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 ten years,” that is, he served in a camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents were “groped”). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it was not possible to live in a village with the wonderful name Vysokoye Polye, because they did not bake bread there and did not sell anything edible. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his ears, Torfoprodukt. However, it turns out that “not everything is about peat mining” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo...
This reconciles the narrator with his lot, for it promises him “a bad Russia.” He settles in one of the villages called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which the narrator lives is called Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva or simply Matryona.
Matryona's fate, about which she does not immediately, not considering it interesting for a “cultured” person, sometimes tells the guest in the evenings, fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees a special meaning in her fate, which Matryona’s fellow villagers and relatives do not notice. My husband went missing at the beginning of the war. He loved Matryona and did not beat her, like the village husbands of their wives. But it’s unlikely that Matryona herself loved him. She was supposed to marry her husband's older brother, Thaddeus. However, he went to the front first world war and disappeared. Matryona was waiting for him, but in the end, at the insistence of Thaddeus’s family, she married her younger brother, Efim. And then Thaddeus, who was in Hungarian captivity, suddenly returned. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband to death with an ax only because Efim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, but all the children from Efim (also six) of the “first Matryona” died without even living for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “corrupted,” and she herself believed it. Then she took in the daughter of the “second Matryona”, Kira, and raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.
Matryona lived all her life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for the collective farm, for her neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. In Matryona there is a huge inner strength. For example, she is able to stop a running horse, which men cannot stop.
Gradually, the narrator understands that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without reserve, that the entire village and the entire Russian land still hold together. But he is hardly pleased with this discovery. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to it next?
Hence the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies while helping Thaddeus and his sons drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry out of obligation rather than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property.
Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.
- About the product
- Main characters
- Other characters
- Summary
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Conclusion
About the product
« Matrenin Dvor» Solzhenitsyn - a story about tragic fate an open woman, Matryona, unlike her fellow villagers. Published for the first time in the magazine " New world"in 1963.
The story is told in the first person. Main character becomes Matryona's lodger and talks about her amazing fate. The first title of the story, “A Village Is Not Standing Without a Righteous Man,” well conveyed the idea of the work about a pure, unselfish soul, but was replaced to avoid problems with censorship.
Main characters
Narrator- an elderly man who served some time in prison and wants a quiet, peaceful life in the Russian outback. He settled with Matryona and talks about the fate of the heroine.
Matryona– a single woman of about sixty. She lives alone in her hut and is often sick.
Other characters
Thaddeus – ex-lover Matryona, tenacious, greedy old man.
Matryona's sisters– women who seek their own benefit in everything treat Matryona as a consumer.
One hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, on the road to Kazan and Murom, train passengers were always surprised by a serious decrease in speed. People rushed to the windows and talked about possible track repairs. Passing this section, the train again picked up its previous speed. And the reason for the slowdown was known only to the drivers and the author.
Chapter 1
In the summer of 1956, the author returned from the “burning desert at random simply to Russia.” His return “dragged on for about ten years,” and he was in no hurry to go anywhere or to anyone. The narrator wanted to go somewhere into the Russian outback with forests and fields.
He dreamed of “teaching” away from the bustle of the city, and he was sent to a town with the poetic name Vysokoye Pole. The author didn’t like it there, and he asked to be redirected to a place with the terrible name “Peatproduct”.
Upon arrival in the village, the narrator understands that “it’s easier to come here than to leave later.”
In addition to the owner, the hut was inhabited by mice, cockroaches, and a lame cat that had been picked up out of pity.
Every morning the hostess woke up at 5 am, fearing to oversleep, since she did not really trust her watch, which had been running for 27 years. She fed her “dirty white crooked goat” and prepared a simple breakfast for the guest.
Once Matryona learned from rural women that “a new pension law had been passed.” And Matryona began to seek a pension, but it was very difficult to get it, the different offices to which the woman was sent were located tens of kilometers from each other, and the day had to be spent just because of one signature.
People in the village lived poorly, despite the fact that peat swamps stretched for hundreds of kilometers around Talnovo, the peat from them “belonged to the trust.” Rural women had to haul bags of peat for themselves for the winter, hiding from the raids of the guards. The soil here was sandy and the harvests were poor.
People in the village often called Matryona to their garden, and she, abandoning her work, went to help them. Talnovsky women almost lined up to take Matryona to their garden, because she worked for pleasure, rejoicing at someone else’s good harvest.
Once every month and a half, the housewife had her turn to feed the shepherds. This lunch “put Matryona at great expense” because she had to buy her sugar, canned food, and butter. Grandmother herself did not allow herself such luxury even on holidays, living only on what her poor garden gave her.
Matryona once told about the horse Volchok, who got scared and “carried the sleigh into the lake.” “The men jumped back, but she grabbed the reins and stopped.” At the same time, despite her apparent fearlessness, the hostess was afraid of fire and, until her knees trembled, of trains.
By winter, Matryona still received a pension. The neighbors began to envy her.
And grandma finally ordered herself new felt boots, a coat from an old overcoat, and hid two hundred rubles for the funeral.
Once, Matryona’s three younger sisters came to Epiphany evenings. The author was surprised, because he had never seen them before. I thought maybe they were afraid that Matryona would ask them for help, so they didn’t come.
With the receipt of her pension, my grandmother seemed to come to life, and work was easier for her, and her illness bothered her less often. Only one event darkened the grandmother’s mood: at Epiphany in the church, someone took her pot with holy water, and she was left without water and without a pot.
Chapter 2
The Talnovsky women asked Matryona about her guest. And she passed the questions on to him. The author only told the landlady that he was in prison. I myself didn’t ask about the old woman’s past; I didn’t think there was anything interesting there. I only knew that she got married and came to this hut as a mistress. She had six children, but they all died. Later she had a student named Kira. But Matryona’s husband did not return from the war.
One day, when he came home, the narrator saw an old man - Thaddeus Mironovich. He came to ask for his son, Antoshka Grigoriev. The author recalls that for some reason Matryona herself sometimes asked for this insanely lazy and arrogant boy, who was transferred from class to class just so as “not to spoil the performance statistics.” After the petitioner left, the narrator learned from the hostess that it was the brother of her missing husband. That same evening she said that she was supposed to marry him. As a nineteen-year-old girl, Matryona loved Thaddeus. But he was taken to war, where he went missing. Three years later, Thaddeus’s mother died, the house was left without a mistress, and Thaddeus’s younger brother, Efim, came to woo the girl. No longer hoping to see her beloved, Matryona got married in the hot summer and became the mistress of this house, and in the winter Thaddeus returned “from Hungarian captivity.” Matryona threw herself at his feet, and he said that “if it weren’t for my dear brother, he would have chopped you both up.”
He later took as his wife “another Matryona” - a girl from a neighboring village, whom he chose as his wife only because of her name.
The author remembered how she came to her landlady and often complained that her husband beat her and offended her. She gave birth to Thaddeus six children. And Matryona’s children were born and died almost immediately. “Damage” is to blame for everything, she thought.
Soon the war began, and Efim was taken away, from where he never returned. Lonely Matryona took little Kira from the “Second Matryona” and raised her for 10 years, until the girl married a driver and left. Since Matryona was very ill, she took care of her will early, in which she ordered that part of her hut - a wooden outbuilding - be given to her pupil.
Kira came to visit and said that in Cherusty (where she lives), in order for young people to get land, they need to build some kind of building. Matrenina's bequeathed room was very suitable for this purpose. Thaddeus began to come often and persuade the woman to give her up now, during her lifetime. Matryona did not feel sorry for the upper room, but she was afraid to break the roof of the house. And so, on a cold February day, Thaddeus came with his sons and began to separate the upper room, which he had once built with his father.
The room lay near the house for two weeks because a blizzard covered all the roads. But Matryona was not herself, and besides, her three sisters came and scolded her for allowing the room to be given away. On those same days, “a lanky cat wandered out of the yard and disappeared,” which greatly upset the owner.
One day, returning from work, the narrator saw old man Thaddeus driving a tractor and loading a dismantled room onto two homemade sleighs. Afterwards we drank moonshine and in the dark drove the hut to Cherusti. Matryona went to see them off, but never returned. At one o'clock in the morning the author heard voices in the village. It turned out that the second sleigh, which Thaddeus had attached to the first out of greed, got stuck on the flights and fell apart. At that time, a steam locomotive was moving, you couldn’t see it because of the hillock, you couldn’t hear it because of the tractor engine. He ran into a sleigh, killing one of the drivers, the son of Thaddeus and Matryona. Late at night, Matryona’s friend Masha came, talked about it, grieved, and then told the author that Matryona bequeathed her “faggot” to her, and she wanted to take it in memory of her friend.
Chapter 3
The next morning they were going to bury Matryona. The narrator describes how her sisters came to say goodbye to her, crying “to show” and blaming Thaddeus and his family for her death. Only Kira truly grieved for her deceased adoptive mother, and “Second Matryona,” Thaddeus’s wife. The old man himself was not at the wake. When they transported the ill-fated upper room, the first sleigh with planks and armor remained standing at the crossing. And, at a time when one of his sons died, his son-in-law was under investigation, and his daughter Kira was almost losing her mind with grief, he was only worried about how to deliver the sleigh home, and begged all his friends to help him.
After Matryona’s funeral, her hut was “filled up until spring,” and the author moved in with “one of her sisters-in-law.” The woman often remembered Matryona, but always with condemnation. And in these memories arose completely new image a woman who was so strikingly different from the people around her. Matryona lived with an open heart, always helped others, and never refused help to anyone, even though her health was poor.
A. I. Solzhenitsyn ends his work with the words: “We all lived next to her, and did not understand that she was the same righteous person, without whom, according to the proverb, not a village would stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours."
Conclusion
The work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells the story of the fate of a sincere Russian woman, who “had fewer sins than a lame-legged cat.” Image main character- this is the image of that very righteous man, without whom the village does not stand. Matryona devotes her entire life to others, there is not a drop of malice or falsehood in her. Those around her take advantage of her kindness, and do not realize how holy and pure this woman’s soul is.
Since a brief retelling of “Matrenin’s Dvor” does not convey the original author’s speech and atmosphere of the story, it is worth reading it in full.
Summary of "Matrenin's Dvor" |
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 ten years,” that is, he served in a camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents were “groped”). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it was not possible to live in a village with the wonderful name Vysokoye Polye, because they did not bake bread there and did not sell anything edible. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his ears, Torfoprodukt. However, it turns out that “not everything is about peat mining” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo...
This reconciles the narrator with his lot, for it promises him “a bad Russia.” He settles in one of the villages called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which the narrator lives is called Matryona Ignatievna 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 in the First World War and disappeared. Matryona was waiting for him, but in the end, at the insistence of Thaddeus’s family, she married her younger brother, Efim. And then Thaddeus, who was in Hungarian captivity, suddenly returned. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband to death with an ax only because Efim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, but all the children from Efim (also six) of the “first Matryona” died without even living for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “corrupted,” and she herself believed it. Then she took in the daughter of the “second Matryona”, Kira, and raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.
Matryona lived all her life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for the collective farm, for her neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. 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 part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry out of obligation rather than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property.
Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.
In the summer of 1956, one hundred and eighty-four kilometers 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 ten years,” that is, he served in a camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents were “groped”). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it was not possible to live in a village with the wonderful name Vysokoye Polye, because they did not bake bread there and did not sell anything edible. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his ears, Torfoprodukt. However, it turns out that “not everything is about peat mining” and there are also Villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo...
This reconciles the narrator with his lot, for it promises him “a bad Russia.” He settles in one of the villages called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which the narrator lives is called Matryona Ignatievna Grigorieva, or simply Matryona.
The fate of Matryona, 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 village husbands did with 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 in the 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 the “first Matryona” had all the children from Efim (also six) die before they even lived 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 does not live for herself all her life. 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 part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When Matryona’s 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.
Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva is a peasant, a lonely woman of sixty years old, released from the collective farm due to illness. The story documents the life of Matryona Timofeevna Zakharova, a resident of the village of Miltsevo (near Solzhenitsyn's Talnovo) in the Kurlovsky district of the Vladimir region. The original title “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” was changed at the suggestion of Tvardovsky, who believed that it revealed the meaning too straightforwardly central image and the whole story. M., according to her fellow villagers, “didn’t chase after money,” dressed haphazardly, “helped strangers for free.”
The house is old, in the corner of the door by the stove is Matryona’s bed, the best part, the window part of the hut is lined with stools and benches, on which there are tubs and pots with her favorite ficus trees - her main wealth. Among the living creatures - a lanky old cat, which M. took pity on and picked up on the street, a dirty white goat with crooked horns, mice and cockroaches.
M. got married even before the revolution, because “their mother died... they didn’t have enough hands.” She married Efim the younger, and loved the eldest, Thaddeus, but he went to war and disappeared. She waited for him for three years: “no news, not a bone.” On Peter's Day they got married to Efim, and Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity to Mikola in the winter and almost chopped them both with an ax. She gave birth to six children, but they “didn’t survive” - they didn’t live to see three months. Efim disappeared during World War II, and M. was left alone. For eleven post-war years(the action takes place in 1956) M. decided that he was no longer alive. Thaddeus also had six children, all were alive, and M. took in the youngest girl, Kira, and raised her.
M. did not receive a pension. She was ill, but was not considered disabled; she worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century “by the sticks.” True, later they began to pay her eighty rubles, and she received more than a hundred more from the school and the resident teacher. She didn’t start anything “good”, didn’t rejoice at the chance to get a lodger, didn’t complain about illness, although she was sick twice a month. But she unquestioningly went to work when the chairman’s wife came running for her or when a neighbor asked her to help dig potatoes - never to anyone
M. did not refuse and did not take money from anyone, for which they considered her stupid. “She was always interfering in men’s affairs. And a horse once almost knocked her into an ice hole in the lake,” and finally, when they took away her room, they could have done without her - no, “Matryona got carried away between the tractor and the sleigh.” That is, she was always ready to help another, to neglect herself, to give her last. So she gave the upper room to her pupil Kira, which means she will have to tear down the house and halve it - an impossible, wild act, from the owner’s point of view. And she even rushed to help transport it.
She got up at four or five o’clock, had plenty of things to do until the evening, had a plan in advance of what to do, but no matter how tired she was, she was always friendly. M. was characterized by innate delicacy - she was afraid to burden herself and therefore, when she was sick, she did not complain, did not moan, and was embarrassed to call a doctor from the village first-aid post. She believed in God, but not earnestly, although she began every business: “With God!” While rescuing Thaddeus's property, which was stuck on a sleigh at a railway crossing, M. was hit by a train and died. Its absence on this earth affects immediately: who will now go sixth to harness the plow? Who should I contact for help?
Against the backdrop of M.'s death, the characters of her greedy sisters, Thaddeus - her former lover, her friend Masha, and everyone who takes part in the division of her poor belongings - appear. There is a cry over the coffin, it turns into “politics”, into a dialogue between contenders for Matrenino’s “property”, of which there is only a dirty white goat, a lanky cat and ficus trees. Matrenin's guest, observing all this, remembering the living M., suddenly clearly understands that all these people, including him, lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous man without whom “the village would not stand.”
The narrator is an autobiographical character. Matryona calls him Ignatyich. After serving exile in the “dusty, hot desert,” he was rehabilitated in 1956 and wished to live in a village somewhere in middle lane Russia. Once in Talnov, he settled with Matryona and taught mathematics at school. The camp past appears in all his actions and desires: to get away from prying eyes, from any interference in his life. R. is painfully worried about the incident when Matryona accidentally put on his padded jacket; he cannot stand the noise, especially the loudspeaker. They immediately got along with Matryona - it was impossible not to get along with her, even though they lived in the same room - she was so quiet and helpful. But R., a highly experienced and learned man, did not immediately understand Matryona and truly appreciated her only after her death.
Name: Matrenin Dvor
Genre: Story
Duration: 8min 49sec
Annotation:
1956 The author returns after the camps. He finds a job as a teacher in the Vladimir region in a place called Torfoprodukt. He settled as a lodger with Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva. Matryona is a lonely woman of about 60, exhausted by illness. She lives very poorly. The state did not provide her with a pension, since she worked on a collective farm for workdays. And there is no one to help her, since her husband disappeared in the war, and her children all died. There was only the former pupil Kira, whom Matryona raised for ten years, until she grew up and started her own family. Kira was the daughter of Thaddeus, the brother of Matryona’s missing husband.
Very quickly the lodger realized that Matryona is a very friendly person who does not refuse anyone. She considers it necessary to help anyone who comes to her asking for help.
Finally, life became easier for her - the school paid for the tenant, but she still managed to get a small pension.
One day Thaddeus came and began to insist that she dismantle part of her house - the upper room - and give it to Kira. Kira needed to build some kind of housing on a plot of land in order for this plot to be given to her. Matryona is sorry to dismantle part of the house where she lived for 40 years. However, she still intended it for Kira after her death. Therefore, sighing, she allows the room to be dismantled.
They hitched two sleds to the tractor and drove away. At the railway crossing, one of the sleighs began to fall apart. Matryona climbed to help the men and they were all crushed by the locomotive.
After her death, there were no people to speak kindly about Matryona, as she deserved. She helped everyone for free, although she was in poor health. She did not pursue wealth and was generous. Few people realized that she was the righteous man without whom the village would not stand.
To Central Russia. Thanks to new trends, a recent prisoner is now not refused to become school teachers 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 “kartovya” (potatoes) no larger than chicken egg: a sandy, unfertilized garden does not produce it larger. 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 Vasilievna 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 for himself, from neighboring village. 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 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 those scattered in the crash. railway upper room logs. 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 coming 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 a new image of Matryona emerged, as he did not understand her, even living side by side with her. This non-covetous woman, a stranger to her sisters, funny to her sisters-in-law, who did not accumulate property before death, buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, pitied 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.