Wladyslaw Reymont

Władysław Reymont was a Polish novelist and the laureate of the 1924 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known work is the award-winning four-volume novel Chłopi (The Peasants). Born into an impoverished noble family, Reymont was educated to become a master tailor, but instead worked as a gateman at a railway station and then as an actor in a troupe. His intensive travels and voyages encouraged him to publish short stories, with notions of literary realism. Reymont's first successful and widely praised novel was The Promised Land from 1899, which brought attention to the bewildering social inequalities, poverty, conflictive multiculturalism and labour exploitation in the industrial city of Łódź (Lodz). The aim of the novel was to extensively emphasize the consequences of extreme industrialization and how it affects society as a whole. In 1900, Reymont was severely injured in a railway accident, which halted his writing career until 1904 when he published the first part of Chłopi. The novel is a chronicle of peasant life during the four seasons of a year. Written almost entirely in peasant dialect, it has been translated into many languages and won for Reymont the Nobel Prize. Reymont's later work was less expressive but reflected the variety of his interests, including his view of the spiritualist movement in Wampir (1911; “Vampire”) and his image of Poland at the beginning of the partition process at the end of the 18th century, Rok 1794, 3 vol. (1913–18; “The Year 1794”). Reymont died of appendicitis in 1925 and was buried in the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw.