What kind of things and why did Matryona Vasilievna appear? Matrenin House characteristics of the image of Grigorieva Matryona Vasilievna

“In the summer of 1953, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - just to Russia.” These lines open Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matrenin’s Dvor”, an amazing fusion of document and high literary prose. The manuscript, however, indicated 1956, but, on the advice of Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn changed the date for reasons of censorship, moved the action to the time Khrushchev's thaw. The story is largely autobiographical. After his release from the camp, Solzhenitsyn came to central Russia to work as a teacher, where he met the future heroine of the story. V. Astafiev called the story “the pinnacle of Russian short fiction,” he believed that all modern “ village prose" left "Matrenina Dvor".

The story is based on an incident that reveals the character of the main character. Through tragic event- the death of Matryona - the author comes to a deep understanding of her personality. Only after death “the image of Matryona floated before me, as I did not understand her, even living side by side with her.” The writer does not give a detailed, specific portrait description of the heroine. Only one portrait detail is constantly emphasized - Matryona’s “radiant”, “kind”, “apologetic” smile. Already in the very tone of the phrase, the selection of “colors” one can feel author's attitude to Matryona: “From red frosty sun The frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, glowed slightly pink, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection.” And then - straight author's description: “Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.” Matryona's speech is smooth, melodious, beginning with "some kind of low warm purring, like a grandmother's in fairy tales."

All the world Matryona in her darkish hut with a large Russian stove is a continuation of herself, a part of her life. Everything here is organic and natural: the cockroaches rustling behind the partition, the rustling of which was reminiscent of the “distant sound of the ocean,” and the languid cat, picked up by Matryona out of pity, and the mice, which on the tragic night of Matryona’s death darted about behind the wallpaper as if Matryona herself was “invisibly rushed about and said goodbye to her hut here.” Through artistic details the image is revealed main character. These are, for example, Matryona’s favorite ficuses, which “filled the hostess’s loneliness with a silent but lively crowd,” the ficuses that Matryona once saved from a fire, without thinking about the meager goods she had acquired. The frightened crowd froze the ficus trees in that terrible night, and then were taken out of the hut forever.

Matryona had to endure a lot of grief and injustice in her lifetime: broken love, the death of six children, the loss of her husband in the war, hellish work in the village that is not feasible for every man, severe illness-illness, bitter resentment towards the collective farm, which squeezed all the strength out of her, and then wrote it off as unnecessary, leaving him without a pension and support. The tragedy of a rural Russian woman is concentrated in the fate of one Matryona. But Matryona did not get angry at this world, she retained a good mood, a feeling of pity for others, and a radiant smile still brightens her face. “She had a surefire way to regain her good spirits - work.” For a quarter of a century on the collective farm, she had broken her back quite a bit: she dug, planted, carried huge sacks and logs, she was one of those who, according to Nekrasov, “stops a galloping horse.” And all this “not for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.” Nevertheless, she was not entitled to a pension, because, as Solzhenitsyn writes with bitter irony, she did not work in a factory - on a collective farm. And in her old age, Matryona knew no rest: she either grabbed a shovel, then went with sacks into the swamp to cut grass for her dirty white goat, or went with other women to secretly steal peat from the collective farm for winter kindling.

“Matryona was angry with someone invisible,” but she did not hold a grudge against the collective farm. Moreover, according to the very first decree, she went to help the collective farm, without receiving, as before, anything for her work. And she did not refuse help to any distant relative or neighbor, without a shadow of envy,” later telling the guest about the neighbor’s rich potato harvest. Work was never a burden to her; “Matryona never spared either her labor or her goods.” And everyone around Matryonin shamelessly took advantage of Matryonin’s selflessness. Sisters, sister-in-law, adopted daughter Kira, the only friend in the village, Thaddeus - these are those who were closest to Matryona, who should have understood and appreciated this man. And what? She lived poorly, wretchedly, alone - a “lost old woman”, exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, apparently fearing that Matryona would ask them for help. Everyone in chorus condemned Matryona, that she was funny and stupid, that she worked for others for free, that she was always meddling in men’s affairs (after all, she also got hit by a train because she wanted to help the men, pull the sleigh with them through the crossing). True, after Matryona’s death, the sisters immediately flocked in, “seized the hut, the goat and the stove, locked her chest, and gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat.” And her half-century-old friend is the only one who sincerely loved Matryona in this village, nevertheless, when leaving, she did not forget to take Matryona’s knitted blouse with her so that the sisters would not get it. The sister-in-law, who recognized Matryona’s simplicity and cordiality, spoke about this “with contemptuous regret.” Everyone mercilessly took advantage of Matryona’s kindness and simplicity - and unanimously condemned her for it.

Matryona was lonely inside big society and, worst of all, inside the small - your village, family, friends. This means that what is wrong is a society that suppresses the best.

Fate threw the hero-storyteller to a station with a strange name for Russian places - Peat Product. Already in the title itself there is a wild violation, a distortion of primordial Russian traditions. From individual parts The holistic appearance of the Russian village is taking shape. Gradually, the interests of a living, concrete person were replaced by government interests. They no longer baked bread or sold anything edible - the table became meager and poor. Collective farmers “everything goes to the collective farm, right down to the white flies,” and they had to gather hay for their cows from under the snow. The new chairman began by cutting off the gardens of all disabled people, and huge areas of land lay empty behind fences. Long years Matryona lived without a ruble, and when they advised her to seek a pension, she was no longer happy: they chased her around the offices with papers for several months - “now for a period, now for a comma.” Neighbors who were more experienced in life summed up her pension ordeals: “The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, but tomorrow it will take away.”

There has been a distortion, a displacement of the most important thing in life - moral principles and concepts. Greed, envy of each other and bitterness drive people. When they were dismantling Matryona’s room, “everyone worked like mad, in that ferocity that people have when they smell big money or are expecting a big treat. They were shouting at each other and arguing."

The picture leaves a painful impression: “Leaves flew around, snow fell - and then melted. They plowed again, sowed again, reaped again. And again the leaves flew off, and again the snow fell..." "And the years passed, as the water floated...", so Matryona passed away, "killed dear person" In Matryona's house last time All relatives and friends gathered. And it turned out that Matryona was leaving this life, not understood by anyone, not mourned by anyone as a human being. Even from folk rituals When saying goodbye to a person, the real feeling, the human element, has gone; they unpleasantly amaze with their “coldly thought-out” orderliness. At the funeral dinner they drank a lot, they said loudly, “not about Matryona at all.” According to custom, they sang “Eternal Memory,” but “the voices were hoarse, different, the faces were drunk, and no one in this eternal memory I no longer invested feelings.”

The most terrible figure in the story is Thaddeus, an “insatiable old man” who has lost basic human pity and is overwhelmed by a thirst for profit. Thaddeus was completely different in his youth - it is no coincidence that Matryona loved him. And in the fact that by old age he has changed beyond recognition, there is a certain share of Matryona’s own fault. And she felt it, forgave him a lot. After all, she didn’t wait for Thaddeus from the front, she buried him in her thoughts ahead of time - and Thaddeus became angry with the whole world, driving out all his resentment and anger on the wife he found as the second Matryona. At Matryona's funeral, he was gloomy with one heavy thought - to save the upper room from the fire and from Matryona's sisters. “Having sorted through the Zhalnovskys,” the author writes, “I realized that Thaddeus was not the only one in the village.” But Matryona - like that - was completely alone.

Matryona's death is inevitable and natural, it is a certain milestone, a severance of moral ties, the beginning of disintegration, the death of the moral foundations that Matryona strengthened with her life. The original (author's) title of the story - “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” - carried the main ideological load. Tvardovsky proposed a neutral name - “Matrenin’s Dvor”.

“Matrenin’s Dvor” is a symbol of a special structure of life, a special world. Matryona, the only one in the village, lives in her own world: she arranges her life with work, honesty, kindness and patience, preserving her soul and inner freedom. Popularly wise, sensible, able to appreciate goodness and beauty, smiling and sociable, Matryona managed to resist evil and violence, preserving her “court”. Matryona dies and this world collapses. 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.

The ending of the story is bitter: “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.”

Righteous Matryona - moral ideal writer. According to Solzhenitsyn, “the meaning of earthly existence is not in prosperity, but in the development of the soul.” Solzhenitsyn continues one of the main traditions of Russian literature, according to which the writer sees his purpose in preaching truth, spirituality, in the need to pose “eternal” questions and seek answers to them.

A lot of hardships, labors and worries fell on the shoulders of the heroine of A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s story Matryona [see. full text, summary and analysis of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor”]. Her life in youth and old age was a continuous toil. “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 dirty book.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Matrenin Dvor. Read by the author

But, unlike her fellow villagers, Matryona kept living soul, remained forever unselfish, kind, delicate, and preserved her former girlish love until old age.

Not rich in words, her story about her love for Thaddeus is full of poetry, reminiscent of ancient songs and laments. After all, this is a kind of lament for the past, for failed happiness. “For three years I hid, waited. And not a word, not a bone..."; “Oh, oh, oh, poor little head!..” she laments.

The narrator seems to echo her. In his speech, the intonations of folk poetry begin to sound: “And the years passed as the water floated...” In his imagination, folklore images: “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, which the village has long since stopped singing, and you can’t sing with the machinery.”

Mourning his heroine, he calls her “tulleless,” unconsciously repeating the lament of Irina Fedosova:

There is no one to take refuge with,
There is no one to lurch to in victory...

Matryona's fate is truly tragic. But not only because she lost a loved one, lived with an unloved one, buried six children in infancy; not because she is tormented by a black illness, that she struggles in poverty, that she is destined to die under a train. Her immense loneliness is tragic. No one understood, loved, or pitied her, because among the black crows she remained white.

She lived her whole life in her native village, “misunderstood and abandoned,” “stranger,” “funny.” The neighbors condemn her for what the author seems to be especially valuable about her. They speak about Matryona’s cordiality and simplicity “with contemptuous regret.” They reproach her for being “not careful.” “I didn’t chase after acquisitions... I didn’t struggle to buy things and then cherish them more than my life.” And the author reflects: "...good The language strangely calls our property ours, the people's or mine. And losing it is considered shameful and stupid in front of people.” But Solzhenitsyn’s heroine did not take care of good, but kindness. And she was incredibly rich. But no one noticed or appreciated the spiritual values ​​that she possessed.

The description of Matryona’s hut takes on a deep meaning in the story. Lonely among people, she is surrounded at home by close “creatures”. It is they who make up the special poetic world, in tune with her soul. She is deeply attached to this world, and he lives his independent, simple and mysterious life.

So, about ficuses it is said: “They filled the loneliness of the housewife with a silent but living crowd.” Ficus trees are compared to a forest and seem to constitute a certain part of the natural world. Even insects are spoken of in the spirit of contrasting them with everything that is outside the hut: “Besides Matryona and me, there were also living in the hut: a cat, mice and cockroaches /... / At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was studying 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.”

The theme of the righteous in literature is not new, and yet in Solzhenitsyn’s story it is revealed especially truthfully. The main characters of “Matryonin Dvor” are simple peasants, whose lives are not like a fairy tale; the description of village life can shock modern reader. What is worth mentioning in the work is the picture of the division of property of a living and healthy woman: her relatives are rushing her to part with earthly goods, as if hinting that she has lingered in this world. The main character is a person of enormous spiritual strength: the death of children, a failed marriage, lonely old age - none of this broke the woman. Analysis of the story allows us to see a truthful picture of the life and worldview of simple village people, far from morality and beauty.

Characteristics of the characters “Matryonin Dvor”

Main characters

Minor characters

In the work “Matryonin’s Dvor” the characters reveal their nature in full force exactly at crucial moment when misfortune happens. Even the narrator Ignatyich begins to truly understand Matrona only after her death. Solzhenitsyn's characterization of heroes consists of a mass small parts, actions and accidentally spoken words. This is the peculiarity of the writer, he is a skilled craftsman artistic word. In the list of the author’s works about the Russian soul, this story is perhaps the most piercing and vivid.

Work test

The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” was written by Solzhenitsyn in 1959. The first title of the story is “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man” (Russian proverb). Final version the names were invented by Tvardovsky, who was at that time the editor of the magazine " New world", where the story was published in No. 1 for 1963. At the insistence of the editors, the beginning of the story was changed and the events were attributed not to 1956, but to 1953, that is, to the pre-Khrushchev era. This is a bow to Khrushchev, thanks to whose permission Solzhenitsyn’s first story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962) was published.

The image of the narrator in the work “Matryonin’s Dvor” is autobiographical. After Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated; he actually lived in the village of Miltsevo (Talnovo in the story) and rented a corner from Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova (Grigorieva in the story). Solzhenitsyn very accurately conveyed not only the details of the life of the prototype Marena, but also the features of life and even the local dialect of the village.

Literary direction and genre

Solzhenitsyn developed the Tolstoyan tradition of Russian prose in realistic direction. The story combines features artistic essay, the story itself and elements of life. The life of the Russian village is reflected so objectively and diversely that the work approaches the genre of “novel-type story.” In this genre, the character of the hero is shown not only at a turning point in his development, but also the history of the character and the stages of his formation are illuminated. The fate of the hero reflects the fate of the entire era and country (as Solzhenitsyn says, the earth).

Issues

At the center of the story moral issues. Are many worth it? human lives a captured plot or a decision dictated by human greed not to make a second trip with a tractor? Material values among the people are valued higher than the person himself. Thaddeus's son and his once beloved woman died, his son-in-law is threatened with prison, and his daughter is inconsolable. But the hero is thinking about how to save the logs that the workers did not have time to burn at the crossing.

Mystical motives are at the center of the story. This is the motive of the unrecognized righteous man and the problem of curse on things touched by people with unclean hands pursuing selfish goals. So Thaddeus undertook to demolish Matryonin’s upper room, thereby making it cursed.

Plot and composition

The story "Matryonin's Dvor" has a time frame. In one paragraph, the author talks about how at one of the crossings and 25 years after a certain event, trains slow down. That is, the frame dates back to the early 80s, the rest of the story is an explanation of what happened at the crossing in 1956, the year of the Khrushchev Thaw, when “something began to move.”

The hero-narrator finds the place of his teaching in an almost mystical way, having heard a special Russian dialect at the bazaar and settling in “kondovaya Russia”, in the village of Talnovo.

The plot centers on the life of Matryona. The narrator learns about her fate from herself (she talks about how Thaddeus, who disappeared in the first war, wooed her, and how she married his brother, who disappeared in the second). But the hero finds out more about the silent Matryona from his own observations and from others.

The story describes in detail Matryona's hut, located in a picturesque place near the lake. The hut plays in the life and death of Matryona important role. To understand the meaning of the story, you need to imagine a traditional Russian hut. Matryona's hut was divided into two halves: the actual living hut with a Russian stove and the upper room (it was built for the eldest son in order to separate him when he got married). It is this upper room that Thaddeus dismantles in order to build a hut for Matryona’s niece and own daughter Kira. The hut in the story is animated. The wallpaper that has fallen off the wall is called its inner skin.

The ficus trees in the tubs are also endowed with living features, reminding the narrator of a silent but living crowd.

The development of action in the story is a static state of harmonious coexistence between the narrator and Matryona, who “do not find the meaning of everyday existence in food.” The climax of the story is the moment of destruction of the upper room, and the work ends with the main idea and bitter omen.

Heroes of the story

The hero-narrator, whom Matryona calls Ignatich, makes it clear from the first lines that he came from prison. He is looking for a teaching job in the wilderness, in the Russian outback. Only the third village satisfies him. Both the first and the second turn out to be corrupted by civilization. Solzhenitsyn makes it clear to the reader that he condemns the attitude of Soviet bureaucrats towards people. The narrator despises the authorities who do not grant Matryona a pension, who force her to work on the collective farm for sticks, who not only do not provide peat for the fire, but also forbid asking about it. He instantly decides not to extradite Matryona, who brewed moonshine, and hides her crime, for which she faces prison.

Having experienced and seen a lot, the narrator, embodying the author’s point of view, acquires the right to judge everything that he observes in the village of Talnovo - a miniature embodiment of Russia.

Matryona is the main character of the story. The author says about her: “Those people have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.” At the moment of meeting, Matryona’s face is yellow, and her eyes are clouded with illness.

To survive, Matryona grows small potatoes, secretly brings forbidden peat from the forest (up to 6 bags a day) and secretly mows hay for her goat.

Matryona lacked womanly curiosity, she was delicate, and did not annoy her with questions. Today's Matryona is a lost old woman. The author knows about her that she got married before the revolution, that she had 6 children, but they all died quickly, “so two didn’t live at once.” Matryona's husband did not return from the war, but disappeared without a trace. The hero suspected that he had new family somewhere abroad.

Matryona had a quality that distinguished her from the rest of the village residents: she selflessly helped everyone, even the collective farm, from which she was expelled due to illness. There is a lot of mysticism in her image. In her youth, she could lift bags of any weight, stopped a galloping horse, had a presentiment of her death, being afraid of steam locomotives. Another omen of her death is a cauldron with holy water that disappeared to God knows where at Epiphany.

Matryona's death seems to be an accident. But why are the mice running around like crazy on the night of her death? The narrator suggests that 30 years later the threat of Matryona’s brother-in-law Thaddeus struck, who threatened to chop Matryona and his own brother, who married her.

After death, Matryona's holiness is revealed. The mourners notice that she, completely crushed by the tractor, has only her right hand left to pray to God. And the narrator draws attention to her face, which is more alive than dead.

Fellow villagers speak of Matryona with disdain, not understanding her selflessness. Her sister-in-law considers her unscrupulous, not careful, not inclined to accumulate goods; Matryona did not seek her own benefit and helped others for free. Even Matryonina’s warmth and simplicity were despised by her fellow villagers.

Only after her death did the narrator understand that Matryona, “not chasing after things”, indifferent to food and clothing, is the basis, the core of all of Russia. On such a righteous person stands the village, the city and the country (“the whole land is ours”). For the sake of one righteous person, as in the Bible, God can spare the earth and save it from fire.

Artistic originality

Matryona appears before the hero as fairy creature, similar to Baba Yaga, who reluctantly gets off the stove to feed the passing prince. She, like a fairytale grandmother, has animal helpers. Shortly before Matryona’s death, the lanky cat leaves the house; the mice, anticipating the death of the old woman, make a particularly rustling noise. But cockroaches are indifferent to the fate of the hostess. Following Matryona, her favorite ficus trees, like a crowd, die: they are of no practical value and are taken out into the cold after Matryona’s death.

IN Central Russia. Thanks to new trends, a recent prisoner is now not refused to become school teachers in the Vladimir village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). Solzhenitsyn settles in the hut of a local resident, Matryona Vasilievna, a woman of about sixty who is often ill. Matryona has neither a husband nor children. Her loneliness is brightened up only by the ficus trees planted throughout the house and a languid cat picked out of pity. (See Description of Matryona's house.)

With warm, lyrical sympathy, A.I. Solzhenitsyn describes the difficult life of Matryona. For many years she has not earned a single ruble. On the collective farm, Matryona works “for the sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.” The law that came out after Stalin’s death finally gives her the right to seek a pension, but not for herself, but for the loss of her husband, who went missing at the front. To do this, you need to collect a bunch of certificates, and then take them many times to social services and the village council, 10-20 kilometers away. Matryona's hut is full of mice and cockroaches that cannot be removed. The only livestock she keeps is a goat, and feeds mainly on “kartovya” (potatoes) no larger than chicken egg: a sandy, unfertilized garden does not produce it larger. But even in such a need, Matryona remains a bright person, With radiant smile. Her work helps her to maintain her good spirits - trips to the forest for peat (with a two-pound sack on her shoulder for three kilometers), cutting hay for the goat, and chores around the house. Due to old age and illness, Matryona has already been released from the collective farm, but the formidable wife of the chairman every now and then orders her to help at work for free. Matryona easily agrees to help her neighbors in their gardens without money. Having received a pension of 80 rubles from the state, she buys herself new felt boots and a coat from a worn railway overcoat - and believes that her life has noticeably improved.

“Matrenin Dvor” - the house of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova in the village of Miltsevo Vladimir region, the setting of the story by A. I. Solzhenitsyn

Soon Solzhenitsyn will learn the story of Matryona’s marriage. In her youth, she was going to marry her neighbor Thaddeus. However, in 1914 he was taken to the German war - and he disappeared into obscurity for three years. Without waiting for news from the groom, in the belief that he was dead, Matryona went to marry Thaddeus’s brother, Efim. But a few months later, Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. In his hearts, he threatened to chop Matryona and Efim with an ax, then he cooled down and took another Matryona for himself, from neighboring village. They lived next door to her. Thaddeus was known in Talnovo as a domineering, stingy man. He constantly beat his wife, although he had six children from her. Matryona and Yefim also had six, but none of them lived for more than three months. Efim, having left for another war in 1941, did not return from it. Friendly with Thaddeus’s wife, Matryona begged her youngest daughter, Kira, raised her for ten years as if she were her own, and shortly before Solzhenitsyn’s appearance in Talnovo, she married her to a locomotive driver in the village of Cherusti. Matryona told Alexander Isaevich the story about her two suitors herself, worrying like a young woman.

Kira and her husband had to get a plot of land in Cherusty, and for this they had to quickly erect some kind of building. In the winter, Old Thaddeus suggested moving the upper room attached to Matryona’s house there. Matryona was already going to bequeath this room to Kira (and her three sisters were aiming for the house). Under the persistent persuasion of the greedy Thaddeus, Matryona, after two sleepless nights, agreed during her lifetime, breaking part of the roof of the house, to dismantle the upper room and transport it to Cherusti. In front of the hostess and Solzhenitsyn, Thaddeus and his sons and sons-in-law came to Matryona’s yard, clattered with axes, creaked with the boards being torn off, and dismantled the upper room into logs. Matryona's three sisters, having learned how she succumbed to Thaddeus's persuasion, unanimously called her a fool.

Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova - the prototype of the main character of the story

A tractor was brought from Cherusti. The logs from the upper room were loaded onto two sleighs. The fat-faced tractor driver, in order not to make an extra trip, announced that he would pull two sleighs at once - it was better for him in terms of money. The disinterested Matryona herself, fussing, helped load the logs. Already in the dark, the tractor with difficulty pulled a heavy load from Matryona's yard. The restless worker did not stay at home either - she ran away with everyone to help along the way.

She was no longer destined to return alive... At a railway crossing, the cable of an overloaded tractor broke. The tractor driver and Thaddeus’s son rushed to get along with him, and Matryona was carried there with them. At this time, two coupled locomotives approached the crossing, backwards and without turning on the lights. Suddenly flying in, they smashed to death all three who were busy at the cable, mutilated the tractor, and fell off the rails themselves. A fast train with a thousand passengers approaching the crossing almost crashed.

At dawn, everything that was left of Matryona was brought from the crossing on a sled under a dirty bag thrown over it. The body had no legs, no half torso, no left arm. But the face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead. One woman crossed herself and said:

“The Lord left her her right hand.” There will be a prayer to God...

The village began to gather for the funeral. Female relatives wailed over the coffin, but self-interest was evident in their words. And it was not hidden that Matryona’s sisters and her husband’s relatives were preparing for a fight for the deceased’s inheritance, for her an old house. Only Thaddeus’s wife and pupil Kira wept sincerely. Thaddeus himself, who had lost his once beloved woman and son in that disaster, was clearly only thinking about how to save those scattered in the crash. railway upper room logs. Asking for permission to return them, he kept rushing from the coffins to the station and village authorities.

A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). October 1956

On Sunday Matryona and son Thaddeus were buried. The wake has passed. In the next few days, Thaddeus pulled out a barn and a fence from his mother’s sisters, which he and his sons immediately dismantled and transported on a sled. Alexander Isaevich moved in with one of Matryona’s sisters-in-law, who often and always spoke with contemptuous regret about her cordiality, simplicity, about how “stupid she was, she helped strangers for free,” “she didn’t chase after money and didn’t even keep a pig.” For Solzhenitsyn, it was precisely from these disparaging words that he emerged new image Matryona, as he did not understand her, even living with her side by side. This non-covetous woman, a stranger to her sisters, funny to her sisters-in-law, who had not accumulated property before her death, buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, pitied a lanky cat, and once at night during a fire she rushed to save not a hut, but her beloved ficus trees - and there is that very righteous man, without which, according to the proverb, the village cannot stand.