The righteousness of the soul of each person depends on exactly how he lived, how he died, what he left behind.
The existence of Matryona, main character the story of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, similar to the life of thousands of her compatriots. The author shows the reader the era of substitution of life values, a time when property became not just an object, but the goal of all human life.
Solzhenitsyn in this work shows us greedy and greedy people and their negative attitude towards other people. It clearly demonstrates the people who, in the post-war period, became extremely cruel and callous towards others. Nothing was done for the people, everything went to the rich. Solzhenitsyn demonstrates to the reader a society that is so blind that it cannot distinguish good from evil, or consider those who are nearby. People began to see stupidity in virtue, not approving of such a life and not understanding it. The author asks why everything suddenly changed: the pursuit of wealth and the oppression of ordinary people became “good,” and selfless help to others, the warmth and simplicity of a person became stupidity.
But everywhere and always there is a person whom you can look up to and from whom you can take an example. In Solzhenitsyn's story there is such a person - this is the woman Matryona. The author presents her as a “righteous person,” emphasizing in every way her incredible kindness and boundless love for the people around her. Matryona acts as true folk morality, which is the support of all human existence.
You may or may not like this work, but it makes you think about your own existence, take a closer look at those around you and rethink life values.
The author focuses the reader's attention on injustice, on such ambiguous qualities of the main character as weak character and excessive kindness. The existence of Matryona highlights a number of moral problems that have always worried humanity. They still worry people.
It’s quite difficult for me to answer the question regarding the advisability of constant selfless help to strangers. After all, it is unfailing to help others, as Matryona did, when she herself has neither food, nor a decent home, nor the means to a decent life, is incredibly difficult, especially when it is not valued. It seems to me that the more you help the greedy and evil people, the more often they will use it and the more they will harm you. However, without such people on Earth it will become worse.
It’s the same with the problem of loneliness. Matryona is lonely, her husband left her, her children died. But you can fight loneliness in different ways. The main character of the story finds salvation in work. She works tirelessly for an ungrateful state, neighbors and a little for herself. Of course, it is on people like Matryona that the Russian land rests, but why should virtue suffer from those who oppress it?..
Another aspect of the life of any people is its relationship with the state. In this story, the author demonstrates the disappointing attitude of the state towards its citizens, in whose role Matryona acts. Paradoxically, the state does not provide people with vital things, forcing them to steal, for which they are then punished! However, people cannot be condemned for theft, which was not committed with malicious intent, because they are simply trying to defend their right to exist in inhuman conditions.
Solzhenitsyn also touched on the problem of love, family life. Having shown Matryona’s “righteousness” in her attitude towards her husband, devotion to her loved ones, as well as her ability to self-sacrifice: she married not out of love, but out of pity. And here love is not shown as an ardent passion that fades away over time. Love here is fidelity, forgiveness, fulfillment of duty and dedication.
Story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s “Matrenin’s Dvor” seems to answer the eternal question “How to live life correctly?” I believe that we do not live in order to spread evil and sow hatred, but in order to do good and revive the beauty that is inherent in man by nature. You shouldn’t elevate yourself above others, you just need to live the way Matryona did.
Dali once said: “If you are one of those who believes that modern Art surpassed the art of Vermeer or Raphael, don’t pick up this book and remain in blissful idiocy” (“Ten instructions for someone who wants to become an artist”) - I think it’s difficult to dispute. Of course, the great Salvador spoke about painting, but this saying also applies to literature. Art (be it literature, painting or music) is a way of self-expression; it helps us look into the most hidden corners of the soul.
I don’t like many works of modern Russian literature due to the lack of any artistic or creative principles. Nowadays, a story, poem or novel is often the result of a violent fantasy, a sick imagination or a distorted perception of the world (those who have an idea of the “Platonic” Second Coming will understand me and, I hope, will support me). Today's writers are trying to prove that their rejection of modern reality and lack of moral ideals There is individual approach to creativity.
But if today the world is ruled by lawlessness and cowardice, this does not mean that faith is over. It will be reborn, because man one way or another returns to his roots, albeit slowly, but with a firm and confident step (restoration of temples, adoption of religion).
Reading the classics, I find a lot of interesting things for myself. After all, at the beginning life path a person does not always manage to meet someone who would best friend and an adviser, so one of the main teachers of each of us is a book. What can modern literature teach us? Admit that you learned about first love not from Solzhenitsyn, but from Turgenev or Pushkin (“First Love”, “Eugene Onegin”), about the revival of the human soul from Dostoevsky (“Crime and Punishment”), but about the diversity and strangeness of humanity thinking - after all, from Gogol (“ Dead Souls"). It should be noted that classic always carries with it a dose of optimism. Even in Crime and Punishment, where we're talking about about a terrible offense - murder - and the hero, it would seem, has no justification, Dostoevsky makes us understand that Raskolnikov is not at all lost to society. His conscience is not clear, but for him there are such concepts as honor, justice, dignity.
It seems to me that the classics give us hope for spiritual revival, and in modern literature this is not the case. Let's try, from the point of view of the above, to consider what constitutes the work of a modern Russian writer, in particular
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. To do this, I propose to analyze one of his stories - “Matrenin’s Dvor”, which, in my opinion, poses the problem of loneliness, a person’s relationship with people around him, and the author’s attitude to life.
So, our hero comes to Russia, to the wonderful Russian hinterland with its eternal mysteries, extraordinary personalities and original characters. What awaits him? He does not know. No one expects him, no one remembers. What could he encounter on his way? He just wanted to “get lost” somewhere where radio, television and other achievements of modern civilization could not reach him.
where radios, televisions and other achievements of modern civilization cannot reach it. Well, luck smiled at him: the second time he managed to find a small village not far from the Torfoprodukt station and live there quietly, teaching the younger generation exact science. There were no problems with housing either. They found a “suitable house” for him, in which, in his words, “it was his lot to settle.”
God, how he missed ordinary people who have not lost that spiritual simplicity that each of us is endowed with from birth. How much tenderness and delight an ordinary village woman selling milk, her appearance, her voice, her characteristic accent, evokes in his soul. And with what sympathy he treats the mistress of the house, Matryona. He respected and understood her as she was: big, merciless, soft, sloppy and yet somehow sweet and dear. The unfortunate woman lost all her children and her beloved, having “ruined” her youth, she was left alone. And of course, I couldn’t help but arouse pity. She is not rich, not even prosperous. She is as poor as a “church mouse”, sick, but cannot refuse help. And the author notes a very important quality in her - selflessness. It was not because of money that old Matryona dug potatoes for her neighbors and raised her niece Kirochka not for the sake of gratitude either, but simply loved children. She is a woman after all.
When the war began, poor Matryona did not suspect that it (the war) would divorce her from her “dear” man, and the heroine “goes” to marry her fiancé’s younger brother. But the husband soon leaves the village, goes to war and does not return. And now Matryona is left with nothing. The children died one after another before reaching the age of one year. And at the end of her life she was doomed to loneliness. Only a “bumpy cat”, a “dirty white crooked goat”, mice and cockroaches inhabited her “skewed hut”. Matryona took in her niece Kirochka, and this was her last consolation. But, apparently, Matryona is not destined to while away her days in peace. It was urgent to move the room to another village, otherwise Kirochka would miss a good place. It would seem that our heroine should not interfere with the transportation of her own house (the last thing she has left), but should prevent it in every possible way. But no - she decides to help transport the logs. And if Matryona had not gone to the railway and had not pushed the cart over the rails, she would have been alive.
How did she end her life? Terrible. Stupid. Tragic, I don't see any justification for her death.
In this work, as in others (“Procession”), Solzhenitsyn expresses his attitude towards people. He doesn’t like the people and tries to depersonalize them, turning them into a *gray mass.” It seems to him that the people around him are “nothing.” They are not able to understand goodness, they don’t care who is next to them. But the author is another matter. He immediately recognizes a “righteous man” in Matryona, but in fact he himself comes to this conclusion too late.
We must pay tribute to the author of the story: in revealing the image of the heroine, he tries to emphasize her kindness and boundless love for people.
What can I say about this work? I’m not happy - once, I don’t like it - twice, because I can’t understand the author’s position: why did Solzhenitsyn embodied so much evil and dirt in his “creation”? (Remember the depressing environment at home and the attitude of people towards each other.
I like it - two, because I can’t understand the author’s position: why did Solzhenitsyn embodied so much evil and dirt in his “creation”? (Remember the depressing environment at home and the attitude of people towards each other.)
Naturally, the writer’s work is inextricably linked with his biography. Many years spent in captivity influenced Solzhenitsyn, but not everyone, even the more unfortunate ones, pour out all their grievances and anger in stories and novels. In my opinion, creative work should express only the best that is in a person in order to show: “This is the good that is in me, feel it and understand!”
Art (literature in particular) should bring bright feelings into the human soul. The reader should empathize with the characters, feel the pain of insults, disappointments and even cry (which, by the way, happened to me), but it’s not good if you have an unpleasant aftertaste in your soul after reading. This is probably some other art that I personally don’t understand.
Why then write at all? It's better to draw in the apocalypse style. All the same, the emotions in these two activities (writing about bad things and drawing) are the same, and you can admire the result large quantity person (if the author wanted it). After all, earlier masters created their works precisely so that people would be horrified by the scenes of general death they saw. And when placing such creations right on the streets (meaning churches), people associated with religion also foresaw that those who could not read would also know about the terrible punishment.
But what cannot be taken away from Solzhenitsyn is that he writes about life based on personal experience, writes specifically about himself, about what he experienced and saw. The author shows us life as it is (in his understanding). Although, when reading his works, one gets the impression that this man never saw anything other than the bad, the ignorant and the unfair. But that's not the main point. Solzhenitsyn's goal is to reveal to us all the “charm” of existence, using a description of a wretched home, evil neighbors and ungrateful relatives.
Solzhenitsyn talks about injustice, as well as weakness of character, excessive kindness and what this can lead to. He puts his thoughts and his attitude towards society into the author’s mouth. The author (the hero of the story) experienced everything that Solzhenitsyn himself had to endure.
Describing the village, Matryona, the harsh reality, at the same time he gives his assessment, expressing his own opinion. How much bitterness and sarcasm can be heard in the description of the station: on the “gray-wooden barracks there was a stern inscription: “Only board the train from the station!” Scrawled on the boards with a nail was: “And without tickets.” And at the ticket office... there was a knife scrawl: “No tickets.” Introducing us to Chairman Gorshkov, the author does not forget to mention how he (Gorshkov) received the Hero of Socialist Labor.
And how much “warmth”, “sensitivity”, “sincereness” is felt in the description of the modest home of Matryona and its inhabitants: “Sometimes the cat and cockroaches ate, but this made her feel unwell. The only thing that the cockroaches respected was the line of the partition that separated the mouth from.
we respected - this was the line of the partition that separated the mouth from... the clean hut... the kitchen was swarming at night... - the whole floor, the bench, and even the wall were almost entirely brown and were moving...”
Note that Gogol’s description of a hotel in the city of N., where cockroaches are also found, does not evoke a feeling of disgust. However, the author cannot do without something “like that.”
Not without hidden pleasure, he writes about his “modesty and tact” when he describes the hostess’s cooking: all these cockroach legs in monotonous food, in his words, “not entirely tasty.” “I obediently ate everything that was cooked for me, patiently putting it aside if I came across something unusual... I didn’t have the courage to reproach Matryona...”
In my opinion, the author likes to describe someone’s grievances and failures (this story is meant): “... Matryona had a lot of grievances...” Again, grievances. If you write not about your own people, then about strangers. And pity. The narrator presses for pity. He is trying to touch a nerve (since he personally couldn’t touch me with anything else). But pity pity is discord...
“No Matryona. A loved one was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for wearing a padded jacket.” The author wants to show us how sensitive and compassionate he is. However, inside he is a hard and dry person. I barely had the strength to read description of the dead Matryona, her mutilated body. Written without emotion, just a statement of fact. This is hard to understand. But what else can be born in a person’s head under the “gnashing of mice”, “rustling of cockroaches” and under the impression of seeing a dead woman? This is comforting.
But the most “fun” thing is the end. In a person, no knowledgeable about life, the thought will appear: “Don’t trust.” The sad picture that we see after the death of the heroine proves this to us. Yes, I agree: the relatives were only thinking about what they could take away from the house. It got to the point that the house itself was taken away. The narrator does not believe in the sincerity of Kira's tears. And the neighbor is of the opinion that Matryona was stupid, and her husband did not love her. In a word, there is emptiness and injustice all around. The author probably believes that everything is bad and that in the end misfortune will befall us. And the people around us are soulless, and they don’t see the beauty in others, and they don’t believe in goodness, and in general, except for him, no one saw kindness, modesty and selflessness in Matryona. “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 writer simply imposes his pessimistic views on the world on us and tries to prove something. He is a skeptic and will never be able to create something beautiful simply because of his life-warped beliefs. However, this is just my opinion.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was subjected to severe trials. War and famine, endless uprisings and revolutions have left their mark on the destinies of people. All the works of A.I. are dedicated to the troubles and joys of the Russian people. Solzhenitsyn.
In his story "Matrenin's Dvor" (1959) he described the situation of a Russian village in post-war years. We can say with confidence that this writer was one of the first who discovered the truth about the fate of the peasantry, depicted tragic life Russian man and the reasons for his misfortune.
Residents of the village of Talnovo, in which the story takes place, exist in terrible conditions. They have no electricity, hospitals, or shops. This is how Solzhenitsyn describes the house of the main character: “The wood chips were rotting, the logs of the log house and the gates, once mighty, had turned black from old age, and their covering had thinned out,” “a darkish hut with a dull mirror, which was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and about the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty.”
The plot of the story centers around an event that occurred “one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow along the branch that goes to Murom and Kazan.” The narrator walked the path to Matryona's yard “from the dusty hot desert.” Fate led him to a “lonely woman of about sixty,” poor and exhausted by a “black illness.” It is in this “darkish hut” that the narrator finds not only the desired silence and comfort, but also a special life (“a silent but living crowd” of ficus trees, filling the “loneliness of the housewife”).
In the story "Matrenin's Dvor" the author depicted folk character, who managed to preserve himself in the terrible turmoil of the 20th century. Matryona’s life was miserable: “...Year after year, for many years, I didn’t earn from anywhere...not a ruble. Because they didn’t pay her a pension... And on the collective farm she didn’t work for money - for sticks.” “Matryona had a lot of grievances,” “there were a lot of injustices with her.” But, having gotten used to it, the heroine remains “simple-minded”, “benevolent”, “radiant”, “enlightened”.
The main thing in the image of Matryona is kindness (“good mood”, “kind smile”), which conquers all hardships and worries in her soul. No enemies (“...they used to steal the wood from the master, now they stole peat from the trust,” “From office to office...they drove her for two months...”) could “dark” the heroine’s mood for a long time. For her, work was the “sure way to return” the inner light. Matryona worked for the collective farm, “for any distant relative or just a neighbor.” She did all this selflessly (“She doesn’t take money”).
Solzhenitsyn shows that the peasantry could not use the product of their labor. Everything went to the state: “excavators were growling all around in the swamps, but the peat was not sold to the residents, but was only taken to the authorities.” Women were forced to steal peat to survive in the winter.
The state cut off gardens from workers and deprived them of payment for hard labour. Therefore, the people did not trust him: “What about a pension? The state is minute by minute. Today, you see, it did. And tomorrow he’ll fuck you.”
The heroine in the story finds herself in the center of the eternal confrontation between good and evil, trying “with her conscience”, her very life, to connect the edges of the abyss. The climax is the moment of Matryona’s death at a crossing while transporting the log frame of her 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.”
Tragic events are foreshadowed by Matryona’s fear of the train (“I was afraid... most of all for some reason...”), and the loss of a pot for the blessing of water (“... like an unclean spirit took it away”), and the fact that “in those same days, a lanky cat wandered off yard..." Even nature resists transportation - a blizzard swirls for two days, after which a thaw begins: “For two weeks the broken room was not easy for the tractor!”
Among her fellow villagers, Matryona remains “misunderstood”, a “stranger”. But, if earlier in the speech of the heroes proverbs were used that reflected bitter experience folk life(“Dunno is lying on the stove, and 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”), then 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, the village does not stand.”
What is the essence of Matryona's righteousness? The fact is that her life is built on the truth. Matryona experiences all the difficulties of the Soviet rural life 1950s: having worked all her life, she is forced to work for a pension not for herself, but for her husband, who has disappeared since the beginning of the war. Unable to buy peat, which is mined all around but not sold to collective farmers, she, like others, is forced to take it secretly. But, in spite of everything, this heroine retained all the brightest things, preserved her soul.
In creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of that time, with his lack of rights and disdain for to an ordinary person. And this makes Matryona’s character even more valuable. The righteousness of this heroine lies in her ability to preserve her humanity in such inaccessible conditions.
The history of the creation of Solzhenitsyn’s work “Matryonin’s Dvor”
In 1962 in the magazine " New world“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 the prototype of the heroine - Matryona Vasilyevna 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 middle name 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 Literaturnaya Gazeta, 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 “A village is not worth it without the righteous” contained deep meaning: the Russian village is based on people whose way of life is based on the universal human values of kindness, labor, sympathy, and help. Since a righteous person is called, firstly, a person who lives in accordance with religious rules; secondly, a person who does not sin in any way against the rules of morality (rules defining 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.
Kind, genre, creative method of the analyzed work
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 out of this story. Somewhat later, this idea was developed in literary criticism.
At the same time, the story “Matryonin’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 between this genre is the image common man, who is the custodian of universal human values. Moreover, the image of an ordinary person is given in sublime tones, and the story itself is focused on a 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”).
Subject of the work
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 a short story serious problems 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.
An analysis of the work shows that the problems raised in it 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 Matryon’s court (as personal world heroines) to the scale of humanity.
The main characters of the work
The main character of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matryona Vasilyevna 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 flowers 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.
An analysis of the work says that the image of Matryona and individual details in the story are symbolic in nature. 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 escapes from 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, adopted daughter Kira, and the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated it. She lived poorly, squalidly, alone - a “lost old woman”, exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost never showed up at her house; they all condemned Matryona in unison, saying 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 Thaddeus 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 the wilderness.” 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 good-natured, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good: it had not yet leaked from the rains and the cold winds did not blow the stove 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 living in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.” They find it right away mutual 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. Caring for 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. Description of the funeral and wake was shown true attitude to Matryona people close to her. 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 of the analyzed story
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 author's attitude to Matryona: “The frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, glowed slightly pink 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.”
Matryona embodies a folk character, which is primarily manifested in her speech. Expressiveness and bright individuality are given to her language by the abundance of colloquial, dialectal vocabulary (prispeyu, kuzhotkamu, letota, molonya). 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.” “Matryonin’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 lanky cat. Every detail here characterizes not only peasant life, Matryonin’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:
“The Veems 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./Nor our whole land.”
The writer was looking for a new word. 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 or a hundred of them in Russia, these are righteous people, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), took advantage of their goodness, in good moments responded to them in kind, they have a positive attitude, 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 questions moral values and life priorities are acute in modern Russian society.
Point of view
Anna Akhmatova
When his big work came out (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”), I said: all 200 million should read this. And when I read “Matryona’s Dvor”, I cried, and I rarely cry.
V. Surganov
In the end, it is not so much the appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona that evokes an internal rebuff in us, but rather the author’s frank admiration for the beggarly selflessness and the no less frank desire to exalt and contrast it with the rapacity of the owner nesting in the people around her, close to her.
(From the book “The Word Makes Its Way.”
Collection of articles and documents about A.I. Solzhenitsyn.
1962-1974. - M.: Russian way, 1978.)
This is interesting
On August 20, 1956, Solzhenitsyn went to his place of work. There were many names such as “Peat Product” in the Vladimir region. Peat product (the local youth called it “Tyr-pyr”) was a railway station 180 kilometers and a four-hour drive from Moscow along the Kazan road. The school was located in the nearby village of Mezinovsky, and Solzhenitsyn had a chance to live two kilometers from the school - in the Meshchera village of Miltsevo.
Only three years will pass, and Solzhenitsyn will write a story that will immortalize these places: a station with a crude name, a village with a tiny market, a landlady’s house Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova and Matryona herself, the righteous woman and sufferer. The photograph of the corner of the hut, where the guest puts a cot and, pushing aside the owner's ficus trees, arranges a table with a lamp, will go around the whole world.
The teaching staff of Mezinovka numbered about fifty members that year and significantly influenced the life of the village. There were four schools here: primary, seven-year, secondary and evening schools for working youth. Solzhenitsyn received a referral to high school— it was in an old one-story building. The school year began with an August teachers' conference, so, having arrived in Torfoprodukt, the teacher of mathematics and electrical engineering of grades 8-10 had time to go to the Kurlovsky district for the traditional meeting. “Isaich,” as his colleagues dubbed him, could, if desired, refer to serious illness, but no, he didn’t talk to anyone about her. We just saw how he was looking for a birch chaga mushroom and some herbs in the forest, and answered questions briefly: “I make medicinal drinks.” He was considered shy: after all, a person suffered... But that was not the point at all: “I came with my purpose, with my past. What could they know, what could they tell them? I sat with Matryona and wrote a novel every free minute. Why would I chatter to myself? I didn't have that manner. I was a conspirator to the end." Then everyone will get used to the fact that this thin, pale, a tall man in a suit and tie, who, like all teachers, wore a hat, coat or raincoat, kept his distance and did not get close to anyone. He will remain silent when the document on rehabilitation arrives in six months - just the school head teacher B.S. Protserov will receive a notification from the village council and send the teacher for a certificate. No talking when the wife starts arriving. “What does anyone care? I live with Matryona and live.” Many were alarmed (was he a spy?) that he walked everywhere with a Zorkiy camera and took pictures that were not at all what amateurs usually take: instead of family and friends - houses, dilapidated farms, boring landscapes.
Arriving at school at the beginning school year, he proposed his own methodology - he gave all classes a test, divided the students into strong and mediocre based on the results, and then worked individually.
During the lessons, everyone received a separate task, so there was neither the opportunity nor the desire to cheat. Not only the solution to the problem was valued, but also the method of solution. The introductory part of the lesson was shortened as much as possible: the teacher wasted time on “trifles.” He knew exactly who needed to be called to the board and when, who to ask more often, who to trust independent work. The teacher never sat at the teacher's table. He didn’t enter the class, but burst into it. He ignited everyone with his energy and knew how to structure a lesson in such a way that there was no time to get bored or doze off. He respected his students. He never shouted, didn’t even raise his voice.
And only outside the classroom Solzhenitsyn was silent and withdrawn. He went home after school, ate the “cardboard” soup Matryona had prepared and sat down to work. The neighbors remembered for a long time how inconspicuously the guest lived, did not organize parties, did not participate in the fun, but read and wrote everything. “I loved Matryona Isaich,” Shura Romanova, Matryona’s adopted daughter (in the story she is Kira), used to say. “It used to be that she would come to me in Cherusti, and I would persuade her to stay longer.” “No,” he says. “I have Isaac - I need to cook for him, light the stove.” And back home."
The lodger also became attached to the lost old woman, valuing her selflessness, conscientiousness, heartfelt simplicity, and smile, which he tried in vain to catch in the camera lens. “So Matryona got used to me, and I got used to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening studies, did not annoy me with any questions.” She completely lacked womanly curiosity, and the lodger also did not stir her soul, but it turned out that they opened up to each other.
She learned about the prison, and about the serious illness of the guest, and about his loneliness. And there was no worse loss for him in those days than the absurd death of Matryona on February 21, 1957 under the wheels of a freight train at the crossing of one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow along the branch that goes to Murom from Kazan, exactly six months after the day he settled in her hut.
(From the book “Alexander Solzhenitsyn” by Lyudmila Saraskina)
Matryona's yard is as poor as before
Solzhenitsyn’s acquaintance with the “conda”, “interior” Russia, in which he so wanted to end up after the Ekibastuz exile, a few years later was embodied in the world-famous story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. This year marks 40 years since its creation. As it turned out, in Mezinovsky itself this work of Solzhenitsyn has become a second-hand book rarity. This book is not even in Matryona’s yard, where Lyuba, the niece of the heroine of Solzhenitsyn’s story, now lives. “I had pages from a magazine, my neighbors once asked me when they started reading it at school, but they never returned it,” complains Lyuba, who today is raising her grandson within the “historical” walls on a disability benefit. Matryona got her hut from her mother - herself younger sister Matryona. The hut was transported to Mezinovsky from the neighboring village of Miltsevo (in Solzhenitsyn’s story - Talnovo), where the future writer lived with Matryona Zakharova (in Solzhenitsyn’s - Matryona Grigorieva). In the village of Miltsevo, a similar, but much more solid house was hastily erected for Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s visit here in 1994. Soon after Solzhenitsyn’s memorable visit, Matrenina’s fellow countrymen uprooted the window frames and floorboards from this unguarded building on the outskirts of the village.
The “new” Mezinovskaya school, built in 1957, now has 240 students. In the unpreserved building of the old one, in which Solzhenitsyn taught classes, about a thousand studied. Over the past half century, not only has the Miltsevskaya river become shallow and the peat reserves in the surrounding swamps have become depleted, but also neighboring villages. And at the same time, Solzhenitsyn’s Thaddeus has not ceased to exist, calling the people’s good “ours” and believing that losing it is “shameful and stupid.”
Matryona's crumbling house, moved to a new location without a foundation, is sunk into the ground, and buckets are placed under the thin roof when it rains. Like Matryona’s, cockroaches are in full swing here, but there are no mice: there are four cats in the house, two of their own and two that have strayed. A former foundry worker at a local factory, Lyuba, like Matryona, who once spent months straightening out her pension, goes through the authorities to extend her disability benefits. “Nobody except Solzhenitsyn helps,” she complains. “Once one came in a jeep, called himself Alexey, looked around the house and gave me money.” Behind the house, like Matryona’s, there is a vegetable garden of 15 acres, in which Lyuba plants potatoes. As before, “mushy potatoes,” mushrooms and cabbage are the main products for her life. Besides cats, she doesn’t even have a goat in her yard, like Matryona had.
This is how many Mezinov righteous people lived and live. Local historians write books about the great writer’s stay in Mezinovsky, local poets compose poems, new pioneers write essays “On the difficult fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate“, as they once wrote essays about Brezhnev’s “Virgin Land” and “Malaya Zemlya”. They are thinking about reviving Matryona’s museum hut again on the outskirts of the deserted village of Miltsevo. And the old Matryonin’s yard still lives the same life as half a century ago.
Leonid Novikov, Vladimir region.
Gang Yu. Solzhenitsyn’s Service // New Time. - 1995. No. 24.
Zapevalov V. A. Solzhenitsyn. To the 30th anniversary of the publication of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” // Russian literature. - 1993. No. 2.
Litvinova V.I. Don't live a lie. Guidelines on the study of creativity of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. - Abakan: KhSU Publishing House, 1997.
MurinD. One hour, one day, one human life in the stories of A.I. Solzhenitsyn // Literature at school. - 1995. No. 5.
Palamarchuk P. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Guide. - M.,
1991.
SaraskinaL. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. ZhZL series. — M.: Young
Guard, 2009.
The word makes its way. Collection of articles and documents about A.I. Solzhenitsyn. 1962-1974. - M.: Russian way, 1978.
ChalmaevV. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Life and Work. - M., 1994.
Urmanov A.V. The works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. - M., 2003.
A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matrenin’s Dvor” (1959) had an autobiographical basis. What the writer saw in the Russian village after his liberation was typical and therefore especially painful. The difficult situation of the village, which experienced the terrible years of collectivization, fed the country during the war, and raised the destroyed economy after hard times, was not so truthfully presented on the pages of the works. Working on a collective farm for workdays instead of money, the lack of a pension and any kind of gratitude (“The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, but tomorrow it will be taken away”) - all this is the reality of peasant life, which had to be loudly declared. The original title was “A village does not stand without a righteous man,” the final version was proposed by A. T. Tvardovsky.
The plot basis of the story and its problems. At the center of the story is a simple Russian peasant woman who has drunk to the brim the misfortunes of her country, her small homeland. But none life difficulties They cannot change this spiritual person, make him callous and heartless. Matryona couldn’t refuse anyone, she helped everyone. The loss of six children did not embitter the heroine: she gave all her mother’s love and care to her adopted daughter Kira. Matryona’s life itself is a moral lesson; she did not fit into the traditional village scheme: “I didn’t chase after acquisitions... I didn’t try to buy things and then cherish them more than my life. I didn’t bother with outfits. Behind clothes that embellish freaks and villains. Misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband, who buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, a stranger to her sisters and sisters-in-law, funny, foolishly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property for death ... "
The story of A. I. Solzhenitsyn is written in the realistic tradition. And there is no excessive embellishment in it. The righteous image of the main character, for whom home is a spiritual category, is contrasted with ordinary people who strive not to miss theirs and do not notice how cruelty hurts them. “Matryona didn’t sleep for two nights. It was not easy for her to decide. I didn’t feel sorry for the upper room itself, which stood idle, just as Matryona never felt sorry for her work or her goods. And this room was still bequeathed to Kira. But it was scary for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. Even I, a guest, felt pain that they would begin to tear off the boards and turn out the logs of the house. But for Matryona this was the end of her entire life.” The tragic end of the story is symbolic: when the upper room is dismantled, Matryona dies. And life quickly takes its toll - Thaddeus, brother-in-law
Matryona, “overcoming weakness and aches, became revived and rejuvenated”: he began to dismantle the barn and fence that were left without a mistress.
The inner light of the soul of such people illuminates the lives of those around them. That is why the author says at the end of the story: “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.”
