> "Have you ever seen how a peasant beats his wife? I
> have. He begins with a rope or a strap. Peasant life
> is devoid of aesthetic pleasures -- music, theatres,
> magazines; naturally this gap has to be filled
Jerzy Kosinski paints a similar picture in his _Painted Bird_ ( I do not have a copy on me to quote some of the more juicy descriptions, e.g. that of a peasant gouging out the eyes of a guy who had hots for his wife and then methodically beating crap out of her). Kosinski has been accused of plagiarism, allright, but he plagiarized it from the Polish literature that provides many description of peasant violence (esp. the novel _Peasants_ by Wladyslaw Reymont) . Another example, Isaak Bashevis Singer (_The Magician of Lublin_) writes about peasants boiling alive a thief they caught, and his other novel _The Satan of Goray_ also contains many gory details (no pun intended, Goray is a Podunk in SE Poland) . The images of the 1840 revolt in which peasants cut their victims with saws are still alive in the literature and folklore.
An then, there is the Jedwabne pogrom, described in gory details by Jan Gross in the New Yorker ....
Perhaps some of it is exaggerated - but the peasant penchant for brutality and violence is well known and hardly contested.
Wojtek