In the journal " New world"Several of Solzhenitsyn's works were published, among them "Matrenin's Dvor". The story, according to the writer, is “completely autobiographical and reliable.” It talks about the Russian village, about its inhabitants, about their values, about goodness, justice, sympathy and compassion, work and help - qualities that fit in the righteous man, without whom “the village is not worth it.”
“Matrenin’s Dvor” is a story about the injustice and cruelty of human fate, about the Soviet order of post-Stalin times and about the life of the most ordinary people living far from city life. The narration is not told from a person's point of view main character, but on behalf of the narrator, Ignatyich, who in the whole story seems to play the role of only an outside observer. What is described in the story dates back to 1956 - three years passed after the death of Stalin, and then Russian people I still didn’t know and didn’t understand how to live further.
“Matrenin’s Dvor” is divided into three parts:
- The first tells the story of Ignatyich, it begins at the Torfprodukt station. The hero immediately reveals his cards, without making any secret of it: he is a former prisoner, and now works as a teacher at a school, he came there in search of peace and tranquility. In Stalin's time, it was almost impossible for people who had been imprisoned to find workplace, and after the death of the leader, many became school teachers (a profession in short supply). Ignatyich stays with an elderly, hardworking woman named Matryona, with whom he finds it easy to communicate and has peace of mind. Her dwelling was poor, the roof sometimes leaked, but this did not mean at all that there was no comfort in it: “Perhaps to someone from the village, who was richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem friendly, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good."
- The second part tells about Matryona’s youth, when she had to go through a lot. The war took her fiancé Fadey away from her, and she had to marry his brother, who still had children in his arms. Taking pity on him, she became his wife, although she did not love him at all. But three years later, Fadey, whom the woman still loved, suddenly returned. The returning warrior hated her and her brother for their betrayal. But hard life could not kill her kindness and hard work, because it was in work and caring for others that she found solace. Matryona even died while doing business - she helped her lover and her sons drag part of their house across the railroad tracks, which was bequeathed to Kira (his daughter). And this death was caused by the greed, greed and callousness of Fadey: he decided to take away the inheritance while Matryona was still alive.
- The third part talks about how the narrator learns about Matryona’s death and describes the funeral and wake. Her relatives are not crying out of grief, but rather because it is customary, and in their heads there are only thoughts about the division of the property of the deceased. Fadey is not at the wake.
Main characters
Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva is an elderly woman, a peasant woman, who was released from work on the collective farm due to illness. She was always happy to help people, even strangers. In the episode when the narrator moves into her hut, the author mentions that she never intentionally looked for a lodger, that is, she did not want to make money on this basis, and did not profit even from what she could. Her wealth was pots of ficus trees and an old domestic cat that she took from the street, a goat, as well as mice and cockroaches. Matryona also married her fiancé’s brother out of a desire to help: “Their mother died...they didn’t have enough hands.”
Matryona herself also had children, six, but they all died in early childhood, so she later took Fadey’s youngest daughter Kira into her upbringing. Matryona rose early in the morning, worked until dark, but did not show fatigue or dissatisfaction to anyone: she was kind and responsive to everyone. She was always very afraid of becoming a burden to someone, she did not complain, she was even afraid to call the doctor again. As Kira grew up, Matryona wanted to give her room as a gift, which required dividing the house - during the move, Fadey’s things got stuck in a sled on the railroad tracks, and Matryona got hit by a train. Now there was no one to ask for help, there was no person ready to unselfishly come to the rescue. But the relatives of the deceased kept in mind only the thought of profit, of dividing what was left of the poor peasant woman, already thinking about it at the funeral. Matryona stood out very much from the background of her fellow villagers, and was thus irreplaceable, invisible and the only righteous person.
Narrator, Ignatyich, to some extent, is a prototype of the writer. He served his exile and was acquitted, after which he set out in search of a calm and serene life, he wanted to work school teacher. He found refuge with Matryona. Judging by the desire to move away from the bustle of the city, the narrator is not very sociable and loves silence. He worries when a woman takes his padded jacket by mistake, and is confused by the volume of the loudspeaker. The narrator got along with the owner of the house; this shows that he is still not completely antisocial. However, he doesn’t understand people very well: he understood the meaning by which Matryona lived only after she passed away.
Topics and issues
Solzhenitsyn in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” talks about the life of the inhabitants of the Russian village, about the system of relationships between power and people, about the high meaning of selfless work in the kingdom of selfishness and greed.
Of all this, the theme of labor is shown most clearly. Matryona is a person who does not ask for anything in return and is ready to give herself all for the benefit of others. They don’t appreciate her and don’t even try to understand her, but this is a person who experiences tragedy every day: first, the mistakes of her youth and the pain of loss, then frequent illnesses, hard work, not life, but survival. But from all the problems and hardships, Matryona finds solace in work. And, in the end, it is work and overwork that leads her to death. The meaning of Matryona’s life is precisely this, and also care, help, the desire to be needed. Therefore, active love for others is the main theme of the story.
The problem of morality also occupies an important place in the story. Material values in the village are exalted over human soul and her work, on humanity in general. Understand the depth of Matryona's character minor characters they are simply incapable: greed and the desire to possess more blinds them to their eyes and does not allow them to see kindness and sincerity. Fadey lost his son and wife, his son-in-law faces imprisonment, but his thoughts are on how to protect the logs that were not burned.
In addition, the story has a theme of mysticism: the motive of an unidentified righteous man and the problem of cursed things - which were touched by people full of self-interest. Fadey made the upper room of Matryona's hut cursed, undertaking to knock it down.
Idea
The above-mentioned themes and problems in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” are aimed at revealing the depth of the main character’s pure worldview. An ordinary peasant woman serves as an example of the fact that difficulties and losses only strengthen a Russian person, and do not break him. With the death of Matryona, everything that she figuratively built collapses. Her house is being torn apart, the remains of her property are divided among themselves, the yard remains empty and ownerless. Therefore, her life looks pitiful, no one realizes the loss. But won't the same thing happen with palaces and jewels? powerful of the world this? The author demonstrates the frailty of material things and teaches us not to judge others by their wealth and achievements. True meaning has a moral image that does not fade even after death, because it remains in the memory of those who saw its light.
Maybe over time the heroes will notice that a very important part of their life is missing: invaluable values. Why disclose global moral problems in such poor scenery? And what then is the meaning of the title of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”? Last words that Matryona was a righteous woman erases the boundaries of her court and expands them to the scale of the whole world, thereby making the problem of morality universal.
Folk character in the work
Solzhenitsyn reasoned in the article “Repentance and Self-Restraint”: “There are such born angels, they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry, without drowning in it at all, even if their feet touch its surface? Each of us has met such people, there are not ten of them and not a hundred of them in Russia, these are righteous people, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), took advantage of their goodness, in good moments answered them in kind, they are disposed - and immediately immersed again to our doomed depths.”
Matryona is distinguished from the rest by her ability to preserve her humanity and a strong core inside. To those who unscrupulously used her help and kindness, it might seem that she was weak-willed and pliable, but the heroine helped based only on her inner selflessness and moral greatness.
Interesting? Save it on your wall!Still from the film “Matryonin’s Dvor” (2008)
In the summer of 1956, at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow, a passenger gets off along the railway line to Murom and Kazan. This is the narrator, whose fate resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front he was “delayed in returning for about ten years,” that is, he served in a camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents were “groped”). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it was not possible to live in a village with the wonderful name Vysokoye Polye, because they did not bake bread there and did not sell anything edible. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his ears, Torfoprodukt. However, it turns out that “not everything is about peat mining” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo...
This reconciles the narrator with his lot, for it promises him “a bad Russia.” He settles in one of the villages called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which the narrator lives is called Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva or simply Matryona.
Matryona's fate, about which she does not immediately, not considering it interesting for a “cultured” person, sometimes tells the guest in the evenings, fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees a special meaning in her fate, which Matryona’s fellow villagers and relatives do not notice. My husband went missing at the beginning of the war. He loved Matryona and did not beat her, like the village husbands of their wives. But it’s unlikely that Matryona herself loved him. She was supposed to marry her husband's older brother, Thaddeus. However, he went to the front first world war and disappeared. Matryona was waiting for him, but in the end, at the insistence of Thaddeus’s family, she married her younger brother, Efim. And then Thaddeus, who was in Hungarian captivity, suddenly returned. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband to death with an ax only because Efim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, but all the children from Efim (also six) of the “first Matryona” died without even living for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “corrupted,” and she herself believed it. Then she took in the daughter of the “second Matryona”, Kira, and raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.
Matryona lived all her life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for the collective farm, for her neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. In Matryona there is a huge inner strength. For example, she is able to stop a running horse, which men cannot stop.
Gradually, the narrator understands that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without reserve, that the entire village and the entire Russian land still hold together. But he is hardly pleased with this discovery. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to it next?
Hence the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies while helping Thaddeus and his sons drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry out of obligation rather than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property.
Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.
Retold
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Matrenin Dvor
This edition is true and final.
None lifetime editions it is not cancelled.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
April 1968
At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down almost to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows and went out into the vestibule: they were repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?
No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.
Only the drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.
In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to middle lane- without heat, with the leafy roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most visceral Russia - if there was such a thing somewhere, it lived.
A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. They told me knowledgeable people, that there is no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m passing through in vain.
But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the …sky oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:
Tell me if you need mathematicians somewhere away from railway? I want to live there forever.
They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - everyone asks to go to the city all day, and for bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoye Pole. Just the name made my soul happy.
The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.
Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.
I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked, and typed in my order: “Peat product.”
Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!
At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barracks, there was a stern sign: “Only board the train from the station side!” A nail was scratched on the boards: “And without tickets.” And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: “No tickets.” I appreciated the exact meaning of these additions later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.
And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, thereby raising his collective farm.
The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and houses from the fifties, with carvings on the facade and glass verandas. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.
A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling piercingly, dragged trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunks wandering along the street - not without that, and stabbing each other with knives.
This is where my dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. There was such a fresh wind blowing at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.
I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. According to the wound the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.
I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:
Drink, drink with your heart's content. Are you a newcomer?
Where are you from? - I brightened up.
And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock there is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.
A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy Russia.
And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.
I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself did not have a place (she and her husband were raising her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; it was cramped and cramped.
So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.
Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. - Only her toilet is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.
Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated as a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.
The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Behind front door internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up into the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down into the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.
It was built long ago and soundly, on big family, and now there lived a lonely woman of about sixty.
When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there at the entrance, covered with vague dark rags, so priceless in the life of a working man.
The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the remaining light and behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.
While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a black illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,
- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.
And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.
Matryonin yard
At the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down almost to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows and went out into the vestibule: they were repairing the tracks, or what? out of schedule?
No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.
Only the drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.
In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to go to the middle zone - without the heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most intimate Russia - if there was such a thing somewhere, it lived.
A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there’s no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m wasting my time.
But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the Vladimir oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that personnel they no longer sat here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:
– Tell me, do you need mathematicians? Somewhere away from the railway? I want to live there forever.
They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - after all, everyone is asking to go to the city, and bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoye Pole. Just the name made my soul happy.
The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.
Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.
I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked and stamped on my order: “Peat product.”
Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!
At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barracks, there was a stern sign: “Only board the train from the station side!” A nail was scratched on the boards: “And without tickets.” And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: “No tickets.” I appreciated the exact meaning of these additions later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.
And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, raising his collective farm and receiving a Hero of Socialist Labor for himself.
The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous, poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses from the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.
A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling piercingly, dragged trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunk people wandering down the street and stabbing each other with knives.
This is where my dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. There was such a fresh wind blowing at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.
I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. In the morning, the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.
I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:
- Drink, drink with all your heart. Are you a newcomer?
- Where are you from? – I brightened up.
And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.
A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy Russia.
And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.
I turned out to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself had no place (she and her husband brought up her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; everywhere it was cramped and crowded.
So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.
“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. “But her latrine is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.”
Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated to look like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the frame and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.
The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up to upper room– a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.
It had been built long ago and soundly, for a large family, but now lived a lonely woman of about sixty.
When I entered the hut, it was lying on the Russian stove, right there at the entrance, covered with an indefinite dark rag, so priceless in the life of a working man.
The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the rest of the light, and also behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.
While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a bad illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,
- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.
And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.
And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:
- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.
We agreed on the price and the peat that the school would bring.
I only found out later that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilievna did not earn a ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid a pension. Her family didn't help her much. And on the collective farm she did not work for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.
So I settled with Matryona Vasilievna. We didn't share rooms. Her bed was in the corner of the door by the stove, and I unfolded my cot by the window and, pushing Matryona’s favorite ficus trees away from the light, I placed a table at another window. There was electricity in the village - it was brought in from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers wrote then - “Ilyich’s light bulbs,” and the men, their eyes wide, said: “Tsar Fire!”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Matrenin Dvor
This edition is true and final.
No lifetime publications can cancel it.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
April 1968
At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down almost to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows and went out into the vestibule: they were repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?
No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.
Only the drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.
In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to go to the middle zone - without the heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most visceral Russia - if there was such a thing somewhere, it lived.
A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there’s no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m wasting my time.
But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the …sky oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:
Tell me, do you need mathematicians somewhere away from the railway? I want to live there forever.
They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - everyone asks to go to the city all day, and for bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoye Pole. Just the name made my soul happy.
The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.
Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.
I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked, and typed in my order: “Peat product.”
Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!
At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barracks, there was a stern sign: “Only board the train from the station side!” A nail was scratched on the boards: “And without tickets.” And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: “No tickets.” I appreciated the exact meaning of these additions later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.
And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, thereby raising his collective farm.
The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and houses from the fifties, with carvings on the facade and glass verandas. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.
A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling piercingly, dragged trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunks wandering along the street - not without that, and stabbing each other with knives.
This is where my dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. There was such a fresh wind blowing at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.
I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. In the morning, the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.
I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:
Drink, drink with your heart's content. Are you a newcomer?
Where are you from? - I brightened up.
And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock there is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.
A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy Russia.
And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.
I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself did not have a place (she and her husband were raising her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; it was cramped and cramped.
So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.
Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. - Only her toilet is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.
Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated as a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.
The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Beyond the front door, internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up into the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down into the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.
It had been built long ago and soundly, for a large family, but now lived a lonely woman of about sixty.
When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there at the entrance, covered with vague dark rags, so priceless in the life of a working man.
The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the remaining light and behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.
While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a black illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,
- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.
And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.
And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:
If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.
We agreed on the price and the peat that the school would bring.
I only found out later that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilyevna did not earn a ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid a pension. Her family didn't help her much. And on the collective farm she did not work for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in the accountant’s greasy book.