A marriage is agreed by their parents between Toník and Lanka, but their known stubbornness involves their godfather in a variety of intrigues in order to bring them together, an enterprise in which he is finally successful.

Known also in English, less flatteringly, if alliteratively, as The Pig-Headed Peasants, the opera was badly staged in 1881, seven years after its completion, and temporarily withdrawn. It was the second of Dvorák's completed Czech operas, written after the first revision of King and Charcoal-Burner.