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

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The aim of my MA thesis is to provide a systematic analysis of peasant social mobility by investigating the experience ofurban and rural spaces. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a growing number of Polish peasants decided toleave the village and earn their living not just in the countryside, but also in the city. Although the majority joined theworking class, some succeeded at partial assimilation to the broadly understood 'intelligentsia'. Of course, many peasantintellectuals 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 andthe village, neither of which they could truly call home. I would like to explore issues such as the change in religiousexperience in urban centres, a transition in the perception of space (crowded city as opposed to spacious village), as wellas the transformation of peasant antisemitism in response to interactions with the Jews away from the shtetl. Thequestions I would like to consider are: what is the relationship between spatial and social mobility? Is 'modern' socialmobility inherently tied to urbanisation? What is the impact of urban environment on the change in peasant social andpolitical views? This focus on peasant oscillation between two milieux, the rural and the urban is, as far as I know, a newapproach in the Polish context.