Władysław Reymont: the boy who was destined to be a tailor and ended up winning the Nobel Prize

When he was young, Władysław Reymont (Poland May 7, 1867) He did not imagine that he would become a famous winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and he did not believe that many of his experiences would lead him to publish the texts that are successful to this day. His life seemed to be heading in another direction.

However, the path that led him to obtain the award-winning Swedish prize began from his birth in a humble family and the profession that his parents wanted him to reach, that of tailor.

Having a trade, in the middle of the 19th century in Eastern Europe, was something very important, since it showed the possibilities of a person, especially if it was someone with humble origins, to succeed or fail; therefore, his parents decided to send the young Wladyslaw to Warsaw so that his sister’s husband would teach him the secrets of tailoring, but, in the end, Reymont decided to abandon the dream of his parents and ended up taking another path.

With a “well done tailcoat” He left the profession they had chosen for him and began working as a porter in a train station, from there he became an actor in a traveling company and in the course of his travels he began to write the stories he passed by.

These stories were of a literary realism, the same genre that helped create his first novel in 1899 entitled The promised land. This novel caught the attention of critics, as the sample and the narrative of social inequalities, poverty, conflictive multiculturalism and labor exploitation in Łódź was what stood out the most.

This type of criticism showed a very neglected city and in addition to everything it was a place that both in the XIX century like the 20th it suffered many attacks. In addition to showing the consequences of industrialization and how it affected the whole.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Reymont was injured in a railway accident which affected him considerably and stopped his career until 1904, leaving only the first part of four of Chlopi.

Władysław’s popularity in communist Poland was recognized by the reflection of his writing, in addition to the symbols that include socialist concepts, the romantic representation of the agrarian field and the intoned criticism of capitalism, present in the literary realism.

Although his work also concentrated the early Polish movement that was characterized by decadence and literary impressionism.

The first part of the novel, with which he won the award, was published in the weekly magazine Tygodnik Illustrowany, which he began writing in 1897, but the other parts were completed in 1909, since the rail accident It greatly complicated his health, for which he ended it seven years later.

In November 1924 they recognized that the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Władysław Reymont who was accepted over Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy, after being nominated by Anders Österling, a member of the Swedish Academy. Although he was unable to attend the ceremony due to a heart condition.

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