Peasant experience of the city in late nineteenth-century Poland.

The aim of my MA thesis is to provide a systematic analysis of peasant social mobility by investigating the experience of
urban and rural spaces. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a growing number of Polish peasants decided to
leave the village and earn their living not just in the countryside, but also in the city. Although the majority joined the
working class, some succeeded at partial assimilation to the broadly understood 'intelligentsia'. Of course, many peasant
intellectuals were active primarily in the village, but even rural forms of activism, such as founding agrarian circles,
required contact with the urban space. I intend to investigate the peasant elite's sense alienation between the city and
the village, neither of which they could truly call home. I would like to explore issues such as the change in religious
experience in urban centres, a transition in the perception of space (crowded city as opposed to spacious village), as well
as the transformation of peasant antisemitism in response to interactions with the Jews away from the shtetl. The
questions I would like to consider are: what is the relationship between spatial and social mobility? Is 'modern' social
mobility inherently tied to urbanisation? What is the impact of urban environment on the change in peasant social and
political views? This focus on peasant oscillation between two milieux, the rural and the urban is, as far as I know, a new
approach in the Polish context.