Can Matryona be called a righteous woman in Matryona's courtyard? Question: Why does the writer call the main character a righteous woman in the work Matrenin Dvor? The theme of righteousness in the story by A.I.
A righteous person is a person who always adheres to a certain ideal in everything. To understand the essence more precisely, you need to look at who the righteous person is according to the Bible. So, this is a person who loves God, loves his neighbors, is not proud, does not slander anyone, does not envy, does not think evil, is always ready to help someone in need. Since Russia is a Christian country, it is precisely these ideals that we attribute to some people.
Solzhenitsyn in his story called the main character Matryona a righteous woman.
He saw in her the ideal of a person and wanted to show how bright society could be. For a writer, the meaning of life is to develop your soul, and not just to enjoy life. And everything that Solzhenitsyn so diligently wanted to convey, he reflected in Matryona.
The heroine has endured a lot. She worked actively without sparing herself. And in the end I was left with nothing. She was inspired by work. She didn’t even sit around in her old age. Every day she worked: she dug potatoes, picked berries in the forest, went for peat. And despite her hunched back, she smiled at everything she saw. She enjoyed every day.
Matryona was always ready to help.
She felt the misfortune of others and knew how to sympathize. Her compassion was not ostentatious, but sincere. The woman’s relatives did not help, and she was ready to give up everything she was doing if they needed help.
Matryona is called a righteous woman because she put everyone above herself. She worked hard, forgot about herself, and was ready to sacrifice the last. The reader may think that this is stupid, that she has deprived herself of a lot. But she was happy. I think we need to stop and think about what happiness really is.
Updated: 2017-05-16
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The main character Matryona was a righteous woman, as she lived according to moral values. To some extent, we can say that the woman lived according to the Bible. She didn’t wish harm on anyone, helped everyone, but never gained anything in her life. But she lived according to her conscience.
Matryona's fate was terrible. Previously, she loved one person, but life decreed otherwise and the woman married her lover’s younger brother. There was a war in the country, but this was not the worst thing for Matryona. The woman was destined for a terrible fate. She was left without a husband, and besides, she buried six children. She gave all her love to her adopted daughter Kira.
They said about Matryona that she was living the wrong life. She has been around for many years, but she still hasn’t gained anything. She just didn’t need material wealth; for her, the main thing was the soul. But none of his friends and relatives missed an opportunity to take advantage of Matryona’s help. She selflessly helped everyone and never refused anyone.
When she died, it seems to me that no one even pitied her. Everyone immediately rushed to discuss how she lived and who would get the house. Only Kira cried bitterly for her. All people thought about who would help them now. How will they live without Matryona? It feels like the whole village rested solely on this woman.
Solzhenitsyn came up with this image for a reason. He wanted to show that there are practically no such righteous people left. People live only to please themselves and think about profit. There are few people who, like Matryona, selflessly help others.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is known for boldly depicting contemporary reality in his works. The author believed that Russian society began to gradually lose its roots, its spirituality - and therefore created the image of the “last righteous woman” in the story.
This name did not appear immediately; at first the title sounded like this: “A village does not stand without a righteous man.” The author changes the title on the advice of a colleague, who felt that the first version immediately reveals the idea of the story without maintaining intrigue.
The main character is a kind village woman of advanced years who has been living alone for a long time. One day, a former prisoner comes to her yard and becomes a guest. Mostly, readers learn about the heroine through his stories and conclusions.
Is it possible to agree with Solzhenitsyn that Matryona is a righteous woman? Of course! Who is a righteous person? He is a pious and often blessed man. Matryona selflessly helps other people, does not wish harm on anyone, although she herself often falls into disgrace. Fellow villagers treat Matryona with disdain, laughing at her selflessness, considering it a sign of stupidity.
The main character is sixty years old and lives alone in a dilapidated house. The woman is reproached for not diligently maintaining cleanliness. But when should she do this? If at the first request she runs to help others: to dig someone else's garden. And keeping an empty house clean hardly seems necessary to her. The situation changes a little when guest Ignatyich appears. Now she gets up very early to cook food for him and cleans the house.
The heroine’s youth was not easy either. She hoped for a happy life with her beloved man, but chance decreed otherwise, bringing her together with another person. By agreeing to an unwanted marriage, Matryona has already doomed herself to suffering. In addition, after a while, her lover returned to the village. He could not understand and forgive the woman. And Matryona felt guilty before him and even took his daughter Kira into her upbringing.
All the heroine had was a goat, ficus trees and a lanky cat, which she took in out of pity. But neither poverty nor troubles embittered the woman. She retained a very important quality – humanism. She saw her purpose in helping people and did not take the money she so needed for her work. People turned to Matryona, but laughed at her behind her back. They considered the heroine’s selflessness to be dementia, because they themselves had long been mired in pettiness and selfishness.
The main character is an image of a righteous woman who lives helping people who despise her. And for her goodness she does not expect goodness in return. Because she is truly respectable.
The concept of “village” for A. Solzhenitsyn is a model (synonym) of folk life of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The existence of a national world, according to the author, is impossible without a “righteous person” - a person possessing the best traits of the people’s character. The absence of such a person will certainly entail the destruction of the centuries-old culture of the Russian village and the spiritual death of the nation. At the center of the narrative in the story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn "Matryonin's Dvor" the fate of the village woman Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva.
Matryona Vasilyevna is the same righteous man who is the embodiment of the spiritual principle in the national character. She personifies the best qualities of the Russian people, what the patriarchal way of life of the village is based on. Her life is built on harmony with the world around her, her home is a continuation of her soul, her character. Everything here is natural and organic, right down to the mice rustling behind the wallpaper. Everything that existed in Matryona’s house (a goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees, cockroaches) was part of her small family. Perhaps such a respectful attitude of the heroine towards all living things comes from the perception of man as part of nature, part of the vast world, which is also characteristic of the Russian national character.
Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of the Russian peasant woman. Her appearance is like an icon, her life is like the life of a saint. Her house is a cross-cutting symbolic image of the story - like the ark of the biblical righteous Noah, in which he is saved from the flood along with his family and pairs of all earthly animals - in order to continue the human race.
Matryona is a righteous woman. But her fellow villagers do not know about her hidden holiness; they consider the woman simply stupid, although it is she who preserves the highest features of Russian spirituality. Like Lukerye from Turgenev’s story “Living Relics,” Matryona did not complain about her life, she did not bother God, because he already knows what she needs. Matryona lived her entire life for others (the collective farm, the village women, Thaddeus). However, neither Matryona’s selflessness, nor kindness, nor hard work, nor patience find a response in the souls of people. The inhuman laws of modern civilization, formed under the influence of socio-historical cataclysms, having destroyed the moral foundations of patriarchal society, created a new, distorted concept of morality, in which there is no place for spiritual generosity, empathy, or elementary sympathy.
The author endowed the heroine with Orthodox faith in God. In the most difficult moments of her life, she turns to the Lord, but for this it is not at all necessary to pray: “Perhaps she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid of oppressing me.” Love and care for her neighbor, her “good mood” - all this attracted the author, helping to heal life’s wounds.
Matryona's tragedy is that her character completely lacked a practical perception of the world (in her entire life she was never able to acquire a household, and the once well-built house became dilapidated and aged). This facet of the Russian folk character, necessary for the existence of the nation, was embodied in the image of Thaddeus. However, without a spiritual beginning, without Matryona, Thaddeus’s practicality, under the influence of various socio-historical circumstances (war, revolution, collectivization), is transformed into absolute pragmatism, disastrous both for the person himself and for the people around him. The meaning of the hero’s life becomes an exaggerated thirst for profit and enrichment, leading to complete moral degradation of the hero. Thaddeus, even at Matryona’s funeral, “only came to stand at the coffins for a short time,” because he was preoccupied with saving “the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of Matryona’s sisters.”
But the most terrible thing is that Thaddeus “was not the only one in the village.” The main character of the story, the narrator Ignatich, states with regret that other residents also see the meaning of life in acquisitiveness, in the accumulation of property: “And losing it is considered shameful and stupid in front of people.” Matryona's fellow villagers, preoccupied with minor everyday problems, could not see the spiritual beauty of the heroine behind the outward unsightliness. Matryona has died, and strangers are already taking away her house and property, not realizing that with Matryona’s death something more important is leaving her life, something that cannot be divided and primitively assessed in everyday life. That is why it is the narrator, and not his fellow villagers, who realizes and feels Matryona’s righteousness. Fellow villagers have long forgotten even the very word “righteous”; they do not understand what it is and do not think about a righteous life.
