Lili

Born into a lower middle-class Catholic family, the novelist Reymont had little formal education, but his eventful life as a theater hand and railroad worker provided him with plentiful material for his writing. Although a straightforward realist, he wrote with a lyrical perfection of style. This, combined with sharp psychological insight, placed him in the forefront of Polish fiction until his death. Reymont wrote short stories as well, but he is best known for his novels about Polish life in both rural and urban societies. His magnum opus, The Peasants (1902--09), leading to the Nobel Prize in 1924, is a broad panorama of a village caught in internal conflicts of the magnitude of those in classical Greek tragedy. It is characterized, in the words of Per Hallstrom, "by an art so grand, so sure, so powerful, that we may predict a lasting value and rank for it, not only within Polish literature but also within the whole of that branch of imaginative writing which has here been given a distinctive and monumental shape." 020