![]() It seemed as if, just as in life, she was breaking free in her girlish way from the closeness of alien bodies and corporeal embraces.” Cezary’s mother, meanwhile, having dealt heroically with the crushing poverty brought on by the revolution, has less and less strength to fight with suspicious Bolsheviks every time she buys a turnip. Driving an arba, a two-wheeled cart, collecting cadavers for the new powers that be, the adolescent is scarred by the sight of a young woman at the bottom of a heap of dead bodies: “Thrown on her back, she hung over the left wheel. He embraces the tenets of Bolshevism, but the violence it gives rise to thoroughly tests his new convictions. Cezary becomes unruly and, when the October Revolution comes, he begins to run with a gang of friends and stops attending school. In grimy, refinery-riddled Baku (today in Azerbaijan), the family achieves relative comfort supported by Cezary’s merchant father until he is called to fight in World War I. Cezary’s mother married a successful businessman, a Pole who returned to Poland to find a wife, and took her to Russia, where she birthed and raised Cezary but never felt at home: “She heard in the depths of her mind the rumble of a train’s wheels and saw the immeasurable expanse of the fields, wilderness, and pastures of this immense land-Russia-which was The novel starts on a harsh note: “It’s not a question here-dammit-of a coat of arms!” So says the narrator about Cezary or “Czaruś” Baryka, denying the traditional significance of lineage, which, in his case, can barely be traced back beyond his parents. ![]() It refers to the time of the year when winter is over once and for all, but spring hasn’t gotten started-in other words, a time of bleak transition, of barrenness. Johnston notes that the Polish word that serves as the novel’s title, Przedwiośnie (pronounced Pshed-VIOHSH-nyeh) doesn’t have a true English equivalent. Their ideas, feelings, and milieus he wrought in passages of such beauty and complexity that they beg to be savored. ![]() Within his stories, Żeromski refused to take sides in the grand debate over Poland’s future, but he created high-minded characters passionate about reform.
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