Railway Porter who Won Noble Prize

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12394, 13 March 1926, Page 12

Railway Porter who Won Noble Prize

From railway porter to winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature —these were the two extremes in the life of Ladislas S. Reymont—“The bard of peasant®”—who has just died in Poland. He was born in 1868, of a very poor family. He never learned writing—it just came to him—as songs, come to a poet, for he was a born storyteller, and his only school was his own greatly tumultuous life. He left home* early and joined a group ot strolling actors; but, baffled by .continuous failures on the stage, he became a railway porter at a wage of a. pound a month. He scribbled his first articles sitting in a ditch near the statiou, watching at the same time for the next train on the line. These articles, written in the intervale of pottering, found favour with one or two editors. An undeveloped genius was sensed, and Reymont received unexpected encouragement. So he wended his way to Warsaw; —to conquer the great world of letters. His first work, portraying tho life of provincial actors as he had known

it, was well received. Then Reymont realised that greater things were"' expected from him, and he wrought several—all of them deep and beautiful and'haunting—hut his summit was ascended with the creation of “Peasants.” . ’ ' , , It meant twelve years of work and first appeared in 1904. The hardly won freedom of Poland meant the coming out -of the peasants—their entering on a new, splendidly active national life, and the genius of Ladislas Reymont found a most tinjiely expression in the portrayal of peasant life. "Peasants” is gracefully and easily divided into autumn and winter, springand summer. The real hero is : the village. But the human element . dobs enter —-and it, sweeps the reader off his: feet. It ia{centred round youngAntek Boryna and beautiful Yagna—; she of the strong limbs and amazing eyes. Their love is elementary and tumultuous—just.: like the evening woods and the spring river# of Poland. There iB darkness- m this love, too. For young Antek hatea his father-old Boryna—who loves Yagna and desires to wed her. There is fire in all of Reymont’s people, but mpet of all in Yagna, who, for all' the strange things, in her lif* “knows no sin.” Beautiful heyond comprehension; she succeeds in breaking , human lives around her—herself unaware of these ravages. There is dancing in tho hook the freC, proud, graceful, dancing of peasants. And when Yagna dances in Antek’s. arras, he juat wants “to laugH and to cry, to press her to his heart, to cover her with kisses, and thus escape somewhere, just they two, afar from; tl)e world, to the extent of forgetting thomselves and all things.” And there is Boryna—Antek’s despot Cf a father—the perfect type of a Polish peasant; Snob is- his, great passion for hie fields that he, when dying, gathers up his last remaining strength, and comes out—although ailing and burning-with fever—“to do his last bit of sowing,*’ Thus beneath them, around them, everywhere, is the precious, lovable “mother-soil.” We can understand why Antek, when coming home from his imprisonment, falls dawn on his knees and kisses this damp brown sell, passionately, silently. For there is hidden motherhood in it, and his sopship has depths which Belmont’s genius clothed in life .and m a perfect beauty of word-musip. “Peasants,” first written in 1904, has since been translated; into)’ six languages —English among other*—and . was awarded the Nobel’ Prize for Literature in 1924. The greater part of his other works has appeared in German.