Original title: One Day of Saint John. The harsh everyday life of prisoners

In the summer of 1956, one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow along railway line A passenger leaves for 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 in her destiny special meaning, 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 younger brother- Efima. 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 new bride I found one for myself 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 without living 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.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Matrenin Dvor

This edition is true and final.

No lifetime publications can cancel it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

April 1968

At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down almost to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows and went out into the vestibule: they were repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?

No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.

Only the drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.

In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to go to the middle zone - without the heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most visceral Russia - if there was such a thing somewhere, it lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. They told me knowledgeable people, that there is no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m passing through in vain.

But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the …sky oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:

Tell me if you need mathematicians somewhere away from railway? I want to live there forever.

They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - everyone asks to go to the city all day, and for bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoye Pole. Just the name made my soul happy.

The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.

I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked, and typed in my order: “Peat product.”

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barracks, there was a stern sign: “Only board the train from the station side!” A nail was scratched on the boards: “And without tickets.” And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: “No tickets.” I appreciated the exact meaning of these additions later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, thereby raising his collective farm.

The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and houses from the fifties, with carvings on the facade and glassed-in verandas. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling piercingly, dragged trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunks wandering along the street - not without that, and stabbing each other with knives.

This is where the dream took me quiet corner Russia. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. There was such a wind there fresh breeze at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.

I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. In the morning, the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.

I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:

Drink, drink with all your heart. Are you a newcomer?

Where are you from? - I brightened up.

And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock there is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.

A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy Russia.

And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.

I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself did not have a place (she and her husband were raising her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; it was cramped and cramped.

So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.

Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. - Only her toilet is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.

Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated as a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Behind front door internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up into the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down into the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

It was built long ago and soundly, on big family, and now there lived a lonely woman of about sixty.

When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there at the entrance, covered with vague dark rags, so priceless in the life of a working man.

The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the remaining light and behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.

While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a black illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,

- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.

And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.

And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:

If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.

We agreed on the price and the peat that the school would bring.

I only found out later that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilyevna did not earn a ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid a pension. Her family didn't help her much. And on the collective farm she did not work for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in the accountant’s greasy book.

So I settled with Matryona Vasilievna. We didn't share rooms. Her bed was in the corner of the door by the stove, and I unfolded my cot by the window and, pushing Matryona’s favorite ficus trees away from the light, I placed another table by another window. There was electricity in the village - it was brought in from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers then wrote “Ilyich’s light bulbs,” and the men, their eyes wide, said: “Tsar Fire!”

Maybe to some from the village, who are richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem like a good-looking hut, 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’s heat out of it right away, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side.

Besides Matryona and me, the other people living in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.

The cat was not young, and most importantly, it was lanky. She was picked up by Matryona out of pity and took root. Although she walked on four legs, she had a strong limp: she was saving one leg because it was a bad leg. When the cat jumped from the stove to the floor, the sound of her touching the floor was not cat-soft, like everyone else’s, but a strong simultaneous blow of three legs: stupid! - such a strong blow that it took me a while to get used to it, I shuddered. It was she who put up three legs at once to protect the fourth.

But it wasn’t because there were mice in the hut that the lanky cat couldn’t cope with them: she jumped into the corner after them like lightning and carried them out in her teeth. And the mice were inaccessible to the cat due to the fact that someone once, in a good life, covered Matryona’s hut with corrugated greenish wallpaper, and not just in a layer, but in five layers. The wallpaper stuck to each other well, but in many places it came off the wall - and it looked like the inner skin of a hut. Between the logs of the hut and the wallpaper skins, the mice made passages for themselves and rustled impudently, running along them even under the ceiling. The cat angrily looked after their rustling sound, but could not reach it.

Sometimes the cat ate cockroaches, but they made her feel unwell. The only thing that the cockroaches respected was the line of the partition that separated the mouth of the Russian stove and the kitchenette from the clean hut. They did not crawl into a clean hut. But the kitchenette was swarming at night, and if late in the evening, having gone in to drink water, I lit a light bulb there, the entire floor, the large bench, and even the wall were almost completely brown and moving. I brought borax from the chemistry laboratory, and, mixing it with the dough, we poisoned them. There were fewer cockroaches, but Matryona was afraid to poison the cat along with them. We stopped adding poison, and the cockroaches multiplied again.

At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was working at the table, the rare, rapid rustling of mice under the wallpaper was covered by the continuous, unified, continuous, like the distant sound of the ocean, rustling of cockroaches behind the partition. But I got used to him, because there was nothing evil in him, there was no lie in him. Their rustling was their life.

And I got used to the rude poster beauty, who from the wall constantly handed me Belinsky, Panferov and a stack of other books, but was silent. I got used to everything that happened in Matryona’s hut.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. The Matrenin walkers were twenty-seven years old when they were bought at the general store. They always walked forward, and Matryona did not worry - as long as they did not lag behind, so as not to be late in the morning. She turned on the light bulb behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, heated the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all of its bellies were - this one dirty-white crooked horned goat), walked through the water and cooked in three cast iron pots: one cast iron pot for me , one for yourself, one for the goat. She chose the smallest potatoes from the underground for the goat, small ones for herself, and for me - with egg. Her sandy garden, which had not been fertilized since the pre-war years and was always planted with potatoes, potatoes and potatoes, did not produce large potatoes.

I hardly heard her morning chores. I slept for a long time, woke up in the late winter light and stretched, poking my head out from under the blanket and sheepskin coat. They, plus a camp padded jacket on my feet, and a bag stuffed with straw underneath, kept me warm even on those nights when the cold pushed from the north into our frail windows. Hearing a restrained noise behind the partition, I each time said measuredly:

Good morning, Matryona Vasilievna!

And the same kind words were always heard from behind the partition. They began with some kind of low, warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales:

Mmm-mm... you too!

And a little later:

And breakfast is in time for you.

She didn’t announce what for breakfast, but it was easy to guess: unhusked cardboard soup, or cardboard soup (that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley with battle - as the cheapest one, they fattened pigs and took them in bags). It was not always salted as it should, it often burned, and after eating it left a residue on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

But it wasn’t Matryona’s fault: there was no oil in the Peat Product, margarine was in great demand, and only combined fat was available. And the Russian stove, as I took a closer look, is inconvenient for cooking: cooking occurs hidden from the cook, the heat approaches the cast iron unevenly from different sides. But it must have come to our ancestors from the Stone Age because, once heated before dawn, it keeps warm food and drink for livestock, food and water for humans all day long. And sleep warm.

I obediently ate everything that was cooked for me, patiently putting it aside if I came across anything unusual: a hair, a piece of peat, a cockroach leg. I didn’t have the courage to reproach Matryona. In the end, she herself warned me: “If you don’t know how to cook, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it?”

“Thank you,” I said quite sincerely.

On what? On your own on good? - she disarmed me radiant smile. And, looking innocently with faded blue eyes, she asked: “Well, what can I prepare for something terrible?”

By the end it meant by the evening. I ate twice a day, just like at the front. What could I order for the terrible one? All of the same, cardboard or cardboard soup.

I put up with this because life taught me to find the meaning of everyday existence not in food. What was dearer to me was this smile on her round face, which, having finally earned enough money for a camera, I tried in vain to catch. Seeing the cold eye of the lens on herself, Matryona assumed an expression either tense or extremely stern.

Once I captured how she smiled at something, looking out the window onto the street.

That autumn Matryona had many grievances. A new pension law had just come out, and her neighbors encouraged her to seek a pension. She was lonely all around, but since she began to get very sick, she was released from the collective farm. There were a lot of injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she wasn’t at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and could only get it for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But my husband had been gone for twelve years, since the beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to obtain those certificates from different places about his stash and how much he received there. It was a hassle to get these certificates; and so that they write that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and certify that she lives alone and no one helps her; and what year is she? and then carry it all to social security; and reschedule, correcting what was done wrong; and still wear it. And find out whether they will give you a pension.

These efforts were made more difficult by the fact that the social security service from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council was ten kilometers to the west, and the village council was an hour’s walk to the north. They chased her from office to office for two months - now for a period, now for a comma. Each passage is a day. He goes to the village council, but the secretary is not there today, just like that, as happens in villages. Tomorrow, then, go again. Now there is a secretary, but he does not have a seal. The third day, go again. And go on the fourth day because they signed blindly on the wrong piece of paper; Matryona’s pieces of paper are all pinned together in one bundle.

They oppress me, Ignatich,” she complained to me after such fruitless passages. - I was concerned.

But her forehead did not remain darkened for long. I noticed: she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work. Immediately she either grabbed a shovel and dug up the cart. Or she would go for peat with a bag under her arm. And even with a wicker body - up to the berries in the distant forest. And not bowing to office desks, but forest bushes, and having broken her back with the burden, Matryona returned to the hut, already enlightened, happy with everything, with her kind smile.

Now I’ve got the tooth, Ignatich, I know where to get it,” she said about peat. - What a place, it’s just nice!

Yes, Matryona Vasilyevna, isn’t there enough peat for me? The car is intact.

Eww! your peat! so much more, and so much more - then, sometimes, it’s enough. Here, as winter swirls and fights against the windows, it doesn’t so much drown you as blows it out. In the summer we trained a lot of peat! Wouldn’t I have trained three cars now? So they get caught. Already one of our women is being dragged to court.

Yes, it was like that. The frightening breath of winter was already swirling - and hearts were aching. We stood around the forest, but there was nowhere to get a firebox. Excavators roared all around in the swamps, but the peat was not sold to residents, but only transported - to the bosses, and whoever was with the bosses, and by car - to teachers, doctors, and factory workers. There was no fuel provided - and there was no need to ask about it. The chairman of the collective farm walked around the village, looked into his eyes demandingly or dimly or innocently and talked about anything except fuel. Because he himself stocked up. And winter was not expected.

Well, they stole used to be a forest from the master, now they were pulling peat from the trust. The women gathered in groups of five or ten to be bolder. We went during the day. Over the summer, peat was dug up everywhere and piled up to dry. This is what’s good about peat, because once it’s mined, it can’t be taken away right away. It dries until the fall, or even before the snow, if the road doesn’t work or the trust gets tired. It was during this time that the women took him. At a time they carried away six peats in a bag if they were damp, ten peats if they were dry. One bag of this kind, sometimes brought three kilometers away (and it weighed two pounds), was enough for one fire. And there are two hundred days in winter. And you need to heat it: Russian in the morning, Dutch in the evening.

Why say both sexes! - Matryona was angry at someone invisible. - Since the horses are gone, so what you can’t secure on yourself is not in the house. My back never heals. In winter you carry the sled, in summer you carry the bundles, by God it’s true!

Women walked a day - more than once. IN good days Matryona brought six bags each. She piled my peat openly, hid hers under the bridges, and every evening she blocked the hole with a board.

Surely the enemies will guess,” she smiled, wiping sweat from her forehead, “otherwise they won’t find it in the world.”

What was the trust to do? He was not given the staff to place guards in all the swamps. It was probably necessary, having shown the abundant production in the reports, then to write it off - to crumbs, to the rains. Sometimes, in impulses, they assembled a patrol and caught women at the entrance to the village. The women threw their bags and ran away. Sometimes, based on a denunciation, they went from house to house with a search, drew up a report on illegal peat and threatened to take it to court. The women gave up carrying for a while, but winter was approaching and drove them out again - with sleds at night.

In general, looking closely at Matryona, I noticed that, in addition to cooking and housekeeping, every day she had some other significant task, she kept the logical order of these tasks in her head and, waking up in the morning, she always knew what her day was about today. will be busy. Besides peat, besides collecting old stumps turned up by a tractor in a swamp, besides lingonberries soaked in quarters for the winter (“Sharpen your teeth, Ignatich,” she treated me), besides digging potatoes, besides running around on pension business, she had to have somewhere else... then to get hay for his only dirty white goat.

Why don’t you keep cows, Matryona Vasilyevna?

Eh, Ignatich,” Matryona explained, standing in an unclean apron in the kitchen doorway and turning to my table. - I have enough milk from a goat. If you get a cow, it will eat me with my feet. Don’t mow near the canvas - they have their own owners, and there is no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and on the collective farm they don’t tell me - I’m not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and the collective farmers, down to the whitest flies, all go to the collective farm, and from under the snow - what kind of grass?... They used to boil with hay during low water, from Petrov to Ilyin. The herb was considered honey...

So, it was a great job for one goat to collect hay for Matryona. In the morning she took a bag and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the edges, along the road, along the islands in the swamp. Having filled the bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. A bag of grass made dried hay - a fork.

The new chairman, recently sent from the city, first of all cut off the vegetable gardens of all the disabled people. He left fifteen acres of sand to Matryona, and ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, for fifteen hundred square meters the collective farm sipped Matryona. When there weren’t enough hands, when the women refused very stubbornly, the chairman’s wife came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, decisive, short gray short coat and a menacing look, as if from a military woman.

She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona was in the way.

That’s right,” the chairman’s wife said separately. - Comrade Grigoriev? We will have to help the collective farm! We'll have to go take out the manure tomorrow!

Matryona's face formed an apologetic half-smile - as if she was ashamed of the chairman's wife, that she could not pay her for her work.

Well, then,” she drawled. - I'm sick, of course. And now I’m not attached to your case. - And then hastily corrected herself: - What time should I arrive?

And take your pitchforks! - the chairwoman instructed and left, rustling her hard skirt.

Wow! - Matryona blamed after. - And take your pitchforks! There are no shovels or pitchforks on the collective farm. And I live without a man, who will force me?...

And then I thought all evening:

What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post nor to the railing. You stand, leaning on a shovel, and wait for the factory whistle to ring at twelve. Moreover, women will start to settle scores, who got out and who didn’t get out. When we used to work on our own, there was no sound at all, just oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oink-ki, now lunch has arrived, now evening has come.

Still, in the morning she left with her pitchfork.

But not only the collective farm, but any distant relative or just a neighbor also came to Matryona in the evening and said:

Tomorrow, Matryona, you will come to help me. We'll dig up the potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her line of work, went to help her neighbor and, returning, still said without a shadow of envy:

Oh, Ignatich, and she has big potatoes! I dug in a hurry, I didn’t want to leave the site, by God I really did!

Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden was done without Matryona. The Talnovsky women clearly established that digging up your own garden with a shovel is harder and longer than taking a plow and harnessing six of them to plow six gardens on your own. That's why they called Matryona to help.

Well, did you pay her? - I had to ask later.

She doesn't take money. You can’t help but hide it for her.

Matryona also had a lot of fuss when it was her turn to feed the goat shepherds: one - a hefty, mute one, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This line lasted a month and a half of roses, but it drove Matryona into great expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, and bought sugar and butter, which she did not eat herself. It turns out that the housewives gave their best to each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

“Be afraid of the tailor and the shepherd,” she explained to me. - The whole village will praise you if something goes wrong with them.

And into this life, thick with worries, a severe illness still broke in from time to time, Matryona collapsed and lay flat for a day or two. She didn't complain, didn't moan, but didn't move much either. On days like these Masha, close girlfriend Matryona, from the time she was very young, came to care for the goat and light the stove. Matryona herself did not drink, did not eat, and did not ask for anything. Calling a doctor from the village medical center to your home was surprising in Talnov, somehow indecent in front of the neighbors - they say, a lady. They called me once, she arrived very angry, and told Matryona, after she had rested, to come to the first aid station herself. Matryona walked against her will, they took tests, sent her to the district hospital - and it all died out. It was also Matryona’s fault.

Things called to life. Soon Matryona began to get up, at first she moved slowly, and then again quickly.

“It’s you who haven’t seen me before, Ignatich,” she justified herself. - All the bags were mine, I didn’t count five pounds as a tizhel. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona! You'll break your back! The Divir did not come to me to put my end of the log on the front. Our military horse, Volchok, was healthy...

Why military?

And they took ours to the war, this wounded one - in return. And he got caught in some kind of verse. Once, out of fear, he carried the sleigh into the lake, the men jumped back, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped it. The horse was oatmeal. Our men loved to feed the horses. Which horses are oatmeal, they don’t even recognize them as tizhels.

But Matryona was by no means fearless. She was afraid of fire, afraid of lightning, and most of all, for some reason, of the train.

How can I go to Cherusti? The train will get out of Nechaevka, its big eyes will pop out, the rails will hum - it will make me feel hot, my knees will shake. By God it's true! - Matryona was surprised and shrugged her shoulders.

So, maybe because they don’t give tickets, Matryona Vasilyevna?

Yet by that winter, Matryona’s life had improved as never before. They finally began to pay her eighty rubles in pension. She received more than a hundred more from the school and from me.

Eww! Now Matryona doesn’t even need to die! - some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. - More money She, the old one, has nowhere to go.

What about a pension? - others objected. - The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, but tomorrow it will take away.

Matryona ordered new felt boots to be rolled up for herself. I bought a new padded jacket. And she put on a coat from a worn railway overcoat, which was given to her by a driver from Cherustei, the husband of her former pupil Kira. The village hunchback tailor put cotton wool under the cloth, and the result was such a nice coat, the likes of which Matryona had not sewn in six decades.

And in the middle of winter, Matryona sewed two hundred rubles into the lining of this coat for her funeral. Cheerful:

Manenko and I saw peace, Ignatich.

December passed, January passed, and her illness did not visit her for two months. More often, Matryona began to go to Masha’s in the evenings to sit and crack some sunflower seeds. She did not invite guests over in the evenings, respecting my activities. Only at baptism, returning from school, I found dancing in the hut and was introduced to Matryona’s three sisters, who called Matryona as the eldest - lyolka or nanny. Until that day, little had been heard in our hut about the sisters - were they afraid that Matryona would ask them for help?

Only one event or omen darkened this holiday for Matryona: she went five miles to the church for the blessing of water, put her pot between others, and when the blessing of water ended and the women rushed, jostling, to take it apart, Matryona did not make it among the first, and at the end - she was not there her bowler hat. And no other utensils were left in place of the pot. The pot disappeared, like an unclean spirit carried it away.

Babonki! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. -Did someone take someone else’s blessed water through a mishap? in a pot?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys called out, and there were boys there. Matryona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t have any.

It cannot be said, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even more likely she was a pagan; superstitions took over in her: that you can’t go into the garden to see Ivan Lenten - on next year there will be no harvest; that if a blizzard is blowing, it means that someone has hanged himself somewhere, and if you get your foot caught in a door, you should be a guest. As long as I lived with her, I never saw her pray, nor did she even cross herself once. And she started every business “with God!” and every time I say “God bless!” said when I was walking to school. Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid of oppressing me. There was a holy corner in a clean hut, and an icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant in the kitchenette. The oblivions stood dark, and during the all-night vigil and in the morning on holidays, Matryona lit a lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her wobbly cat. She was strangling mice...

Having escaped a little from her life, Matryona began to listen more attentively to my radio (I did not fail to set up a reconnaissance device for myself - that’s what Matryona called the outlet. My radio was no longer a scourge for me, because I could turn it off with my own hand at any moment; but, indeed, he came out of a remote hut for me - on reconnaissance). That year, it was customary to receive, see off, and drive around many cities, holding rallies, two or three foreign delegations a week. And every day the news was full of important messages about banquets, dinners and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned and sighed disapprovingly:

They drive and drive and run into something.

Hearing that new machines had been invented, Matryona grumbled from the kitchen:

Everything is new, new, they don’t want to work on the old ones, where are we going to put the old ones?

Back in that year, artificial Earth satellites were promised. Matryona shook her head from the stove:

Oh, oh, oh, they’ll change something, winter or summer.

Chaliapin performed Russian songs. Matryona stood and stood, listened and said decisively:

They sing wonderfully, not our way.

Why, Matryona Vasilyevna, listen!

I listened again. She pursed her lips:

But Matryona rewarded me. They once broadcast a concert from Glinka’s romances. And suddenly, after a heel of chamber romances, Matryona, holding her apron, came out from behind the partition, warmed up, with a veil of tears in her dim eyes:

But this is our way... - she whispered.

So Matryona got used to me, and I got used to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening classes, did not annoy me with any questions. She was so lacking in womanly curiosity, or was she so delicate, that she never asked me once: was I ever married? All the Talnovsk women pestered her to find out about me. She answered them:

If you need it, you ask. I know one thing - he is distant.

And when, not long after, I myself told her that I had spent a lot of time in prison, she just silently nodded her head, as if she had suspected it before.

And I also saw today’s Matryona, a lost old woman, and I also didn’t bother about her past, and I didn’t even suspect that there was anything to look for there.

I knew that Matryona got married even before the revolution, and straight into this hut, where we now lived with her, and straight to the stove (that is, neither her mother-in-law nor her older unmarried sister-in-law was alive, and from the first morning after her marriage, Matryona took up for grip). I knew that she had six children and one after another they all died very early, so that two did not live at once. Then there was some student Kira. But Matryona’s husband did not return from this war. There was no funeral either. Fellow villagers who were with him in the company said that he was either captured or died, but his body was not found. For eleven post-war years Matryona herself decided that he was not alive. And it’s good that I thought so. Even if he were alive now, he would be married somewhere in Brazil or Australia. Both the village of Talnovo and the Russian language are erased from his memory...

Once, coming home from school, I found a guest in our hut. A tall black old man, with his hat on his knees, was sitting on a chair that Matryona had placed for him in the middle of the room, next to the Dutch oven. His entire face was covered with thick black hair, almost untouched by gray hair: a thick, black mustache merged with his thick black beard, so that his mouth was barely visible; and continuous black whiskers, barely showing the ears, rose to the black hair hanging from the crown of the head; and wide black eyebrows were thrown towards each other like bridges. And only the forehead disappeared like a bald dome into the bald, spacious crown. The old man's entire appearance seemed to me to be full of knowledge and dignity. He sat upright, with his hands folded on his staff, the staff resting vertically on the floor - he sat in a position of patient waiting and, apparently, spoke little to Matryona, who was fiddling behind the partition.

When I arrived, he smoothly turned his majestic head towards me and suddenly called me:

Father!... I see you badly. My son is studying with you. Grigoriev Antoshka...

He might not have spoken further... With all my impulse to help this venerable old man, I knew in advance and rejected everything useless that the old man would say now. Grigoriev Antoshka was a round, ruddy boy from the 8th "G", who looked like a cat after pancakes. He came to school as if to relax, sat at his desk and smiled lazily. Moreover, he never prepared lessons at home. But, most importantly, fighting for that high percentage of academic performance for which the schools of our district, our region and neighboring regions were famous, he was transferred from year to year, and he clearly learned that, no matter how the teachers threatened, they would still transfer at the end of the year , and you don’t need to study for this. He just laughed at us. He was in the 8th grade, but did not know fractions and did not distinguish what kind of triangles there are. In the first quarters he was in the tenacious grip of my twos - and the same awaited him in the third quarter.

But to this half-blind old man, fit to be Antoshka’s grandfather, not his father, and who came to me to bow to me in humiliation, how could I say now that year after year the school deceived him, but I can’t deceive him any longer, otherwise I’ll ruin the whole class and turn into into a balabolka, and I will have to give a damn about all my work and my title?

And now I patiently explained to him that my son is very neglected, and he lies at school and at home, we need to check his diary more often and take a hard approach from both sides.

“It’s much cooler, father,” the guest assured me. - I’ve been beating him for a week now. And my hand is heavy.

In the conversation, I remembered that once Matryona herself for some reason interceded for Antoshka Grigoriev, but I did not ask what kind of relative he was to her, and then also refused. Matryona even now became a wordless petitioner at the door of the kitchenette. And when Thaddeus Mironovich left me with the message that he would come and find out, I asked:

I don’t understand, Matryona Vasilyevna, how is this Antoshka to you?

Divira is my son,” Matryona answered dryly and went off to milk the goat.

Disappointed, I realized that this black persistent old man - brother her husband, missing.

And the long evening passed - Matryona no longer touched on this conversation. Only late in the evening, when I forgot to think about the old man and was working in the silence of the hut to the rustle of cockroaches and the clicking of walkers, Matryona suddenly said from her dark corner:

I, Ignatich, once almost married him.

Apparently, all evening Matryona was thinking only about that.

She got up from the wretched rag bed and slowly came out to me, as if following her words. I leaned back and for the first time saw Matryona in a completely new way.

There was no overhead light in our large room, which was filled with ficus trees like a forest. From the table lamp the light fell all around only on my notebooks, and throughout the entire room, to eyes that looked up from the light, it seemed twilight with a pink tint. And Matryona emerged from it. And it seemed to me that her cheeks were not yellow, as always, but also with a hint of pink.

He was the first to woo me... before Efim... He was the eldest brother... I was nineteen, Thaddeus was twenty-three... They lived in this very house then. It was their house. Built by their father.

I involuntarily looked back. This old gray rotting house suddenly, through the faded green skin of the wallpaper, under which mice were running, appeared to me with young, not yet darkened, planed logs and a cheerful resinous smell.

And you…? And what?…

That summer... we went with him to sit in the grove,” she whispered. - There was a grove here, where the horse yard is now, they cut it down... I couldn’t get out, Ignatich. The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war.

She dropped it - and the blue, white and yellow July of 1914 flashed before me: a still peaceful sky, floating clouds and people boiling with ripe stubble. I imagined them side by side: a resin hero with a scythe across his back; her, rosy, hugging the sheaf. And - a song, a song under the sky, the kind that the village has long fallen behind in singing, and you can’t sing with the machinery.

He went to war and disappeared... For three years I hid and waited. And no news, and not a bone...

Tied with an old faded handkerchief, it looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp. round face Matryona - as if freed from wrinkles, from everyday careless attire - frightened, girlish, faced with a terrible choice.

Yes. Yes... I understand... The leaves flew around, the snow fell - and then melted. They plowed again, sowed again, reaped again. And again the leaves flew away, and again the snow fell. And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned upside down.

Their mother died - and Efim wooed me. Like, you wanted to go to our hut, so go to ours. Efim was a year younger than me. They say here: the smart one comes out after the Intercession, and the fool comes out after Petrov. They didn't have enough hands. I went... They got married on Peter's Day, and Thaddeus returned to Mikola in winter... from Hungarian captivity.

He never beat me,” she said about Efim. “He ran down the street at the men with his fists, but didn’t give a damn about me... That is, there was one time - I had a quarrel with my sister-in-law, he smashed a spoon on my forehead.” I jumped up from the table: “You should choke, drones!” And she went into the forest. Didn't touch it anymore.

It seems that Thaddeus had nothing to regret: the second Matryona also gave birth to six children for him (among them my Antoshka, the youngest, scraped) - and they all survived, but Matryona and Yefim did not have children: they did not live to see three months and sick with nothing, everyone died.

One daughter, Elena, was just born, they washed her alive, and then she died. So I didn’t have to wash the dead one... Just as my wedding was on Peter’s Day, so I buried my sixth child, Alexander, on Peter’s Day.

And the whole village decided that there was damage in Matryona.

The portion is in me! - Matryona nodded with conviction now. - They took me to a former nun for treatment, she made me cough - she was waiting for the portion to throw out of me like a frog. Well, I didn’t throw it away...

And the years passed, as the water floated... In '41, Thaddeus was not taken to the war because of blindness, but Efim was taken. And just like the older brother in the first war, the younger brother disappeared without a trace in the second. But this one didn't come back at all. The once noisy, but now deserted hut was rotting and aging - and the deserted Matryona was aging in it.

And she asked that second downtrodden Matryona - the womb of her snatch (or the little blood of Thaddeus?) - for their youngest girl, Kira.

Suffering from illnesses and near death, Matryona then declared her will: a separate log cabin of the upper room, located under a common connection with the hut, should be given as an inheritance to Kira after her death. She said nothing about the hut itself. Three more of her sisters were aiming to get this hut.

So that evening Matryona revealed herself to me completely. And, as it happens, the connection and meaning of her life, barely becoming visible to me, began to move in those same days. Kira arrived from Cherusti, old Thaddeus became worried: in Cherusti, in order to get and hold a piece of land, the young people had to build some kind of building. Matrenina's room was quite suitable for this. And there was nothing else to put in, there was nowhere in the forest to get it from. And not so much Kira herself, and not so much her husband, as for them, old Thaddeus set out to seize this plot in Cherusty.

And so he began to visit us often, came again and again, spoke instructively to Matryona and demanded that she give up the upper room now, during her lifetime. During these visits, he did not seem to me like that old man leaning on a staff, who was about to fall apart from a push or a rude word. Although hunched over with a sore lower back, he was still stately, having retained the rich, youthful blackness of his hair over sixty, he pressed on with fervor.

Matryona did not 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.

But those who insisted knew that her house could be broken even during her lifetime.

And Thaddeus and his sons and sons-in-law came one February morning and knocked on five axes, screamed and creaked as the boards were being torn off. Thaddeus’s own eyes sparkled busily. Despite the fact that his back was not completely straightened, he deftly climbed under the rafters and quickly fussed around below, shouting at his assistants. He and his father once built this hut as a boy; This room was built for him, the eldest son, so that he could settle here with his wife. And now he was furiously picking it apart, piece by piece, in order to take it away from someone else’s yard.

Having marked the crowns of the frame and the boards of the ceiling flooring with numbers, the room with the basement was dismantled, and the hut itself with shortened bridges was cut off with a temporary plank wall. They left the cracks in the wall, and everything showed that the breakers were not builders and did not expect Matryona to have to live here for a long time.

And while the men were breaking, the women were preparing moonshine for the day of loading: vodka would be too expensive. Kira brought a pound of sugar from the Moscow region, Matryona Vasilievna, under the cover of darkness, carried that sugar and bottles to the moonshiner.

The logs in front of the gate were taken out and stacked, the son-in-law driver went to Cherusti to pick up a tractor.

But on the same day a snowstorm began - a duel, in Matryona’s style. She caroused and circled for two days and covered the road with enormous snowdrifts. Then, as soon as they knew the way, a truck or two passed by - suddenly it became warmer, one day it cleared up all at once, there were damp fogs, streams gurgled through the snow, and the foot in the boot got stuck up to the top.

For two weeks the tractor couldn't handle the broken chamber! These two weeks Matryona walked as if lost. That’s why it was especially hard for her because her three sisters came, all unanimously cursed her as a fool for giving away the upper room, said that they didn’t want to see her anymore, and left.

And on those same days, a lanky cat wandered out of the yard - and disappeared. One to one. This also hurt Matryona.

Finally, the frozen road was covered with frost. A sunny day arrived, and my soul became happier. Matryona dreamed something good about that day. In the morning she found out that I wanted to take a photograph of someone at the old weaving mill (these still stood in two huts, and rough rugs were woven on them), and she smiled shyly:

Just wait, Ignatich, a couple of days, maybe I’ll send the upper room - I’ll lay down my camp, because I’m intact - and then you’ll take it off. By God it's true!

Apparently, she was attracted to portray herself in the old days. From red frosty sun The frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, glowed slightly pink, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection. Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.

Just before dusk, returning from school, I saw movement near our house. The large new tractor sleighs were already loaded with logs, but much still did not fit - both the family of grandfather Thaddeus and those invited to help were finishing up knocking down another homemade sleigh. Everyone worked like crazy, in that ferocity that people have when they smell big money or are expecting a big treat. They shouted at each other and argued.

The dispute was about how to transport the sleigh - separately or together. One son of Thaddeus, lame, and his son-in-law, a machinist, explained that it was impossible to wallpaper the sleigh right away, the tractor would not pull it. The tractor driver, a self-confident, fat-faced big fellow, wheezed that he knew better, that he was the driver and would carry the sleigh together. His calculation was clear: according to the agreement, the driver paid him for transporting the room, and not for the flights. There was no way he would have made two flights a night - twenty-five kilometers each and once back. And by morning he had to be with the tractor in the garage, from where he secretly took it for the left one.

Old man Thaddeus was impatient to take away the entire upper room today - and he nodded to his men to give in. The second, hastily knocked together, sleds were hooked up behind the strong first ones.

Matryona ran among the men, fussed and helped roll logs onto the sleigh. Then I noticed that she was wearing my padded jacket and had already smeared her sleeves on the icy mud of the logs, and I told her about it with displeasure. This padded jacket was a memory for me, it warmed me during difficult years.

So for the first time I became angry with Matryona Vasilievna.

Oh, oh, oh, poor little head! - she was puzzled. - After all, I picked up her begma, and forgot that it was yours. Sorry, Ignatich. - And she took it off and hung it up to dry.

The loading was over, and everyone who was working, about ten men, thundered past my table and ducked under the curtain into the kitchenette. From there, glasses clattered rather dully, sometimes a bottle clinked, the voices became louder, the boasting became more fervent. The tractor driver especially boasted. The heavy smell of moonshine reached me. But they didn’t drink for long—the darkness forced us to hurry. They began to leave. The tractor driver came out smug and with a cruel face. The son-in-law, the driver, the lame son of Thaddeus and one nephew accompanied the sleigh to Cherusti. The rest went home. Thaddeus, waving a stick, was catching up with someone, in a hurry to explain something. The lame son paused at my table to smoke and suddenly started talking about how much he loved Aunt Matryona, and that he had recently gotten married, and that his son had just been born. Then they shouted at him and he left. A tractor roared outside the window.

The last one to hurriedly jump out from behind the partition was Matryona. She shook her head anxiously after those who had left. I put on a padded jacket and threw on a scarf. At the door she told me:

And why couldn’t the two be matched? If one tractor fell ill, the other would pull it up. And now what will happen - God knows!...

And she ran away after everyone.

After drinking, arguing and walking, it became especially quiet in the abandoned hut, chilled by the frequent opening of the doors. It was already completely dark outside the windows. I also got into my padded jacket and sat down at the table. The tractor died down in the distance.

An hour passed, then another. And the third. Matryona did not return, but I was not surprised: after seeing off the sleigh, she must have gone to her Masha.

And another hour passed. And further. Not only darkness, but a kind of deep silence descended on the village. I couldn’t understand then why there was silence - it turned out that during the whole evening not a single train passed along the line half a mile away from us. My receiver was silent, and I noticed that the mice were busier than ever: they were running more and more impudently, more noisily under the wallpaper, scratching and squeaking.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” Solzhenitsyn

"One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" analysis of the work - theme, idea, genre, plot, composition, characters, issues and other issues are discussed in this article.

The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is a story about how a man from the people relates himself to a forcibly imposed reality and its ideas. It shows in a condensed form that camp life, which will be described in detail in other, major works of Solzhenitsyn - in the novel “The Gulag Archipelago” and “In the First Circle”. The story itself was written while working on the novel “In the First Circle”, in 1959.

The work represents a complete opposition to the regime. This is a cell of a large organism, a terrible and unforgiving organism of a large state, so cruel to its inhabitants.

In the story there are special measures of space and time. Camp is a special time that is almost motionless. The days in the camp roll by, but the deadline does not. A day is a unit of measurement. The days are like two drops of water, all the same monotony, thoughtless mechanicalness. Solzhenitsyn tries to fit the entire camp life into one day, and therefore he uses the smallest details in order to recreate the entire picture of life in the camp. In this regard, they often talk about a high degree of detail in Solzhenitsyn’s works, and especially in short prose - stories. Behind each fact lies a whole layer of camp reality. Each moment of the story is perceived as a frame of a cinematic film, taken separately and examined in detail, under a magnifying glass. “At five o’clock in the morning, as always, the rise struck - with a hammer on the rail at the headquarters barracks.” Ivan Denisovich overslept. I always got up when I woke up, but today I didn’t get up. He felt that he was sick. They take everyone out, line them up, everyone goes to the dining room. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s number is Sh-5ch. Everyone tries to be the first to enter the dining room: the thickest pour is poured first. After eating, they are lined up again and searched.

The abundance of details, as it seems at first glance, should burden the narrative. After all, there is almost no visual action in the story. But this, nevertheless, does not happen. The reader is not burdened by the narrative; on the contrary, his attention is riveted to the text, he intensely follows the course of events, real and occurring in the soul of one of the characters. Solzhenitsyn does not need to resort to any special techniques to achieve this effect. It's all about the material of the image itself. Heroes are not fictional characters, A real people. And these people are placed in conditions where they have to solve problems on which their lives and fate most directly depend. To modern man These tasks seem insignificant, and that is why the story leaves an even more eerie feeling. As V.V. Agenosov writes, “every little thing for the hero is literally a matter of life and death, a matter of survival or dying. Therefore, Shukhov (and with him every reader) sincerely rejoices at every particle found, every extra crumb of bread.”

There is one more time in the story - metaphysical, which is also present in other works of the writer. At this time there are other values. Here the center of the world is transferred to the consciousness of the prisoner.

In this regard, the topic of metaphysical understanding of a person in captivity is very important. Young Alyoshka teaches the no longer young Ivan Denisovich. By this time, all the Baptists were imprisoned, but not all the Orthodox. Solzhenitsyn introduces the topic of religious understanding of man. He is even grateful to prison for turning him towards spiritual life. But Solzhenitsyn more than once noticed that with this thought, millions of voices appeared in his mind, saying: “That’s why you say that because you survived.” These are the voices of those who laid down their lives in the Gulag, who did not live to see the moment of liberation, who did not see the sky without the ugly prison net. The bitterness of loss comes through in the story.

The category of time is also associated with individual words in the text of the story itself. For example, these are the first and last lines. At the very end of the story, he says that Ivan Denisovich’s day was a very successful day. But then he mournfully notes that “there were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three such days in his term from bell to bell.”

The space in the story is also interestingly presented. The reader does not know where the space of the camp begins and ends; it seems as if it has filled all of Russia. All those who found themselves behind the wall of the Gulag, somewhere far away, in an unattainable distant city, in a village.

The very space of the camp turns out to be hostile for prisoners. They are afraid of open areas and strive to cross them as quickly as possible, to hide from the eyes of the guards. Animal instincts awaken in a person. Such a description completely contradicts the canons of Russian classics of the 19th century century. The heroes of that literature feel comfortable and at ease only in freedom; they love space and distance, which are associated with the breadth of their soul and character. Solzhenitsyn's heroes flee from space. They feel much safer in cramped cells, in stuffy barracks, where they can at least allow themselves to breathe more freely.

The main character of the story is a man from the people - Ivan Denisovich, a peasant, a front-line soldier. And this was done deliberately. Solzhenitsyn believed that it is people from the people who ultimately make history, move the country forward, and bear the guarantee of true morality. Through the fate of one person - Ivan Denisovich - the author shows the fate of millions who were innocently arrested and convicted. Shukhov lived in the village, which he remembers fondly here in the camp. At the front, he, like thousands of others, fought with full dedication, not sparing himself. After being wounded, he went back to the front. Then German captivity, from where he miraculously managed to escape. And this is why he is now in the camp. He was accused of espionage. And what exactly the task the Germans gave him, neither Ivan Denisovich himself nor the investigator knew: “What task - neither Shukhov himself, nor the investigator could come up with. So they just left it as a task.” At the time of the story, Shukhov had been in the camps for about eight years. But this is one of the few who did not lose their dignity in the grueling conditions of the camp. In many ways, his habits as a peasant, an honest worker, a peasant help him. He does not allow himself to humiliate himself in front of other people, lick plates, or inform on others. His age-old habit of respecting bread is visible even now: he stores bread in a clean rag, takes off his hat before eating. He knows the value of work, loves it, and is not lazy. He is sure: “he who knows two things with his hands can also handle ten.” In his hands the matter is resolved, the frost is forgotten. He treats his tools with care and carefully monitors the laying of the wall, even in this forced work. Ivan Denisovich's day is a day of hard work. Ivan Denisovich knew how to do carpentry and could work as a mechanic. Even in forced labor, he showed diligence and built a beautiful, even wall. And those who did not know how to do anything carried sand in wheelbarrows.

Solzhenitsyn's hero has largely become the subject of malicious accusations among critics. According to them, this integral national character should be almost ideal. Solzhenitsyn portrays an ordinary person. So, Ivan Denisovich professes camp wisdom and laws: “Groan and rot. But if you resist, you will break.” This was received negatively by critics. Particular bewilderment was caused by the actions of Ivan Denisovich, when, for example, he took away a tray from a weak prisoner and deceived the cook. It is important to note here that he does this not for personal benefit, but for his entire team.

There is another phrase in the text that caused a wave of discontent and extreme surprise among critics: “I didn’t know whether he wanted it or not.” This thought was misinterpreted as Shukhov’s loss of firmness and inner core. However, this phrase echoes the idea that prison awakens spiritual life. Ivan Denisovich already has life values. Prison or freedom will not change them, he will not give it up. And there is no captivity, no prison that could enslave a soul, deprive it of freedom, self-expression, life.

Ivan Denisovich’s value system is especially visible when comparing him with other characters imbued with camp laws.

Thus, in the story Solzhenitsyn recreates the main features of that era when the people were doomed to incredible torment and hardship. The history of this phenomenon does not actually begin in 1937, when the so-called violations of the norms of state and party life began, but much earlier, from the very beginning of the existence of the totalitarian regime in Russia. Thus, the story presents a cluster of the fate of millions of Soviet people who were forced to pay for honest and devoted service through years of humiliation, torment, and camps.

Plan

1. Memoirs of Ivan Denisovich about how and why he ended up in a concentration camp. Memories of German captivity, about war.
2. The main character's memories of the village, of the peaceful pre-war era.
3. Description of camp life.
4. A successful day in the camp life of Ivan Denisovich.