Analysis of the story "Matrenin's Dvor" includes characteristics of its characters, summary, history of creation, disclosure main idea and the problems raised by the author of the work.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the story is based on real events and is “completely autobiographical.”
At the center of the story is a picture of life in a Russian village in the 50s. 20th century, the problem of the village, discussions on the main human values, issues of goodness, justice and compassion, the problem of labor, the ability to help a neighbor who finds himself in a difficult situation. The righteous man possesses all these qualities, without whom “the village does not stand.”
The history of the creation of "Matryonin's Dvor"
Initially, the title of the story was: “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” The final version was proposed at an editorial discussion in 1962 by Alexander Tvardovsky. The writer noted that the meaning of the title should not be moralizing. In response, Solzhenitsyn good-naturedly concluded that he had no luck with names.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008)
Work on the story took place over several months, from July to December 1959. Solzhenitsyn wrote it in 1961.
In January 1962, during the first editorial discussion, Tvardovsky convinced the author, and at the same time himself, that the work was not worth publishing. And yet he asked to leave the manuscript with the editor. As a result, the story was published in 1963 in the New World.
It is noteworthy that the life and death of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova are reflected in this work as truthfully as possible - exactly as it really happened. The real name of the village is Miltsevo, it is located in the Kuplovsky district of the Vladimir region.
Critics warmly greeted the author's work, praising its artistic value. The essence of Solzhenitsyn’s work was very accurately described by A. Tvardovsky: an uneducated, simple woman, an ordinary worker, an old peasant woman... how can such a person attract so much attention and curiosity?
Maybe because her inner world is very rich and sublime, endowed with the best human qualities, and against its background everything worldly, material, empty fades. Solzhenitsyn was very grateful to Tvardovsky for these words. In a letter to him, the author noted the importance of his words for himself, and also pointed out the depth of his writer’s vision, from which the main idea of the work was not hidden - a story about a loving and suffering woman.
Genre and idea of the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn
"Matrenin's Dvor" belongs to the short story genre. This is a narrative epic genre, the main features of which are the small volume and unity of the event.
Solzhenitsyn's work tells the story of an unjustly cruel fate common man, about the life of villagers, about the Soviet order of the 50s of the last century, when after the death of Stalin, the orphaned Russian people did not understand how to live further.
The narration is told on behalf of Ignatyich, who throughout the entire plot, as it seems to us, acts only as an abstract observer.
Description and characteristics of the main characters
List characters The story is not numerous, it boils down to a few characters.
Matryona Grigorieva- a woman of advanced years, a peasant who worked all her life on a collective farm and who was released from hard labor manual labor due to serious illness.
She always tried to help people, even strangers. When the narrator comes to her to rent a house, the author notes the modesty and selflessness of this woman.
Matryona never intentionally looked for a tenant and did not seek to profit from this. All her property consisted of flowers, an old cat and a goat. Matryona's dedication knows no bounds. Even her marital union with the groom's brother is explained by her desire to help. Since their mother died, there was no one to do housework, then Matryona took on this burden.
The peasant woman gave birth to six children, but they all died in early age. Therefore, the woman began raising Kira, Thaddeus’s youngest daughter. Matryona worked from early morning until late evening, but never showed her dissatisfaction to anyone, did not complain about fatigue, did not grumble about fate.
She was kind and sympathetic to everyone. She never complained and didn't want to be a burden to anyone. Matryona decided to give her room to the grown-up Kira, but to do this it was necessary to divide the house. During the move, Thaddeus's things got stuck on the railway, and the woman died under the wheels of the train. From that moment on, there was no longer a person capable of selfless help.
Meanwhile, Matryona's relatives thought only about profit, about how to divide the things left from her. The peasant woman was very different from the rest of the villagers. This was the same righteous man - the only one, irreplaceable and so invisible to the people around him.
Ignatyich is the prototype of the writer. At one time, the hero served exile, then he was acquitted. Since then, the man set out to find a quiet corner where he could spend the rest of his life in peace and serenity, working as a simple school teacher. Ignatyich found his refuge with Matryona.
Narrator - closed person who does not like excessive attention and long conversations. He prefers peace and quiet to all this. Meanwhile, with Matryona he managed to find mutual language, however, due to the fact that he had a poor understanding of people, he was able to comprehend the meaning of the peasant woman’s life only after her death.
Thaddeus- Matryona’s former fiancé, Efim’s brother. In his youth, he was going to marry her, but he went into the army, and there was no news of him for three years. Then Matryona was given in marriage to Efim. Returning, Thaddeus almost hacked to death his brother and Matryona with an ax, but came to his senses in time.
The hero is distinguished by cruelty and intemperance. Without waiting for Matryona’s death, he began to demand part of the house from her for her daughter and her husband. Thus, it is Thaddeus who is to blame for the death of Matryona, who was hit by a train while helping her relatives take apart their house piece by piece. He was not at the funeral.
The story is divided into three parts. The first talks about the fate of Ignatyich, that he is a former prisoner and now works as a school teacher. Now he needs a quiet refuge, which the kind Matryona gladly provides him with.
The second part tells about the difficult events in the fate of the peasant woman, about her youth main character and that the war took her lover away from her and she had to throw in her lot with an unloved person, the brother of her fiancé.
In the third episode, Ignatyich learns about the death of a poor peasant woman and talks about the funeral and wake. Relatives squeeze out tears because circumstances require it. There is no sincerity in them, their thoughts are occupied only with how best to divide the property of the deceased.
Problems and arguments of the work
Matryona is a person who does not demand rewards for her good deeds; she is ready to sacrifice herself for the good of another person. They don’t notice her, don’t appreciate her, and don’t try to understand her. Matryona's whole life is full of suffering, starting from her youth, when she had to unite her fate with an unloved person, experiencing the pain of loss, ending with maturity and old age with their frequent illnesses and hard manual labor.
The meaning of the heroine’s life is in hard work, in which she forgets about all the sorrows and problems. Her joy is caring for others, helping, compassion and love for people. This is the main theme of the story.
The problem of the work comes down to issues of morality. The fact is that in the village material values are placed above spiritual ones, they prevail over humanity.
The complexity of Matryona's character and the sublimity of her soul are inaccessible to the understanding of the greedy people surrounding the heroine. They are driven by the thirst for accumulation and profit, which obscures their vision and does not allow them to see the kindness, sincerity and dedication of the peasant woman.
Matryona serves as an example that the difficulties and hardships of life temper a strong-willed person; they are unable to break him. After the death of the main character, everything that she built begins to collapse: the house is taken away into pieces, the remains of the pitiful property are divided, the yard is left to the mercy of fate. No one sees what a terrible loss has occurred, what a wonderful person has left this world.
The author shows the frailty of material things, teaches not to judge people by money and regalia. The true meaning lies in moral character. It remains in our memory even after the death of the person from whom this amazing light of sincerity, love and mercy emanated.
To Central Russia. Thanks to new trends, a recent prisoner is now not refused to become a school teacher in the Vladimir village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). Solzhenitsyn settles in the hut of a local resident, Matryona Vasilievna, a woman of about sixty who is often ill. Matryona has neither a husband nor children. Her loneliness is brightened up only by the ficus trees planted throughout the house and a languid cat picked out of pity. (See Description of Matryona's house.)
With warm, lyrical sympathy, A.I. Solzhenitsyn describes the difficult life of Matryona. For many years she has not earned a single ruble. On the collective farm, Matryona works “for the sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.” The law that came out after Stalin’s death finally gives her the right to seek a pension, but not for herself, but for the loss of her husband who went missing at the front. To do this, you need to collect a bunch of certificates, and then take them many times to social services and the village council, 10-20 kilometers away. Matryona's hut is full of mice and cockroaches that cannot be removed. The only livestock she keeps is a goat, and feeds mainly on “kartovy” (potatoes) no larger than a chicken egg: the sandy, unfertilized garden does not produce anything larger than it. But even in such a need, Matryona remains a bright person, with a radiant smile. Her work helps her to maintain her good spirits - trips to the forest for peat (with a two-pound sack on her shoulder for three kilometers), cutting hay for the goat, and chores around the house. Due to old age and illness, Matryona has already been released from the collective farm, but the formidable wife of the chairman every now and then orders her to help at work for free. Matryona easily agrees to help her neighbors in their gardens without money. Having received a pension of 80 rubles from the state, she buys herself new felt boots and a coat from a worn railway overcoat - and believes that her life has noticeably improved.
“Matryona Dvor” - the house of Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova in the village of Miltsevo, Vladimir region, the setting of the story by A. I. Solzhenitsyn
Soon Solzhenitsyn will learn the story of Matryona’s marriage. In her youth, she was going to marry her neighbor Thaddeus. However, in 1914 he was taken to the German war - and he disappeared into obscurity for three years. Without waiting for news from the groom, in the belief that he was dead, Matryona went to marry Thaddeus’s brother, Efim. But a few months later, Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. In his hearts, he threatened to chop Matryona and Efim with an ax, then he cooled down and took another Matryona, from a neighboring village, as his wife. They lived next door to her. Thaddeus was known in Talnovo as a domineering, stingy man. He constantly beat his wife, although he had six children from her. Matryona and Efim also had six, but none of them lived for more than three months. Efim, having left for another war in 1941, did not return from it. Friendly with Thaddeus’s wife, Matryona begged her youngest daughter, Kira, raised her for ten years as if she were her own, and shortly before Solzhenitsyn arrived in Talnovo, she married her to a locomotive driver in the village of Cherusti. Matryona told Alexander Isaevich the story about her two suitors herself, worrying like a young woman.
Kira and her husband had to get a plot of land in Cherusty, and for this they had to quickly erect some kind of building. In winter, Old Thaddeus suggested moving the upper room attached to Matryon’s house there. Matryona was already going to bequeath this room to Kira (and her three sisters were aiming for the house). Under the persistent persuasion of the greedy Thaddeus, Matryona, after two sleepless nights, agreed during her lifetime, having broken part of the roof of the house, to dismantle the upper room and transport it to Cherusti. In front of the hostess and Solzhenitsyn, Thaddeus and his sons and sons-in-law came to Matryona’s yard, clattered with axes, creaked with the boards being torn off, and dismantled the upper room into logs. Matryona's three sisters, having learned how she succumbed to Thaddeus's persuasion, unanimously called her a fool.
Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova - the prototype of the main character of the story
A tractor was brought from Cherusti. The logs from the upper room were loaded onto two sleighs. The fat-faced tractor driver, in order not to make an extra trip, announced that he would pull two sleighs at once - it was better for him in terms of money. The disinterested Matryona herself, fussing, helped load the logs. Already in the dark, the tractor with difficulty pulled a heavy load from the mother’s yard. The restless worker didn’t stay at home either - she ran away with everyone to help along the way.
She was no longer destined to return alive... At a railway crossing, the cable of an overloaded tractor broke. The tractor driver and Thaddeus’s son rushed to get along with him, and Matryona was carried there with them. At this time, two coupled locomotives approached the crossing, backwards and without turning on the lights. Suddenly flying in, they smashed to death all three who were busy at the cable, mutilated the tractor, and fell off the rails themselves. A fast train with a thousand passengers approaching the crossing almost crashed.
At dawn, from the crossing, everything that was left of Matryona was brought back on a sled under a dirty bag thrown over it. The body had no legs, no half torso, no left arm. But the face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead. One woman crossed herself and said:
“The Lord left her her right hand.” There will be a prayer to God...
The village began to gather for the funeral. Female relatives wailed over the coffin, but self-interest was evident in their words. And it was not hidden that Matryona’s sisters and her husband’s relatives were preparing for a fight for the deceased’s inheritance, for her an old house. Only Thaddeus’s wife and pupil Kira wept sincerely. Thaddeus himself, who had lost his once beloved woman and son in that disaster, was clearly only thinking about how to save the logs of the upper room that had been scattered during the crash near the railroad. Asking for permission to return them, he kept rushing from the coffins to the station and village authorities.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). October 1956
On Sunday Matryona and son Thaddeus were buried. The wake has passed. In the next few days, Thaddeus pulled out a barn and a fence from his mother’s sisters, which he and his sons immediately dismantled and transported on a sled. Alexander Isaevich moved in with one of Matryona’s sisters-in-law, who often and always spoke with contemptuous regret about her cordiality, simplicity, about how “stupid she was, she helped strangers for free,” “she didn’t chase after money and didn’t even keep a pig.” For Solzhenitsyn, it was precisely from these disparaging words that he emerged new image Matryona, as he did not understand her, even living with her side by side. This non-covetous woman, a stranger to her sisters, funny to her sisters-in-law, who had not accumulated property before her death, buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, felt sorry for a lanky cat, and once at night during a fire she rushed to save not a hut, but her beloved ficus trees - and there is that very righteous man, without which, according to the proverb, the village cannot stand.
Solzhenitsyn Alexander Isaevich (1918 – 2008) Born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. Parents came from peasant backgrounds. This didn't stop them from getting a good education. The mother was widowed six months before the birth of her son. To support him, she went to work as a typist. In 1938, Solzhenitsyn entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University, and in 1941, having received a diploma in mathematics, he graduated from the correspondence department of the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (IFLI) in Moscow. After the start of the Great Patriotic War, he was drafted into the army (artillery). On February 9, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by front-line counterintelligence: when examining (opening) his letter to a friend, NKVD officers discovered critical remarks addressed to I.V. Stalin. The tribunal sentenced Alexander Isaevich to 8 years in prison followed by exile to Siberia.
In 1957, after the start of the fight against the personality cult of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated. N. S. Khrushchev personally authorized the publication of his story about Stalin’s camps, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962). In 1967, after Solzhenitsyn sent an open letter to the Congress of the USSR Writers' Union, calling for an end to censorship, his works were banned. Nevertheless, the novels “In the First Circle” (1968) and “ Cancer building"(1969) were distributed in samizdat and were published without the consent of the author in the West. In 1970, Alexander Isaevich was awarded Nobel Prize on literature.
In 1973, the KGB confiscated the manuscript's activities. Died on August 3, 2008, a new work of the writer of the year in Moscow. "The Gulag Archipelago". The “GULAG Archipelago” meant prisons, forced labor camps, and settlements for exiles scattered throughout the USSR. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, accused of treason and deported to Germany. In 1976, he moved to the United States and lived in Vermont, pursuing literary creativity. Only in 1994 was the writer able to return to Russia. Until recently, Solzhenitsyn continued his literary and social activities.
The main theme of this writer’s work is not the criticism of communism or the curse of the Gulag, but the struggle of good against evil - eternal theme world art. Solzhenitsyn’s work grew not only from the traditions of Russian literature of the 20th century. As a rule, his works are considered against the backdrop of an extremely limited circle socio-political And literary phenomena 19th -20th centuries. The artistic space of Solzhenitsyn's prose is a combination of three worlds - ideal (Divine), real (earthly) and hellish (devilish).
The structure of the Russian soul also corresponds to this structure of the world. It is also three-part and is a combination of several principles: holy, human and animal. At different periods, one of these principles is suppressed, the other begins to dominate, and this explains the high rises and deep falls of the Russian people. The time that Solzhenitsyn writes about in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”, in his opinion, is one of the most terrible failures in Russian history, the time of the triumph of the Antichrist. For Solzhenitsyn, the devilish anti-world is the kingdom of egoism and primitive rationalism, the triumph of self-interest and the denial of absolute values; the cult of earthly well-being dominates in it, and man is proclaimed the measure of all values.
Elements of oral folk art in the story “Matryonin’s Dvor”, it is traditional to reveal the heroine’s inner world on the basis of song style. So, Matryona has a “singing” speech: “She didn’t speak, she hummed touchingly,” “benevolent words ... began with some kind of low torment, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” The impression was strengthened by the inclusion of “singing” dialectisms in the text. The dialectical words used in the story very vividly convey the speech of the heroine’s native area: kartovo, cardboard soup, kuzhotkom (in the evening), upper room, duel (blizzard), etc. Matryona has firm ideas about how to sing “in our way” “, and her memories of her youth evoke in the narrator an association with “a song under the sky, which has long been left behind and cannot be sung with the mechanisms.” The story uses proverbs that reflect bitter experiences folk life: “Dunno is lying on the stove, Know-Nothing is being led on a string”, “There are two riddles in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember, how I will die - I don’t know.”
At the end of the story, folk wisdom becomes the basis for assessing the heroine: “... she is the very righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb (meaning the proverb “A city is not worth without a saint, a village without a righteous man”), a village is not worth.” In the story “Matrenin's Dvor” there are repeatedly signs that promise something unkind. It should be recalled that signs are common to many folklore works: songs, epics, fairy tales, etc. Tragic events are foreshadowed by Matryona’s fear of moving (“I was afraid...most of all for some reason...”), and the loss of her kitten at the blessing of water (“... like an unclean spirit took him away”), and that “on those same days a lanky cat wandered out of the yard...”. Nature itself protects the heroine from evil. A blizzard swirling around for two days interferes with transportation, and immediately after it a thaw begins. Thus, folklore and Christian motives occupy a significant place in this story. Solzhenitsyn uses them because they are directly connected with the Russian people. And the fate of the people during the period of unrest of the 20th century is central theme of Solzhenitsyn's entire work. . .
Year of first publication - 1963 Genre: short story Genus: epic Type artistic speech: prose Plot type: social, psychological
History of creation The story “Matrenin's Dvor” was written in 1959 and published in 1964. This is Solzhenitsyn's story about the situation in which he found himself upon returning from the camp. He “wanted to worm his way in and get lost in the very interior of Russia,” to find “a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways.” After his rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn lived in the village of Maltsevo, Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region, with the peasant woman Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova. The former camp inmate could only get hired for hard work, but he wanted to teach.
Initially, the author called his work “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” It is known that in 1963, in order to avoid friction with censorship, the publisher A.T. Tvardovsky changed the name; the idea of righteousness referred to Christianity and was not welcomed in any way in the early 60s of the twentieth century.
Brief story 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 or 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 a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. Matryona has enormous 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 across railway on the sleigh is part of his own hut, bequeathed to Kira. 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.
Plot The story is absolutely documentary, there is practically no fiction in it, the events that happened are described in the story with chronological accuracy. The story begins in August 1956 and ends in June 1957. Climax The climax is the episode of cutting off the upper room, and the denouement is the moment of Matryona’s death at the crossing while transporting the log frame of her upper room: “At the crossing there is a hill, the entrance is steep. There is no barrier. The tractor went over with the first sleigh, but the cable broke, and the second sleigh... got stuck... there... Matryona was carried too.”
Composition The work consists of three chapters. 1. Image of a Russian village in the early 50s. Includes a detailed exposition: the story of finding shelter and meeting the mistress of the house, when the hero is only watching Matryona. 2. The life and fate of the heroine of the story. We learn the story of Matryona, her biography, conveyed in memories. 3. Moral lessons. The third chapter follows after the denouement and is an epilogue.
Main characters The narrator (Ignatyich) is an autobiographical character. Matryona calls R. Ignatyich. He served exile “in the dusty, hot desert” and was rehabilitated. R. wanted to live in some village in central Russia. Once in Talnov, he began renting a room from Matryona and teaching mathematics at a local school. R. is closed, avoids people, does not like noise. He worries when Matryona accidentally puts on his padded jacket and is tormented by the noise of the loudspeaker. But the hero got along with Matryona herself immediately, despite the fact that they lived in the same room: she was very quiet and helpful. But R., an intelligent and experienced person, did not immediately appreciate Matryona. He understood the essence of M. only after the death of the heroine, equating her with the righteous (“A village is not worth without a righteous man,” R. recalled).
Is there a detailed portrait of the heroine in the story? What portrait details does the writer focus on? Matryona is endowed with a discreet appearance. It is important for the author to depict not so much external beauty a simple Russian peasant woman, how much inner light flows from her eyes, and the more clearly emphasize her thought: “Those people always have good faces, who are in harmony with their conscience.”
Which artistic details create a picture of Matryona’s life? All her “wealth” is ficus trees, a lanky cat, a goat, mice and cockroaches. The entire world around Matryona in her darkish hut with a large Russian stove is a continuation of herself, a part of her life. Everything here is natural and organic: the beloved ficus trees “filled the owner’s loneliness with a silent but living crowd.”
How does the theme of the heroine’s past unfold in the story? The heroine's life path is not easy. She had to endure a lot of grief and injustice in her lifetime: broken love, the death of six children, the loss of her husband in the war, hellish work in the village, severe illness and illness, a bitter resentment towards the collective farm, which squeezed all the strength out of her and then wrote her off as unnecessary. . The tragedy of a rural Russian woman is concentrated in the fate of one Matryona.
How does Matryona appear in the system of other images in the story, what is the attitude of those around her? The heroes of the story fall into two unequal parts: Matryona and the author-narrator who understands and loves her, and those who can be called “Nematryona,” her relatives. The boundary between them is indicated by the fact that the main thing in the consciousness and behavior of each of them is interest in common life, the desire to participate in it, an open, sincere attitude towards people, or a focus only on one’s own interests, one’s own home, one’s own wealth.
The image of the righteous woman Matryona in the story is contrasted with Thaddeus. Fierce hatred is felt in his words about Matryona’s marriage to his brother. The return of Thaddeus reminded Matryona of their wonderful past. Nothing wavered in Thaddeus after the misfortune with Matryona; he even looked at her dead body with some indifference. The train crash, under which both the room and the people transporting it ended up, was predetermined by the petty desire of Thaddeus and his relatives to save money on little things, not to drive the tractor twice, but to make do with one flight. After her death, many began to reproach Matryona. So, my sister-in-law said about her: “. . . and she was unscrupulous, and did not pursue the acquisition, and was not careful; . . . and stupid, she helped strangers for free.” Even Ignatyich admits with pain and remorse: “There is no Matryona. A loved one was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for wearing a padded jacket.”
The conflict between Matryona and the village is not developed in the story; there is rather indifference and neglect, a lack of understanding of her worldview. We see only one unrighteous Thaddeus, who forced Matryona to give up part of the house. After Matryona's death, the village will become morally poorer. Describing her funeral, Solzhenitsyn does not hide his dissatisfaction with his fellow villagers: they buried Matryona in a poor, unpainted coffin, they sang “eternal memory” in drunken, hoarse voices, and hastily divided up her things. Why are they so heartless? The author explains the bitterness of people social problems. Social poverty led the village to spiritual poverty. Solzhenitsyn's view of the village of the 60s is distinguished by its harsh, cruel truthfulness. But this truth is imbued with pain, and torment, and love, and hope. Love is the desire to change the social order that has led Russia to the brink of the abyss. The hope is that if in every village there is at least one righteous woman, and he hopes that there is.
The Theme of Righteousness Solzhenitsyn approaches the theme of righteousness, a favorite in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century, delicately, unobtrusively and even with humor. Speaking about Matryona, his hero remarks: “Only she had fewer sins than her lame-legged cat. She was strangling mice! . “The writer rethinks the images of the righteous in Russian literature and portrays the righteous not as a person who went through many sins, repented and began to live like a god. He makes righteousness a natural way of life for the heroine. At the same time, Matryona is not a typical image, she is not like other “Talnovsky women” who live by material interests. She is one of those “three righteous people” who are so difficult to find.
Idea: Using the example of revealing the fate of a village woman, show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly reveal the measure of humanity in each person. The idea of “Matryona’s Court” and its problematics are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the heroine’s Christian-Orthodox worldview.
Art space Interesting art space story. It begins with its name, then expands to the railway station, which is located “one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow along the line that goes from Murom to Kazan,” and to the villages “over the hill,” and then covers the entire country that receives foreign delegation, and extends even into the Universe, which should be filled by artificial satellites of the Earth. The category of space is associated with images of a house and a road, symbolizing the life path of the characters.
Issues: üRussian village of the early 50s, its life, customs, morals ü The relationship between the authorities and the working man üThe punitive power of love üThe special holiness of the heroine’s thoughts.
The values of the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn affirm universal human moral values. The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” calls for not repeating the mistakes of the last generation, so that people become more humane and moral. After all, these are the basic values of humanity!
Anna Akhmatova about A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor” “An amazing thing... This is worse than “Ivan Denisovich”... There you can blame everything on the cult of personality, but here... After all, it’s not Matryona, but the entire Russian village that fell under the locomotive and to pieces..."
Statements by A.I. Solzhenitsyn about the heroine of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” are the same “She is a keeper, without her great-grandfather, the village would not exist. Not a hundred city. Neither the whole land is ours." “Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.”
“There are such born angels, they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide on top of this slurry (violence, lies, myths about happiness and legality), without drowning in it at all.” A. I. Solzhenitsyn True man is expressed almost only in moments of farewell and suffering - this is who he is, remember him... V. Rasputin
ANALYSIS OF A.I. SOLZHENITSYN’S STORY “MATRENIN’S Dvor”
The purpose of the lesson: to try to understand how the writer sees the phenomenon of a “common man”, to understand the philosophical meaning of the story.
Methodological techniques: analytical conversation, comparison of texts.
DURING THE CLASSES
1.Teacher's word
The story "Matrenin's Dvor", like "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", was written in 1959 and published in 1964. “Matrenin’s Dvor” is an autobiographical work. This is Solzhenitsyn’s story about the situation in which he found himself after returning “from the dusty hot desert,” that is, from the camp. He “wanted to worm his way in and get lost in the very interior of Russia,” to find “a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways.” The former camp inmate could only get hired for hard work, but he wanted to teach. After his rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn worked for some time as a physics teacher in the Vladimir region, living in the village of Miltsevo with the peasant woman Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova (there he completed the first edition of “In the First Circle”). The story “Matrenin’s Dvor” goes beyond ordinary memories, but acquires deep meaning and is recognized as a classic. It was called “brilliant,” “a truly brilliant work.” Let's try to understand the phenomenon of this story.
P. Check homework.
Let's compare the stories "Matrenin's Dvor" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
Both stories are stages in the writer’s understanding of the phenomenon of the “common man,” the bearer of mass consciousness. The heroes of both stories are “ simple people", victims of a despiriting world. But the attitude towards the heroes is different. The first was called “A village does not stand without a righteous person,” and the second was called Shch-854 (One Day of One Prisoner).” “Righteous” and “convict” are different assessments. What appears to Matryona as “high” (her apologetic smile in front of the formidable chairwoman, her compliance in the face of the insolent pressure of her relatives), in Ivan Denisovich’s behavior is indicated by “working extra money,” “serving a rich brigadier with dry felt boots right on his bed,” “running through the quarters, where someone needs to be served, sweep or offer something.” Matryona is depicted as a saint: “Only she had fewer sins than her lame cat. She was strangling mice...” Ivan Denisovich - a common person with sins and shortcomings. Matryona is not of this world. Shukhov belongs to the world of the Gulag, he has almost settled down in it, studied its laws, and developed a lot of devices for survival. During the 8 years of his imprisonment, he became accustomed to the camp: “He himself didn’t know whether he wanted it or not,” he adapted: “It’s as it should be - one works, one watches”; “Work is like a stick, it has two ends: if you do it for people, give it quality; if you do it for a fool, give it show.” True, he managed not to lose his human dignity, not to sink to the position of a “wick” that licks bowls.
Ivan Denisovich himself is not aware of the surrounding absurdity, does not realize the horror of his existence. He humbly and patiently bears his cross, just like Matryona Vasilievna.
But the heroine’s patience is akin to the patience of a saint.
In “Matryona’s Dvor” the image of the heroine is given in the perception of the narrator; he evaluates her as a righteous woman. In “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” the world is seen only through the eyes of the hero and is assessed by him himself. The reader also evaluates what is happening and cannot help but be horrified and shocked by the description of the “almost happy” day.
How is the character of the heroine revealed in the story?
What is the theme of the story?
Matryona is not of this world; the world, those around her condemn her: “and she was unclean; and I didn’t chase the factory; and not careful; and she didn’t even keep a pig, for some reason she didn’t like to feed it; and, stupid, helped strangers for free...”
In general, he lives “in desolation.” Look at Matryona’s poverty from all angles: “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 a littered accountant’s book.”
But the story is not only about the suffering, troubles, and injustice that befell the Russian woman. A.T. Tvardovsky wrote about it this way: “Why is the fate of the old peasant woman, told on a few pages, of such great interest to us? This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. And yet, her spiritual world is endowed with such a quality that we talk to her as if we were talking to Anna Karenina.” Solzhenitsyn responded to Tvardovsky: “You pointed out the very essence - a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism was always scouring the top, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and the neighboring ones.” Writers go to the main theme of the story - “how people live.” To survive what Matryona Vasilievna had to go through and remain a selfless, open, delicate, sympathetic person, not to become embittered at fate and people, to preserve her “radiant smile” until old age - what mental strength is needed for this!
The movement of the plot is aimed at understanding the secrets of the character of the main character. Matryona reveals herself not so much in the everyday present as in the past. Remembering her youth, she says: “It’s you who haven’t seen me before, Ignatich. All my bags were five pounds, I didn’t consider them heavy. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona, you’ll break your back!” The Divir didn’t come near me to put my end of the log on the front.” It turns out that Matryona was once young, strong, beautiful, one of those Nekrasov peasant women who “stopped a galloping horse”: “Once the horse was frightened and carried the sleigh to the lake, the men jumped away, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped...” And at the last moment of her life, she rushed to “help the men” at the crossing - and died.
And Matryona reveals herself from a completely unexpected side when she talks about her love: “for the first time I saw Matryona in a completely new way,” “That summer... we went with him to sit in the grove,” she whispered. - There was a grove here... I didn’t get out without a little, Ignatich. The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war... He went to war and disappeared... For three years I hid, waited. And no news, and not a bone...
Tied with an old faded handkerchief, Matryona’s round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp - as if freed from wrinkles, from an everyday careless outfit - frightened, girlish, faced with a terrible choice.
These lyrical, bright lines reveal the charm, spiritual beauty, and depth of Matryona’s experiences. Outwardly unremarkable, reserved, undemanding, Matryona turns out to be an extraordinary, sincere, pure, open person. Them sharper feeling the guilt that the narrator experiences: “There is no Matryona. A loved one was killed. And on the last day I reproached her padded jacket.” “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.” The final words of the story return to the original title - “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” and fill the story about the peasant woman Matryona with a deep generalizing, philosophical meaning.
What is the symbolic meaning of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”?
Many of Solzhenitsyn’s symbols are associated with Christian symbolism, images-symbols of the way of the cross, a righteous man, a martyr. The first title “Matryonina Dvora2” directly points to this. And the name “Matrenin’s Dvor” itself is general in nature. The courtyard, Matryona’s house, is the refuge that the narrator finally finds in search of “interior Russia” after for long years camps and homelessness: “I didn’t like this place in the whole village.” The symbolic likening of the House to Russia is traditional, because the structure of the house is likened to the structure of the world. In the fate of the house, the fate of its owner is, as it were, repeated, predicted. Forty years have passed here. In this house she survived two wars - German and World War II, the death of six children who died in infancy, the loss of her husband, who went missing during the war. The house is deteriorating and the owner is getting old. The house is being dismantled like a person - “rib by ribs”, and “everything showed that the breakers are not builders and do not expect Matryona to have to live here for a long time.”
It’s as if nature itself resists the destruction of the house - first a long snowstorm, enormous snowdrifts, then a thaw, damp fogs, streams. And the fact that Matryona’s holy water inexplicably disappeared seems like a bad omen. Matryona dies along with the upper room, with part of her house. The owner dies and the house is completely destroyed. Matryona's hut was filled up like a coffin until spring - buried.
Matryona’s fear of the railway is also symbolic in nature, because it is the train, a symbol of a world and civilization hostile to peasant life, that will flatten both the upper room and Matryona herself.
Sh. TEACHER'S WORD.
The righteous Matryona is the writer’s moral ideal, on which, in his opinion, the life of society should be based. According to Solzhenitsyn, the meaning of earthly existence is not prosperity, but the development of the soul.” Connected with this idea is the writer’s understanding of the role of literature and its connection with the Christian tradition. Solzhenitsyn continues one of the main traditions of Russian literature, according to which the writer sees his purpose in preaching truth, spirituality, and is convinced of the need to pose “eternal” questions and seek answers to them. He spoke about this in his Nobel lecture: “In Russian literature, we have long been ingrained in the idea that a writer can do a lot among his people - and should... Once he has taken up his word, he can never evade: a writer is not an outside judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is a co-author of all the evil committed in his homeland or by his people.”
“The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, which made Solzhenitsyn’s name known throughout the country and far beyond its borders. A year later, in the same magazine, Solzhenitsyn published several stories, including “Matrenin’s Dvor.” The publications stopped there. None of the writer’s works were allowed to be published in the USSR. And in 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Initially, the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” was called “A village is not worth it without the righteous.” But, on the advice of A. Tvardovsky, in order to avoid censorship obstacles, the name was changed. For the same reasons, the year of action in the story from 1956 was replaced by the author with 1953. “Matrenin’s Dvor,” as the author himself noted, “is completely autobiographical and reliable.” All notes to the story report on the prototype of the heroine - Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova from the village of Miltsovo, Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region. The narrator, like the author himself, teaches in a Ryazan village, living with the heroine of the story, and the very patronymic of the narrator - Ignatich - is consonant with the patronymic of A. Solzhenitsyn - Isaevich. The story, written in 1956, tells about the life of a Russian village in the fifties.
Critics praised the story. The essence of Solzhenitsyn’s work was noted by A. Tvardovsky: “Why is the fate of an old peasant woman, told on a few pages, of such great interest to us? This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. And yet her spiritual world is endowed with such qualities that we talk to her as if we were talking to Anna Karenina.” Having read these words in “ Literary newspaper“, Solzhenitsyn immediately wrote to Tvardovsky: “Needless to say, the paragraph of your speech relating to Matryona means a lot to me. You pointed to the very essence - to a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism was always scouring the surface, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and the neighboring ones.”
The first title of the story, “It does not stand without the righteous,” contained a deep meaning: the Russian village rests on people whose way of life is based on the universal values of goodness, labor, sympathy, and help. Because they call him righteous, Firstly, a person who lives according to religious rules; secondly, a person who does not sin in any way against the rules of morality (rules that determine morals, behavior, spiritual and mental qualities necessary for a person in society). The second name - "Matrenin's Dvor" - somewhat changed the point of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the boundaries of Matryonin's Dvor. On a larger scale of the village, they are blurred; the people surrounding the heroine are often different from her. By titling the story “Matrenin’s Dvor,” Solzhenitsyn focused readers’ attention on amazing world Russian woman.
Genre, genre, creative method
Solzhenitsyn once noted that he rarely turned to the short story genre, for “artistic pleasure”: “You can put a lot into a small form, and it is a great pleasure for an artist to work on a small form. Because in a small form you can hone the edges with great pleasure for yourself.” In the story “Matryonin's Dvor” all facets are honed with brilliance, and encountering the story becomes, in turn, a great pleasure for the reader. The story is usually based on an incident that reveals the character of the main character.
There were two points of view in literary criticism regarding the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. One of them presented Solzhenitsyn’s story as a phenomenon of “village prose.” V. Astafiev, calling “Matrenin’s Dvor” “the pinnacle of Russian short stories,” believed that our “village prose” came from this story. Somewhat later, this idea was developed in literary criticism.
At the same time, the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” was associated with the original genre of “monumental story” that emerged in the second half of the 1950s. An example of this genre is M. Sholokhov’s story “The Fate of a Man.”
In the 1960s, the genre features of the “monumental story” are recognized in “Matryona’s Court” by A. Solzhenitsyn, “Mother of Man” by V. Zakrutkin, “In the Light of Day” by E. Kazakevich. The main difference of this genre is the image of a common man who is a guardian universal human values. Moreover, the image of a common man is given in sublime tones, and the story itself is focused on high genre. Thus, in the story “The Fate of Man” the features of an epic are visible. And in “Matryona’s Dvor” the focus is on the lives of saints. Before us is the life of Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva, a righteous woman and great martyr of the era of “total collectivization” and a tragic experiment over an entire country. Matryona was portrayed by the author as a saint (“Only she had fewer sins than a lame-legged cat”).
Subjects
The theme of the story is a description of the life of a patriarchal Russian village, which reflects how thriving selfishness and rapacity are disfiguring Russia and “destroying connections and meaning.” The writer raises in a short story the serious problems of the Russian village of the early 50s. (her life, customs and morals, the relationship between power and the human worker). The author repeatedly emphasizes that the state only needs working hands, and not the person himself: “She was lonely all around, and since she began to get sick, she was released from the collective farm.” A person, according to the author, should mind his own business. So Matryona finds the meaning of life in work, she is angry at the unscrupulous attitude of others to the work.
Idea
The problems raised in the story are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the heroine’s Christian-Orthodox worldview. Using the example of the fate of a village woman, show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly reveal the measure of humanity in each person. But Matryona dies - and this world collapses: her house is torn apart log by log, her modest belongings are greedily divided. And there is no one to protect Matryona’s yard, no one even thinks that with Matryona’s departure something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, is leaving life.
“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Not a city. Neither the whole land is ours.” The last phrases expand the boundaries of Matryona’s yard (as the heroine’s personal world) to the scale of humanity.
Main characters
The main character of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva. Matryona is a lonely, destitute peasant woman with a generous and selfless soul. She lost her husband in the war, buried six of her own, and raised other people’s children. Matryona gave her pupil the most precious thing in her life - a house: “... she didn’t feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, like neither her labor nor her goods...”.
The heroine suffered many hardships in life, but did not lose the ability to empathize with others' joy and sorrow. She is selfless: she sincerely rejoices at someone else’s good harvest, although she herself never has one in the sand. Matryona’s entire wealth consists of a dirty white goat, a lame cat and large ones in tubs.
Matryona - concentration best features national character: shy, understands the “education” of the narrator, respects him for it. The author appreciates in Matryona her delicacy, lack of annoying curiosity about the life of another person, and hard work. She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get it for her husband, that is, for the breadwinner. As a result, she never achieved a pension. Life was extremely difficult. She obtained grass for the goat, peat for warmth, collected old stumps torn up by a tractor, soaked lingonberries for the winter, grew potatoes, helping those around her to survive.
The image of Matryona and certain details in the story are symbolic. Solzhenitsyn's Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of a Russian woman. As noted in critical literature, the appearance of the heroine is like an icon, and her life is like the lives of saints. Her house symbolizes the ark of the biblical Noah, in which he is saved from the global flood. Matryona's death symbolizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world in which she lived.
The heroine lives according to the laws of Christianity, although her actions are not always clear to others. Therefore, the attitude towards it is different. Matryona is surrounded by her sisters, sister-in-law, stepdaughter Kira, the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated it. She lived poorly, wretchedly, alone - a “lost old woman”, exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost never showed up at her house; they all unanimously condemned Matryona that she was funny and stupid, that she had been working for others for free all her life. Everyone mercilessly took advantage of Matryona’s kindness and simplicity - and unanimously judged her for it. Among the people around her, the author treats her heroine with great sympathy; both her son Fadceya and her pupil Kira love her.
The image of Matryona is contrasted in the story with the image of the cruel and greedy Thaddeus, who seeks to get Matryona’s house during her lifetime.
Matryona's courtyard is one of the key images of the story. The description of the yard, the house is detailed, with a lot of details, devoid of bright colors Matryona lives “in desolation.” It is important for the author to emphasize the inseparability of a house and a person: if the house is destroyed, its owner will also die. This unity is already stated in the title of the story. For Matryona, the hut is filled with a special spirit and light; a woman’s life is connected with the “life” of the house. Therefore, for a long time she did not agree to demolish the hut.
Plot and composition
The story consists of three parts. In the first part we are talking about how fate threw the hero-storyteller to a station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoprodukt. A former prisoner, and now a school teacher, eager to find peace in some remote and quiet corner of Russia, finds shelter and warmth in the house of the elderly Matryona, who has experienced life. “Maybe to some from the village, who are richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem like a good-looking hut, but for us that winter it was quite good: it had not yet leaked from the rains and the cold winds did not blow the stove’s heat out of it right away, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side. Besides Matryona and me, the other people who lived in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.” They immediately find a common language. Next to Matryona, the hero calms down his soul.
In the second part of the story, Matryona recalls her youth, the terrible ordeal that befell her. Her fiancé Thaddeus went missing in the First World War. The younger brother of the missing husband, Efim, who was left alone after death with his youngest children in his arms, wooed her. Matryona felt sorry for Efim and married someone she didn’t love. And here, after three years of absence, Thaddeus himself unexpectedly returned, whom Matryona continued to love. Hard life did not harden Matryona's heart. In worries about her daily bread, she walked her way to the end. And even death overtook a woman in labor worries. 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.
In the third part, the tenant learns about the death of the owner of the house. The descriptions of the funeral and wake showed the true attitude of the people close to her towards Matryona. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of obligation than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property. And Thaddeus doesn’t even come to the wake.
Artistic Features
The artistic world in the story is built linearly - in accordance with the heroine’s life story. In the first part of the work, the entire narrative about Matryona is given through the perception of the author, a man who has endured a lot in his life, who dreamed of “getting lost and lost in the very interior of Russia.” The narrator evaluates her life from the outside, compares it with her surroundings, and becomes an authoritative witness of righteousness. In the second part, the heroine talks about herself. The combination of lyrical and epic pages, the coupling of episodes according to the principle of emotional contrast allows the author to change the rhythm of the narrative and its tone. This is the way the author goes to recreate a multi-layered picture of life. Already the first pages of the story serve as a convincing example. It opens with an opening story about a tragedy at a railway siding. We will learn the details of this tragedy at the end of the story.
Solzhenitsyn in his work does not give a detailed, specific description of the heroine. Only one portrait detail is constantly emphasized by the author - Matryona’s “radiant”, “kind”, “apologetic” smile. Nevertheless, by the end of the story the reader imagines the appearance of the heroine. Already in the very tonality of the phrase, the selection of “colors,” one can feel the author’s attitude towards Matryona: “The frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, was filled with a slightly pink color from the red frosty sun, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection.” And then - a direct author’s description: “Those people always have good faces who are in harmony with their conscience.” Even after the terrible death of the heroine, her “face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.”
Incarnated in Matryona folk character, which primarily manifests itself in her speech. Expressiveness and bright individuality are given to her language by the abundance of colloquial, dialectal vocabulary (prispeyu, kuzhotkomu, letota, mologna). Her manner of speech, the way she pronounces her words, is also deeply folkish: “They began with some kind of low, warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” “Matrenin’s Dvor” minimally includes the landscape; he pays more attention to the interior, which appears not on its own, but in a lively interweaving with the “residents” and with sounds - from the rustling of mice and cockroaches to the state of ficus trees and a languid cat. Every detail here characterizes not only peasant life, Matrenin's yard, but also the narrator. The narrator's voice reveals a psychologist, a moralist, even a poet in him - in the way he observes Matryona, her neighbors and relatives, and how he evaluates them and her. The poetic feeling is manifested in the author’s emotions: “Only she had fewer sins than a cat...”; “But Matryona rewarded me...” The lyrical pathos is especially obvious at the very end of the story, where even the syntactic structure changes, including paragraphs, turning the speech into blank verse:
“We all lived next to her / and did not understand / that she was the one
the most righteous man, / without whom, according to the proverb, / the village does not stand.
/Neither the city./Nor our whole land.”
The writer was looking for something new. An example of this is his convincing articles on language in Literaturnaya Gazeta, his fantastic commitment to Dahl (researchers note that Solzhenitsyn borrowed approximately 40% of the vocabulary in the story from Dahl’s dictionary), and his inventiveness in vocabulary. In the story "Matrenin's Dvor" Solzhenitsyn came to the language of preaching.
Meaning of the work
“There are such born angels,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in the article “Repentance and Self-Restraint,” as if characterizing Matryona, “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.”
What is the essence of Matryona's righteousness? In life, not by lies, we will now say in the words of the writer himself, spoken much later. In creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of rural collective farm life in the 50s. Matryona's righteousness lies in her ability to preserve her humanity even in such inaccessible conditions. As N.S. Leskov wrote, righteousness is the ability to live “without lying, without being deceitful, without condemning one’s neighbor and without condemning a biased enemy.”
The story was called “brilliant,” “a truly brilliant work.” Reviews about it noted that among Solzhenitsyn’s stories it stands out for its strict artistry, integrity of poetic expression, and consistency of artistic taste.
Story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrenin's Dvor" - for all times. It is especially relevant today, when issues of moral values and life priorities are acute in modern Russian society.
Analysis of the story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin Dvor"
A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s view of the village of the 50s and 60s is distinguished by its harsh and cruel truth. Therefore, the editor of the magazine “New World” A.T. Tvardovsky insisted on changing the time of action of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” (1959) from 1956 to 1953. This was an editorial move in the hope of getting Solzhenitsyn’s new work published: the events in the story were transferred to the time before the Khrushchev Thaw. The picture depicted leaves too painful an impression. “The leaves flew around, snow fell - and then melted. They plowed again, sowed again, reaped again. And again the leaves flew away, and again the snow fell. And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned upside down."
The story is usually based on an incident that reveals the character of the main character. Solzhenitsyn also builds his story on this traditional principle. Fate threw the hero-storyteller to a station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoprodukt. Here “dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution.” But then they were cut down, reduced to the roots. In the village they no longer baked bread or sold anything edible - the table became meager and poor. Collective farmers “everything goes to the collective farm, right down to the white flies,” and they had to gather hay for their cows from under the snow.
The author reveals the character of the main character of the story, Matryona, through a tragic event - her death. Only after death “the image of Matryona floated before me, as I did not understand her, even living side by side with her.” Throughout the entire story, the author does not give a detailed, specific description of the heroine. Only one portrait detail is constantly emphasized by the author - Matryona’s “radiant”, “kind”, “apologetic” smile. But by the end of the story, the reader imagines the appearance of the heroine. The author’s attitude towards Matryona is felt in the tone of the phrase, the selection of colors: “The frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, was filled with a slightly pink color from the red frosty sun, and this reflection warmed Matryona’s face.” And then - a direct author’s description: “Those people always have good faces, who are in harmony with their conscience.” I remember Matryona’s smooth, melodious, primordially Russian speech, beginning with “some kind of low warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales.”
The world Matryona in her darkish hut with a large Russian stove is like a continuation of herself, a part of her life. Everything here is organic and natural: the cockroaches rustling behind the partition, the rustling of which resembled the “distant sound of the ocean,” and the lanky cat picked up by Matryona out of pity, and the mice that tragic night Matryona's deaths rushed about behind the wallpaper as if Matryona herself was “invisibly rushing about and saying goodbye to her hut here.” Her favorite ficus trees “filled the owner’s loneliness with a silent but lively crowd.” The same ficus trees that Matryona once saved during a fire, without thinking about the meager wealth she had acquired. The ficus trees froze by the “frightened crowd” that terrible night, and then were taken out of the hut forever...
The author-narrator unfolds the life story of Matryona not immediately, but gradually. She had to endure a lot of grief and injustice in her lifetime: broken love, the death of six children, the loss of her husband in the war, hellish work in the village, severe illness, bitter resentment towards the collective farm, which squeezed all the strength out of her and then wrote her off as unnecessary. , leaving without pension and support. In the fate of Matryona, the tragedy of a rural Russian woman is concentrated - the most expressive, blatant.
But she did not become angry with this world, she retained a good mood, a feeling of joy and pity for others, and a radiant smile still brightens her face. “She had a surefire way to regain her good spirits - work.” And in her old age, Matryona did not know rest: she either grabbed a shovel, then went with a sack into the swamp to cut grass for her dirty white goat, or went with other women to secretly steal peat from the collective farm for winter kindling.
“Matryona was angry with someone invisible,” but she did not hold a grudge against the collective farm. Moreover, according to the very first decree, she went to help the collective farm, without receiving, as before, anything for her work. And she did not refuse help to any distant relative or neighbor, without a shadow of envy later telling the guest about the neighbor’s rich potato harvest. Work was never a burden to her; “Matryona never spared either her labor or her goods.” And everyone around Matryonin shamelessly took advantage of Matryonin’s selflessness.
She lived poorly, wretchedly, alone - a “lost old woman”, exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, apparently fearing that Matryona would ask them for help. Everyone condemned her in chorus, that she was funny and stupid, that she worked for others for free, that she was always meddling in men’s affairs (after all, she got hit by a train because she wanted to help the men pull their sleighs through the crossing). True, after Matryona’s death, the sisters immediately flocked in, “seized the hut, the goat and the stove, locked her chest, and gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat.” And a friend of half a century, “the only one who sincerely loved Matryona in this village,” who came running in tears with the tragic news, nevertheless, when leaving, took Matryona’s knitted blouse with her so that the sisters would not get it. The sister-in-law, who recognized Matryona’s simplicity and cordiality, spoke about this “with contemptuous regret.” Everyone mercilessly took advantage of Matryona’s kindness and simplicity - and unanimously condemned her for it.
Significant place In the story, the writer devotes the funeral scene. And this is no coincidence. In Matryona’s house, all the relatives and friends in whose surroundings she lived her life gathered for the last time. And it turned out that Matryona was leaving this life, not understood by anyone, not mourned by anyone as a human being. At the funeral dinner they drank a lot, they said loudly, “not about Matryona at all.” According to custom, they sang “Eternal Memory,” but “the voices were hoarse, loud, their faces were drunk, and no one was putting feelings into this eternal memory.”
The death of the heroine is the beginning of decay, the death of the moral foundations that Matryona strengthened with her life. She was the only one in the village who lived in her own world: she arranged her life with work, honesty, kindness and patience, preserving her soul and inner freedom. Popularly wise, sensible, able to appreciate goodness and beauty, smiling and sociable in disposition, Matryona managed to resist evil and violence, preserving her “court,” her world, the special world of the righteous. But Matryona dies - and this world collapses: her house is torn apart log by log, her modest belongings are greedily divided. And there is no one to protect Matryona’s yard, no one even thinks that with Matryona’s departure something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, is leaving life.
“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Neither the city. Not our whole land."
The ending of the story is bitter. The author admits that he, who became related to Matryona, does not pursue any selfish interests, nevertheless did not fully understand her. And only death revealed before him the majestic and tragic image Matryona. The story is a kind of author's repentance, bitter repentance for the moral blindness of everyone around him, including himself. He bows his head before a man of a selfless soul, absolutely unrequited, defenseless.
Despite the tragedy of the events, the story is written on some very warm, bright, piercing note. It sets the reader up for good feelings and serious thoughts.
Lesson topic: Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn.
Analysis of the story "Matrenin's Dvor".
The purpose of the lesson: try to understand how the writer sees the phenomenon of the “common man”, to understand the philosophical meaning of the story.
During the classes:
- Teacher's word.
History of creation.
The story “Matrenin’s Dvor” was written in 1959, published in 1964. “Matrenin’s Dvor” is an autobiographical and reliable work. The original title is “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” Published in Novy Mir, 1963, No. 1.
This is a story about the situation in which he found himself, returning “from the dusty hot desert,” that is, from the camp. He wanted to “get lost in Russia,” to find a “quiet corner of Russia.” The former camp inmate could only get hired for hard work, but he wanted to teach. After rehabilitation in 1957, S. worked for some time as a physics teacher in the Vladimir region, lived in the village of Miltsevo with the peasant woman Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova.
2. Conversation based on the story.
1) The name of the heroine.
- Which of the Russian writers of the 19th century had the same name as the main character? With which female images in Russian literature could you compare the heroine of the story?
(Answer: the name of Solzhenitsyn’s heroine brings to mind the image of Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina, as well as the images of other Nekrasov women - workers: just like them, the heroine of the story “is dexterous in any work, she had to stop a galloping horse, and into a burning hut come in.” There is nothing of a majestic Slav in her appearance; you cannot call her a beauty. She is modest and inconspicuous.)
2) Portrait.
- Is there a detailed portrait of the heroine in the story? What portrait details does the writer focus on?
(Answer: Solzhenitsyn does not give a detailed portrait of Matryona. From chapter to chapter, only one detail is repeated most often - a smile: “radiant smile”, “smile of her round face”, “smiled at something”, “apologetic half-smile”. It is important for the author to portray not so much the external beauty of a simple Russian peasant woman, but the inner light flowing from her eyes, and all the more clearly emphasize your thought, expressed directly: “Those people always have good faces who are in harmony with their conscience.” what remained was intact, calm, more alive than dead.)
3) The heroine’s speech.
Write down the most characteristic statements of the heroine. What are the features of her speech?
(Answer: Matryona’s deeply folk character is manifested primarily in her speech. Expressiveness and bright individuality give her language an abundance of vernacular, dialect vocabulary and archaism (2 – the days are in time, to the terrible, love, summer, both sexes, help, trouble). That's what everyone in the village said. Matryona’s manner of speech is just as deeply folkish, the way she pronounces her “kind words.” “They began with some kind of low, warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales.”
4) Life of Matryona.
- What artistic details create a picture of Matryona’s life? How are everyday objects connected to the heroine’s spiritual world?
(Answer: Outwardly, Matryona’s life is striking in its disorder (“she lives in desolation”) All her wealth is ficus trees, a lanky cat, a goat, mouse cockroaches, a coat made from a railway overcoat. All this testifies to the poverty of Matryona, who worked all her life, but only with great difficulty, she earned herself a tiny pension. But another thing is also important: these meager everyday details reveal her special world. It is no coincidence that the ficus says: “They filled the loneliness of the housewife. They grew freely...” - and the rustling of cockroaches is compared to the distant sound of the ocean. It seems that nature itself lives in Matryona’s house, all living things are drawn to her).
5) The fate of Matryona.
Can you reconstruct Matryona’s life story? How does Matryona perceive her fate? What role does work play in her life?
(Answer: The events of the story are limited to a clear time frame: summer-winter 1956. Restoring the fate of the heroine, her life dramas, personal troubles, one way or another, are connected with the turns of history: With the First World War, in which Thaddeus was captured, with the Great Domestic, with whom her husband did not return, with the collective farm, from whom all her strength was drained and left her without a livelihood. Her fate is a part of the fate of the entire people.
And today the inhumane system does not let Matryona go: she was left without a pension, and she is forced to spend whole days obtaining various certificates; they don’t sell her peat, forcing her to steal, and they even search her based on a denunciation; the new chairman cut gardens for all disabled people; It is impossible to have cows, since mowing is not allowed anywhere; They don't even sell train tickets. Matryona does not feel justice, but she does not hold a grudge against fate and people. “She had a surefire way to restore good spirits - work.” Receiving nothing for her work, she goes at the first call to help her neighbors and the collective farm. Those around her willingly take advantage of her kindness. The villagers and relatives themselves not only do not help Matryona, but also try not to appear in her house at all, fearing that she will ask for help. To each and every one, Matryona remains absolutely alone in her village.
6) The image of Matryona among relatives.
What colors are used in the story of Thaddeus Mironovich and Matryona’s relatives? How does Thaddeus behave when dismantling the upper room? What is the conflict of the story?
(Answer: The main character is contrasted in the story with the brother of her late husband, Thaddeus. Drawing his portrait, Solzhenitsyn repeats the epithet “black” seven times. A man whose life was broken in his own way by inhumane circumstances, Thaddeus, unlike Matryona, harbored a grudge against fate , taking it out on his wife and son. The almost blind old man comes to life when he presses Matryona about the upper room, and then when he breaks down his hut. ex-fiancée. Self-interest and the desire to seize a plot for his daughter force him to destroy the house that he once built himself. Thaddeus's inhumanity is especially clearly manifested on the eve of Matryona's funeral. Thaddeus did not come to Matryona’s wake at all. But the most important thing is that Thaddeus was in the village, that Thaddeus was not alone in the village. At the wake, no one talks about Matryona herself.
There is almost no eventual conflict in the story, because the very character of Matryona excludes conflictual relationships with people. For her, good is the inability to do evil, love and compassion. In this substitution of concepts, Solzhenitsyn sees the essence of the spiritual crisis that struck Russia.
7) The tragedy of Matryona.
What signs foretell the death of the heroine?
(Answer: From the very first lines, the author prepares us for the tragic outcome of Matryona’s fate. Her death is foreshadowed by the disappearance of a pot of blessed water and the disappearance of a cat. For relatives and neighbors, Matryona’s death is only a reason to slander her until they have the opportunity to profit from her not cunning goods, for the narrator is the death loved one and the destruction of the whole world, the world of that people's truth, without which the Russian land does not stand)
8) The image of the narrator.
What do the fates of the narrator and Matryona have in common?
(Answer: The narrator is a man from a difficult family, with a war and a camp behind him. Therefore, he is lost in a quiet corner of Russia. And only in Matryona’s hut did the hero feel something akin to his heart. And lonely Matryona felt trust in her guest. Only to him does she tell about of his bitter past, only to her will he reveal that the heroes were united by the drama of their fate, and many of their life principles are especially reflected in their speech. And only the death of the hostess made the narrator comprehend her spiritual essence, which is why it sounds so strongly in the finale. story motive of repentance.
9) - What is the theme of the story?
(Answer: main topic story - “how people live.”
Why is the fate of the old peasant woman, told in a few pages, of such interest to us?
(Answer: This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. To survive what Matryona Vasilievna had to endure, and to remain a selfless, open, delicate, sympathetic person, not to become embittered towards fate and people, to preserve her “radiant smile” until old age - what mental strength is needed for this!
10) -What is the symbolic meaning of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”?
(Answer: Many symbols of S. are associated with Christian symbolism: images are symbols of the way of the cross, a righteous man, a martyr. The first name “Matryona’s yard” directly indicates this. And the name itself is general in nature. The yard, the house of Matryona, is the refuge that The narrator finds it after many years of camps and homelessness. In the fate of the house, the fate of its owner is repeated. Forty years passed here in this house, she survived two wars - German and domestic, the death of six children who died in infancy, the loss of her husband. who went missing during the war. The house is falling apart - the housewife is getting old. The house is being dismantled like a person - Matryona dies along with part of her house. Matryona's house is completely destroyed until spring. like a coffin - buried.
Conclusion:
The righteous Matryona is the writer’s moral ideal, on which, in his opinion, the life of society should be based.
The folk wisdom included by the writer in the original title of the story accurately conveys this author’s thought. Matryonin's yard is a kind of island in the middle of the ocean of lies that holds treasure folk spirit. The death of Matryona, the destruction of her yard and hut is a dire warning about the catastrophe that can happen to a society that has lost its moral guidelines. However, despite all the tragedy of the work, the story is imbued with the author’s faith in the vitality of Russia. Solzhenitsyn sees the source of this vitality not in political system, not in state power, not in the force of arms, but in simple hearts, unnoticed by anyone, humiliated, most often lonely righteous people opposing the world of lies.)
The magazine “New World” published several works by Solzhenitsyn, 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 into the righteous man, without whom “the village is not worth it.”
“Matryonin’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 told not from the perspective of the main character, but from the perspective 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 the Russian people did not yet know or understand how to live on.
“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 a job, 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: “Maybe to someone from the village, someone 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 her house across the railroad tracks, which was bequeathed to Kira (his daughter). And this death was caused by Fadey’s greed, avarice and callousness: 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 six children, but they all died in early childhood, so she later took in Fadey’s youngest daughter, Kira, to raise her. 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 as a 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 most clearly shown. 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 the human soul and its work, over 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 issues 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!The story by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn “Matryonin’s Dvor” was written in 1959. It is worth paying attention to the fact that initially the work had a slightly different appearance: when Solzhenitsyn decided to publish his story, Tvardovsky proposed changing the original title - “A village is not worth without a righteous man” and the year of the events that took place in the story, otherwise there was a risk that the work would be censored.
Solzhenitsyn's story is completely autobiographical and reliable, and life Matryona Vasilievna reproduced as it really happened.
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Despite the fact that the story has a changed title, each of the titles contains the meaning that the author wanted to convey to us.
He calls Matryona a righteous man. A righteous person is a saint living in the world of ordinary people, one who is ready to help at any moment. The essence of his actions is virtue. And indeed, throughout the entire story we can notice that Matryona is a sympathetic woman, she helps people for free, and for her help “She does not take money. You can’t help but hide it for her...”
The narrator, on whose behalf the narration is being told, has set something like a goal for himself: “to get stuck in and get lost in the very interior of Russia, if there was such a thing somewhere.” And he finds what he was looking for in Matryona’s house: “I didn’t like this place in the whole village.” Matryona's yard is all its inhabitants and buildings, including even cockroaches and mice. The name Matryona means mother, mother, nesting doll, that is, she is, as it were, the mother of everything that is in her yard. The main trait of her character is, perhaps, kindness.
Matryona’s yard can be called the embodiment of tranquility, all its components: the house, the goat, the cat, mice, cockroaches, ficus trees and Matryona herself are indivisible, and if one is destroyed, then everything else will be destroyed. This is what happened when the relatives decided to divide her “goods”, separating part of the house, they brought down the entire way of life, destroyed the entire yard and the mistress herself.
This is how Matryona died, whose righteousness lay in the fact that she knew how to preserve her pure soul in conditions that were absolutely unsuitable for this. With this work, Solzhenitsyn wanted to say how little Matryon remains, because it is with him that further fate Russian village. Without Matryon, “the village cannot stand,” says Solzhenitsyn.
Updated: 2019-11-26
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