Born in 1867, Reymont tried his luck—unsuccessfully—as a railwayman, tailor and actor before embarking on a literary career.
He wrote his first short stories in the early 1890s, followed by A Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra, his book debut in 1895.
Four years later, Reymont published the novel The Promised Land, which significantly enhanced his reputation.
Its protagonists are three entrepreneurs—a Pole, a German and a Jew—who join forces to build a cotton factory in hopes of making a fortune in late 19th-century Łódź, then seen as a promised land of free enterprise.
In 1975, The Promised Land was made into a feature film by Andrzej Wajda. Universally hailed as one of the masterpieces of Polish cinema, it received an Academy Award nomination.
Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning novel The Peasants, published in instalments between 1904 and 1909, has been described by Penguin, its British publisher, as “one of Poland's most engrossing twentieth-century epics.”
Set in the small village of Lipce, the novel is divided into four parts, each reflecting a season of the year.
According to literary critic Kazimierz Wyka, The Peasants is “a study of universal human emotions and conflicts—love, jealousy, greed and the struggle for power.”
The novel has been adapted for the screen multiple times, in 1922, 1972 and, most recently, in 2022. The latest version was a hand-painted animated film by directors Dorota Kobiela (DK Welchman) and Hugh Welchman.
When the news of the Nobel Prize arrived on November 13, 1924, Reymont was in poor health and unable to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm the following month.
He died on December 5, 1925 at the age of 57.
His funeral at Warsaw’s Powązki Cemetery was attended by President Stanisław Wojciechowski, government officials and foreign diplomats. The urn containing the writer’s heart was placed in a pillar of Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, the same church where Chopin's heart is interred.
Władysław Reymont. Image: Polona.pl, public domain
Reymont is one of five Polish writers to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The others are Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), Czesław Miłosz (1980), Wisława Szymborska (1996) and Olga Tokarczuk (2018).
(mk/gs)