Peasant Memoirs from Interwar Northeastern Poland and the Power of Irony

Stanisław Edward Boridczenko 

Writing from the Margins

In much of Eastern Europe, as elsewhere, contemporary national histories have traditionally been written from the perspective of elites, with a few notable exceptions. Political leaders, generals, and intellectuals dominate most national narratives, while the lives of ordinary people often appear only in passing. Within such an approach, the countless smaller stories of those outside the ruling classes are usually treated as secondary – presented merely as background to the actions of those in power or to a vaguely defined “historical process.”[1] 

Against this backdrop, one Eastern European nation – Poland – developed a little-known but remarkable tradition: the systematic collection of ordinary people’s life stories through memoir competitions, which were typically organized by intellectual circles and, at times, by state institutions.[2] Over the past century, around 1,500 such competitions have taken place—an initiative that remains almost unique on the global scale.[3]  The result has been a remarkable archive of memoirs: uneven and emotional, sometimes chaotic, but deeply human.

As an organized research practice, this tradition emerged in the early twentieth century. One of its pioneers was the sociologist Florian Znaniecki, who recognized the importance of personal documents – letters, diaries, and autobiographies – as sources for understanding social life. Znaniecki famously used such materials in his joint study with William Isaac Thomas on Polish migrants, demonstrating how individual life stories could illuminate broader historical and social processes.[4]

The roots of Znaniecki’s idea, however, reach further back. In the nineteenth century, when Poland’s territory was divided among the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires, imperial authorities sought to suppress Polish political aspirations and integrate the population into imperial administrative systems. In response, many members of the Polish intelligentsia turned toward ordinary people, viewing engagement with the broader population as essential to preserving national identity – a perspective that would later shape the work of interwar researchers.

What Could Peasants Say?

One of the most striking examples of the mentioned tradition is the two-volume collection Peasants’ Memoirs (Pamiętniki chłopów), which was published in 1935 and 1936.[5] The project was organized during the Great Depression by the Institute of Social Economy in Warsaw, which issued a public call asking peasants across Poland to describe their lives in the newly re-established Polish state. The Institute not only offered prizes for the best memoirs but – perhaps more importantly – addressed peasants in its announcements with unusual respect, treating them as equals rather than merely subjects. Despite the rhetoric of the new republic, political elites often continued to view the peasantry through long-standing stereotypes, rarely recognizing them as an equal social group.

Unsurprisingly, nearly five hundred villagers responded to the Institute’s call. They sent letters recounting their experiences of rural life, poverty, migration, family struggles, and encounters with local authorities. For many of these authors – often poor, with little formal education, and usually treated as an anonymous social category – writing such a memoir offered a rare opportunity to address an audience beyond their immediate surroundings.

The emotional force of the letters collected during the call is striking. As one anonymous writer – a five-hectare farmer from Mołodeczno County – recalled:

“Just last spring, when bread and all food ran out, there were moments when a person would walk and stagger from weakness. Spring. Beautiful. The song of nightingales. All of nature rejoices – and I, hungry, sat down on the doorstep and wept bitter tears like a child. Thoughts of suicide seized me, but I pitied my beloved family. Where was the government then? Where was any authority? Where were the offices and the state administration, if people in patched trousers were dying of hunger?” [6]

For this and many other authors, the Institute itself appeared almost as a last refuge. As one writer admitted, “here at least I can pour out my bitterness and sorrow.” In this way, the memoir competition created a rare space in which anger, disappointment, and frustration – emotions usually excluded from public debate – could finally be expressed.

Image of a villager and a child, dressed in simple, homespun clothes, standing in the doorway of a modest thatched cottage. Taken at an unknown time and place – most likely somewhere between 1925 – 1939 in northern Polesies  – this photograph captures the harsh everyday reality behind peasants’ memoirs. https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/jednostka/-/jednostka/5952924

When Tragedy Turns into Irony

Yet, at least in the case of the Polish–Soviet borderlands, these texts were not solely tragic accounts of poverty, repression, and institutional injustice. Early on, the editors noticed something unexpected: many memoirs from this region were saturated with irony, sarcasm, and dark humor. As they observed, the authors often displayed “an ironic attitude toward their own writing and its purpose.”

At times, letters from this region read less like conventional autobiographies and more like scenes from The Good Soldier Švejk – the famous satirical novel by Jaroslav Hašek – full of grotesque exaggeration and biting satire. However, this humor is not incidental. Irony functions as an alternative narrative strategy: a way of resisting power by refusing to take seriously those who claimed authority over people’s lives. It conveys anger at present conditions and, quietly, the possibility of a different future.

Almost every form of authority becomes a target. Anything capable of humiliating or crushing an ordinary person is mocked. Particularly striking are ironic depictions of lived experience involving two closely connected institutions of power: the state and the Church.

The State

The state appears first. In these memoirs, the state is distant and difficult to comprehend: something that is imposed from above rather than embedded in local social life.

One peasant, described by the editors as “probably a moderately well-off farmer from Wołkowysk County,” recalled a scene from the final years of the Russian Empire. In the local administrative office, he spotted a framed notice written in Russian:

“‘It is forbidden to speak Polish in the communal office, under penalty of a fine of 25 rubles or two weeks’ arrest.’ District Police Officer.”[7]

Some time later, during mobilization for the First World War, he returned to the same office and encountered something astonishing. Next to the old ban on the Polish language hung a new proclamation – this time written in Polish. Issued by the Russian commander-in-chief, it called on Poles to fight alongside Russian soldiers and promised them a future independent homeland under the tsar:

“Poles! We are beginning a war with a powerful enemy. I call upon you to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Russian soldier. After victory, you will receive a free homeland under the scepter of the Russian tsar.”[8]

With understated irony, the peasant asked the village head why both notices were displayed at once. Why not remove one of them? The answer was simple and absurd: “Of course [I will]. But for now, let them remain.”[9]

This brief episode captures how state power appeared to many rural inhabitants. Orders came from distant centers and often contradicted one another. Local officials enforced regulations they neither believed in nor fully understood. The state did not represent local people – and it could not even remain consistent with itself. It appeared clumsy, contradictory, and faintly ridiculous. Rather than an expression of popular sovereignty, it functioned as an external force of domination, separated from everyday life by hierarchy and distance.

Importantly, this mockery was not reserved for the Russian Empire alone. German, Bolshevik, and even Polish authorities were treated with similar skepticism. No political regime was immune to irony.

This 1931 group photograph shows participants at a meeting of town heads from the Wilno and Nowogródek voivodships. The officials – well-groomed, formally dressed, self-assured – embody the authority of the interwar Polish state. In striking contrast to the homespun garments worn by the poor villagers in the previous photo, the tailored suits and polished boots visually reinforce the social and cultural distance between rural communities and representatives of the state.

https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/jednostka/-/jednostka/5902848

The Church

Religious institutions also appear frequently in these memoirs and were viewed through a similar ironic lens. Orthodox priests in the region in particular were often portrayed as greedy, cynical, and preoccupied with money.

One letter describing negotiations over the cost of a grandmother’s funeral offers an especially dark and satirical account. As an anonymous farmer’s son who was working on the family farm in the Wilejka district recalled:

“With the [high prices of] tobacco, people can still manage. But when it falls into the hands of the priest, there’s no amount of cleverness that can help.

After the funeral, I asked how much was due. Without hesitation, he said ten gold rubles. I was surprised. ‘But we inherited nothing from her. Twenty zlotys is enough for grandma.’” [10]

What follows resembled a market exchange rather than a religious ritual:

“He would not accept such a sum. We bargained like Jews. He finally agreed to forty. I offered twenty-five. He gave in five more. I offered thirty. After a while, we came to an agreement.”[11]

Such scenes reveal a population that often approached certain representatives of the Church with suspicion and responded through irony. The use of antisemitic stereotypes – particularly those associating greed with Jews – reflects the broader cultural language of the period. In this context, irony served not only as humor but also as a form of discrediting authority. If religious authority could be portrayed as motivated primarily by financial gain rather than spiritual concerns, additionally burdened by an antisemitic comparison, its moral legitimacy was implicitly called into question.

The same author reinforced this perspective even further in another account describing a conversation with the same priest. The exchange began when the peasant requested a birth certificate. Although the discussion quickly turned to the issue of religiosity in the village (or rather lack of it), the memoir suggests that the priest’s real concern lay elsewhere:

“ –  Do you attend the Orthodox church? –  I do… But he doesn’t believe me; he knows that I’m lying. He knows that after the holidays the church is always empty. And I also know that I am an unbeliever – I only go there from time to time…

[…]

But I understand that this is not what he is after. He attacks me from all sides to force me to confess my guilt [of non-attending the Church], and then immediately punish me before the face of God, as a heretic, for a few extra Polish złoty – that is his main aim.”[12]

An Orthodox priest stands beside a Polish soldier somewhere in Eastern Poland between 1924 and 1939  – a pairing rich in symbolism. For many villagers, memories of the Orthodox Church’s role in the Russification policies of the Russian Empire were still vivid. Yet here, religion and state authority appear side by side despite the fact that for almost a century it was Orthodox clergy who actively fought against any manifestations of Polish presence in the region.

https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/jednostka/-/jednostka/5968725

When Margins Speak Back

The memoirs reveal a complex reality. They show ambitions, frustrations, and expectations that were not fundamentally different from those of educated elites. At the same time, references to themes such as “national oppression,” often central in historiographical narratives, are absent from these texts. The authors’ concerns were grounded less in artificial concepts and ideological frameworks and more in the everyday social and economic realities that were observed in the region.

One striking example beyond the Peasants’ Memoirs is the life of Sergiusz Piasecki, a Polish writer of Belarusian background. Before becoming a writer, he led a turbulent life on the borderlands as a smuggler and later as an intelligence agent for the Second Polish Republic. Despite his limited formal education, he began writing while imprisoned in the 1930s.

Piasecki’s career – briefly enabled by the interwar social and political context—was ultimately disrupted by the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, when his native Nowogródek region was incorporated into Soviet Belarus. After the war, he published books critiquing these changes, using satire to resist postwar realities across Eastern Europe.[13]

In this sense, Piasecki’s trajectory parallels the voices preserved in anonymous peasant memoirs. Both reveal cultural expressions that remained largely invisible in a social order that rigidly assigned individuals their place. That order, despite claims of stability and hierarchy, was continually challenged – not always through open revolt, but through irony, satire, and quiet acts of intellectual independence.

Taken together, the voices found in these memoirs complicate familiar national narratives and dominant historical imaginaries. The peasants who emerge from these texts are neither passive nor naïve “representatives of the masses.” Instead, they appear as perceptive observers of power, keenly aware of hypocrisy and injustice, and often openly dissatisfied with existing social and political arrangements – even when those arrangements seemed deeply entrenched.

In this context, humor becomes more than a stylistic feature. It functions both as a survival strategy and as a way of preserving dignity in situations where other forms of agency were limited. Through irony and satire, these authors asserted their own perspective on a world that rarely allowed them to speak loudly.

Acknowledgements

This text was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange through a Bekker Fellowship (No. BPN/BEK/2024/1/00123), and to Professor Jim Bjork for kindly agreeing to host me during the research.

Dr Stanisław Edward Boridczenko is a research assistant at the Institute of History, University of Szczecin (Poland), and is currently based at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) as a Humboldt Fellow. His academic interests include the study of empires and imperialism, as well as the phenomenon of national and state indifference – particularly in the context of the Polish–Russian frontier.

[1] Examples of this almost classic elite-focused historiography can still be found in contemporary national histories. In Poland, the multi-volume work of Andrzej Nowak narrates the country’s past primarily through political developments and the actions of elites (Nowak, Dzieje Polski (Kraków: Biały Kruk, 2014–)). A similar emphasis on state structures and political leadership appears in Belarusian historiography, where historians focus largely on institutions and governing actors, i.e. historii dziarzhawnastsi (e.g., Ihar Marzaliuk et al., Historyia belaruskai dziarzhawnastsi (Minsk: Adukatsyia i Vykhavanne, 2022); Mikalai Kastsiuk, Narys historyi belaruskai dziarzhawnastsi: XX stahoddzie (Minsk: Belaruskaia Navuka, 2008)). In Russia, the same elite-centered narrative remains dominant, visible for example in projects supported by the state bodies like the Russian Historical Society, as well as in recent works on the history of the Soviet Union and Russian Empire (e.g., Andrei Sakharov et al., Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (Moscow: AST, 2018)).

[2] As a result, Poland today has its own strong tradition of “people’s history”, commonly referred to as historia ludowa. In recent years this field has become one of the most dynamic areas of historical debate. In many other post-socialist countries, in contrast, the early twentieth-century interest in the people’s and bottom-up histories gradually faded. See, for example: Adam Leszczyński, Ludowa historia Polski (Kraków: W.A.B., 2020); Kacper Pobłocki, Chamstwo (Warsaw: Czarne, 2021); Michał Rauszer, Bękarty pańszczyzny (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo RM, 2022).

[3] See Paweł Rodak, “Fenomen pisania o własnym życiu: Konkursy pamiętnikarskie w Polsce w XX wieku,” Kultura i Społeczeństwo 66, no. 2 (2022): 9–38, https://doi.org/10.35757/KiS.2022.66.2.1 ; and Paweł Rodak, “Zapomniana epopeja. Polskie konkursy pamiętnikarskie i literatura,” Teksty Drugie, no. 2 (2024): 19–47, https://doi.org/10.18318/td.2024.2.2 

[4] William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group, 5 vols. (Boston: Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1918–1920).

[5] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr. 1–51 (Warsaw: Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, 1935); Pamiętniki chłopów. Seria druga (Warsaw: Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, 1936). A digital copy of the collection is available through the website of the University of Wrocław Library: https://bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content/78719/III_POL_289_27217.pdf 

[6] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr 1 – 51…, 553-4.

[7] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr 1 – 51…, 454.

[8] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr 1 – 51…, 455.

[9] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr 1 – 51…, 455.

[10] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr 1 – 51…, 535.

[11] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr 1 – 51…, 535.

[12] Pamiętniki chłopów. Nr 1 – 51…, 535.

[13] Sergiusz Piasecki, Zapiski oficera Armii Czerwonej (London: Gryf Publications, 1957); Sergiusz Piasecki, 7 pigułek Lucyfera (London: Modern Writing, 1948).