From Shame and Ressentiment to Peasant Pride.

A Literary Account of Stanisław Pigoń’s Social Rise

Abstract

From Shame and Ressentiment to Peasant Pride. A Literary Account of Stanisław Pigoń’s Social Rise

This article offers an interpretation of the autobiographical writings of Stanisław Pigoń through the lens of the ressentiment theory, understood primarily as a consequence of peasant shame and the experience of being “oppressed by the oppressed.” The author asks whether, and in what ways, literature may become a space for recollections of social mobility, ressentiment-driven revenge, critique of post-serfdom dependencies, and the reproduction of shame. The article also examines the role played in the transformation of peasant shame into peasant pride by the nationalist discourse and by the post-mobility authorial figures who embodied it, such as Charles Péguy and Maurice Barrès. One of the central claims advanced in this paper is that the presence of ressentiment in the texts under discussion does not diminish their cognitive value, nor does it discredit the legitimate critical conclusions they formulate regarding twentieth-century social phenomena.