unable to be put out of mind—how many of us then would have to quit our jobs, or soon lose them? We’d have to go through life feeling like the men who cleared the gas chambers. We would never be able to formulate evil procedures, because the consequences of our procedures would be in front of us constantly. It is inconceivable for us to have to think about it. All money-making would grind to a halt from all this thinking about it. Andrey Platonov humorously portrays a thoughtful worker being chewed out by his superiors in the opening scene of The Foundation Pit; there is an assigned thinking time, they tell him, and it’s paradoxically when you’re not doing the things that are most worthy of being thought about.

Voices of Conscience

One of the satisfactions of the Promised Land is that Reymont puts stories of the affected people in front of readers (though some leftist critics in Poland felt he didn’t go far enough.) Regardless, some of the most affecting portraits are of minor characters whose desperate circumstances inspire the reader’s sympathy. There are the Trevinskis, with the husband whose factory is failing while his pure, innocent wife goes on buying expensive artwork. Vysocki, a doctor who is in love with the millionaire’s daughter Mela Grünspan, ends up being refused by her due to her Jewish family being unable to approve of her converting to Protestantism, and the latent antisemitism of Vysocki’s crazy mother.

Yet Vysocki is one of the “good” character in The Promised land, caring for as many of the poor and sick as he can help, including the Yaskulski family, poor laborers living in a filthy shanty. We are introduced to Joseph Yaskulski as he is being mocked as stupid by the son of his rich employer, and it is a highly effective move for Reymont to take the reader home with Joseph to see the extraordinary tribulations his family is going through, his brother Toni dying of consumption, his father too drunk and ashamed to work, having to be cajoled into working by Vysocki, who gives extra money to the Yaskulskis despite not making much money himself. Many of the passages in the book involving Vysocki make me wonder why it should be Stefan Żeromski who is called “the conscience of Polish literature” and not Reymont. Consider the beautiful sense of humanity in this off-hand passage, where Moritz Welt is trying to find Joseph Yaskulski, and he asks the dying Tony:

Tony was sitting in front of the store, wrapped in a blanket, and looking up dreamily and languidly to the crescent of the moon, just emerging from behind a cloud and silvering the zinc-plated roofs, wet with dew, and the chimneys of the town.

“Is Joe at home?” Horn inquired, grasping the dry hand of the consumptive boy.

“He is,” Tony answered with an effort, still holding the other’s hand.

“Do you feel any better now than in winter?”

The boy said, pointing to the moon, and staring with hollow eyes: “Can one not get there?”

“Perhaps–when one is dead,” Horn replied, hastily going into the shop.

“I feel how awfully quiet it must be up there,” the boy said, shuddering all over; and yet a smile of grim, potent, dreary yearning passed over his thin face. He remained silent, letting his arms drop. Resting his head against the door he sat by, he plunged his soul into the infinite spaces through which the silver crescent of the moon was gliding.

Another character who stands for the moral views of the author is Anne, Charles’s fiancee. Volume II of the novel begins in Kurov, which is portrayed to us in such loving terms—amongst apple orchards and woodlands and fields —that it is made to seem a paradise on Earth in contrast to the poisoned Lodz. Anne is in her element in the country, associated with an older world of nobility and manors and when Charles sees her in that setting, he feels more strongly then the need to marry her than he ever feels in Lodz. But when Anne and Charles’s father move to Lodz in Volume II of the novel, they immediately miss the wide open fields and enormous sky of Kurov. Moreover, being of an aristocratic character gives Charles’s father and Anne a certain noblesse oblige that is completely alien to the pure capitalistic values of Lodz. This clash of values immediately comes into play when a construction scaffold falls at Charles’s new factory, and five workers die, with many more injured.

Anne uttered a cry when she saw all those bleeding shapes, but without more ado set to help Yaskulski dress the men’s wounds. She shuddered to behold those broken limbs, already beginning to inflame and swell; she was frightened at those livid faces, begrimed with earth and blood; their groans brought tears, and several times she was so near fainting that she had to go out into the fresh air. But she always returned. She mastered the horror, the sickening nausea, and with infinite compassion and pity she washed and stuped their wounds, and arrested the bleeding with pads of lint as well as she could.

The factory workers and their families regard Anne as a saint and a protectress, and show up at her door to shower her with their appreciation. But Charles mocks the workers and their simple gratitude. We see by Anne and Charles’ angry exchange that Charles has almost completely transformed into Bucholc. He tells her:

“You like to apply the glamour of sentiment to everyday life. It’s all very pretty, but to no purpose.”

“That depends on the degree of feeling one has for human sufferings.”

“Kindly believe that I too have feelings. But you cannot force me to feel tenderly for every incapable, every lame dog, every faded flower, every crushed butterfly!”

There was in his eyes a gleam of keen malicious irony.

“The lad has three broken ribs, a broken head, and a haemorrhage of the ungs. So he is not to be classed among faded flowers or crushed butterflies. He is in pain—”

“Then let him die off, and God take him!” he retorted sharply, stung by the high tone she was taking.

“You are without mercy,” she murmured reproachfully.

Anne is without doubt the strongest female character in the novel. (She is certainly the most willful.) Her compassion, moral clarity, and stoicism in the face of a fiancee who doesn’t love her are admirable, and towards the end of the novel we see what depths of heroism and self-sacrifice lay in her. Charles, meanwhile, undergoes a profound shift in perspective at the end/epilogue chapter of the novel that seems a little tendentious. While Reymont allows himself this opportunity for explicit moralizing that he has refrained from in the rest of the book, Charles’s new point of view is jarring not so much because he was previously incapable of mercy (as Anne accuses him of, though he shows a sense of guilt and compassion at various points) so much as that Charles as we’ve come to know him is a workoholic; he is a worker, not a lover; love to him is a tool at best, and nuisance most of the time; and he is never so happy as when he has a dozen projects in hand, and so the idea that that suddenly would stop being the thing that makes him happy rings untrue.

Yet these are just a few of the moments that stick out in my memory of reading the novel. It is, truthfully, so dense with interbraided characters and subplots that I feel like a reread or two would be required just to clarify the whole tangled net of relationships. And if keeping track of the characters is difficult in the two volumes of The Promised Land, I wonder at the probable complexity of Reymont’s four volume novel The Peasants, which ultimately was the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

A comparison with Thomas Mann, whose Buddenbrooks came out a year after this novel, is instructive: Reymont works fabulously with the Realist toolset, but he is no Modernist; one of Modernism’s greatest innovations (from Flaubert and Austen onward) was to combine characterization with other narrative actions, like plot exposition and description of the setting. Reymont doesn’t do this, hence he doesn’t accomplish as much (or as efficient) characterization as Mann does.

Back to the Land: Ecological Awareness in The Promised Land

One of the ways The Promised Land fits in with Reymont’s larger body of work is in the theme of city versus rural life. The rural life of Anne and Mr. Boroviecki is portrayed as healthful and beautiful, while the city is corrupt and dirty. This theme extends to ecological issues, which Reymont shows remarkable awareness of some 63 years before the publication of Silent Spring. When he describes Lodz, he continually shows the effects that the industry of the town is having on the environment.

Sometimes waste products and factory refuse came pouring down in dirty streamlets, reddish or bluish or yellowish; and the flow of offscourings from the houses and the factories behind them was so abundant that they brimmed over the kennels, which were neither wide nor deep, and deluged the foot-paths with a many-colored flood.

And again and again he remarks on the soot-covered parks, the poisoned trees:

And then, a stream of waste product from the factories, flowing on like a many-coloured ribbon, and sinuously winding among the decaying fir-trees, had spread deleterious emanations all around, and brought death to those mighty trunks.

He makes his most explicit statement of the connection between capitalism and environmental degradation towards the end of the novel:

For that ‘promised land’ – for that tumor – villages were deserted, forests died out, the land was depleted of its treasures, the rivers dried up, people were born. And it sucked everything into itself. And in its powerful jaws it crushed and chewed up people and things, sky and earth, in return giving useless millions to a handful of people, and hunger and hardship to the whole throng.

It will be interesting to see how the theme of city and countryside is developed in the book considered to be Reymont’s opus, The Peasants.