Ambition and corruption in Poland’s Industrial Revolution
The Promised Land is a story of ambition and greed set during the Industrial Revolution in Poland. It takes place in Lodz, presently Poland’s fourth largest city and apparently an industrial center. Reymont’s descriptions of the city call to mind the traditional American view of Pittsburgh as a factory town. Instead of steel, however, the main export of Lodz is textiles. Several successful factories operate in the city, and questionable business ethics are rampant. As the novel opens, three young career climbers have plans to try their hands in this competitive market by opening their own factory. Charles Borowiecki is a Polish nobleman currently working as the right-hand man to Lodz’s top cloth manufacturer. Moritz Welt is a Jewish trader in fabrics and raw materials. Max Baum, a German, wants to break away from his father’s business, an old-fashioned handloom factory in decline. As the three are raising capital for their venture, Borowiecki comes across an insider trading tip. To take advantage of this knowledge, the three partners agree to send Welt off an a business trip to secure a lucrative deal. Meanwhile, Borowiecki makes the rounds of the social scene among the rich industrialists of Lodz and, though he’s engaged to a woman from his rural hometown, he embarks on an affair with a married woman.
My favorite author is the French writer Emile Zola, who in my opinion took the art of the novel to its apex. Reymont is the one writer in the world who is excellent enough and stylistically similar enough to be mistaken for Zola. (If Reymont had published as many books as Zola, maybe he’d be my favorite author.) It’s hard to say whether Reymont was a “disciple” of Zola and his school of Naturalism, or if their two styles developed coincidentally. Either way, Reymont is a world-class writer of prose fiction who deserves to be better known and more widely translated.
The Promised Land is deliberately and brutally unromantic. Reymont describes Lodz as an urban mud puddle shrouded in smog. At least two of the book’s three heroes are decidedly unheroic and would sell their souls to be rich and successful. The relationships and prejudices between the three prevalent races in Lodz—Poles, Germans, and Jews—are explored throughout the story. Anti-Semitism is a factor in the plot, as some characters are anti-Semitic, but I wouldn’t call the book itself anti-Semitic because it exhibits both positive and negative portrayals of Jews, as well as Poles and Germans, for that matter. The vilest villain in the novel is capitalism itself, which drives the characters’ behavior. This is emblematic of the Naturalist school’s focus on how social forces shape human beings and control their lives.
The problem with The Promised Land is that it takes a long time to get going. The final quarter of the novel is riveting, but you have to trudge through a lot of description and exposition to get there. At first it seems the novel is going to be about these three friends and their factory, but Reymont departs from the trio for extended periods to introduce dozens of other characters. In his desire to capture the broad scope of real life in Lodz, there are too many plot threads, too many romances, and too many dinner parties. Some narrowing of focus would have been an improvement. The Promised Land doesn’t quite measure up to The Peasants, but this is a classic work of literature by a superb author and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Polish history and culture.
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