What did the stove mean to Matryona? Read an essay on the topic Home - a haven of the soul in the story Matryonin Dvor, Solzhenitsyn for free
Home is a haven for the soul
Home is a word close to every person. It has many meanings, because home can be considered the place where you were born and raised, native village, the city and the whole country. A house is not necessarily a building with four walls, a foundation and a roof, it is a whole universe that can fill the soul. It is no coincidence that Alexander Solzhenitsyn called one of his most famous stories"Matryonin's yard" He wanted to give a detailed description not only of the house main character, but also everything that was connected with it.
The story takes place in the 1950s during Khrushchev's thaw. The people lived poorly and were mainly engaged in farming. In the villages they ate what they grew themselves, pensions for the elderly were meager, and other payments too. Matryona Vasilievna lived in Talnovo. Many years ago she lost her husband, who, according to her, was a very good and respectable family man. But she did not receive payment for the loss of a breadwinner, since she could not prove anything. He went missing in action during the war.
At first, the pension was also not issued, since there were no official documents about her work experience on the collective farm. Then they finally allocated eighty rubles, and after a mathematics teacher, the narrator in fact, moved in with her, the school began to pay her another hundred rubles for the room. And Matryona suddenly had relatives, new friends, and advisers. She herself had little interest in material goods. She was more interested in what was in her heart. Yes, and during the war she learned to enjoy simple things.
The house in which she lived was old and neglected. She was already too old to look after him alone. As Ignatich describes, it was lined with tubs and pots of ficus trees, which, according to the owner, had positive energy. The wallpaper had long since peeled away from the walls, forming unsightly slits in which cockroaches and mice lived. The Russian stove gave the house a special coziness. It was possible not only to keep food warm on it, but also to sleep. Matryona herself was so delicate and good-natured that she never dared to disturb a guest with unnecessary questions or prolonged presence.
She even told her life story with caution, for fear of boring her. She did not have children, so she gave all her unspent love to her niece Kira. She was the daughter of her husband’s older brother, whom Matryona almost married in her youth. When Thaddeus got married, his wife gave him six children, but Efim and Matryona never had a single child survive. In the village they even said that she had been jinxed. As a result, she adopted Kira, who became like her own. When Kira got married and moved to another village, she promised her her house as an inheritance.
However, the girl’s father did not even wait for Matryona’s death and insisted that she give her log house to the young people, since they were given land plot. The poor woman did not object. She was so ingenuous and simple that she personally gave away her only treasure acquired in her entire life. If we do not take into account the material side, it should be noted that the woman lived in this house for more than one decade. This was her outlet, in other words, the refuge of her soul.
At the end of the story, we learn about the tragic, at the same time absurd death of the heroine. She died at a railroad crossing, helping Thaddeus and his sons take her house from her. In the eyes of the narrator, Matryona is a righteous woman. Villages, cities and countries rely on people like them. It is not for nothing that people have used the expression since ancient times: “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” Due to the fact that the story is autobiographical, we understand that thanks to this kind and sympathetic woman, the narrator, and therefore the author, was able to relax a little in the Russian outback after for long years camps and at the same time restore strength.
/ / / Matryona’s House and its role in Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryona’s Dvor”
In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's story, the house is a real character in the work.
Much attention is paid to it appearance. It was made well, designed to big family. Only over time the wood chips have rotted, the gates have become askew, and the logs have turned gray. The gate was locked, but it could easily be opened by simply sticking your hand through. The yard was not covered with a roof. But much of the house was under one roof.
The hut was run by an old, lonely woman of 60 years old.
The interior decoration of the room was no different from the outside and even more pointed to poverty and destitution. It was a little dark in the hut. The mirror was so dim that it was simply impossible to look into it. For beauty's sake, two bright posters hung on the wall: one about the book trade, the other about the harvest. There was no radio in the house. The hostess could not afford such luxury.
The tenant, a mathematics teacher, lived with Matryona Vasilyevna in the same room. They didn't share it. The mistress’s bed stood by the stove, and Ignatyich’s cot was by the window. On the windows of the hut there were countless tubs with ficus trees - Matryona Vasilievna’s hobby. There was electricity in the village. They took him to the old woman's house. True, most often the overhead light was not turned on, but only the table lamp was turned on, from which a dim glow emanated.
Maybe to some people Matryona’s hut did not seem so suitable for living, but it provided excellent protection from autumn and winter weather. The roof did not leak from the rain. And the heat from the stove did not blow out immediately, but only closer to the morning.
In addition to the owner and the tenant, a cat, mice and cockroaches lived in the house. The walls of the hut were once covered with green wallpaper, in several layers. In many places they have long since moved away. Between them and the logs, the mice made passages for themselves and, not at all embarrassed or afraid, ran along the walls all the way to the ceiling.
Cockroaches were found only in the kitchen; they did not go into the room itself. But if you turn on the light in the kitchen at night, they swarmed everywhere: on the bench, on the floor, on the walls.
Why does the house suddenly become the real hero of the story? The thing is that once Matryona Vasilyevna ordered, after her death, to give the house as an inheritance to her adopted daughter Kira, who currently lived with her husband in a neighboring village.
But Thaddeus ordered the hut to be demolished earlier. And no matter how the old woman worried or was tormented by forebodings, the job was done. They took down all the pots with ficus trees, which Matryona Vasilievna loved so much that during the fire she saved not herself and the hut, but them. We hung a towel over an old, worn-out mirror. Bright posters were removed from the walls. And they took the log house to Kira. Such cruel treatment of the house brought a lot of trouble; three people died during transportation, including Matryona Vasilievna herself.
The house, like its owner, in the story “ Matrenin Dvor"becomes a real victim for the sake of self-interest and human heartlessness.
At the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes 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 Vladimir oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that personnel they no longer sat 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, do you need mathematicians? Somewhere away from the 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 - after all, everyone is asking to go to the city, and 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 stamped on 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, raising his collective farm and receiving a Hero of Socialist Labor for himself.
The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous, poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses from the fifties. 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 shrilly, 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 drunk people wandering down the street 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 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 turned out 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 had no place (she and her husband brought up her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; everywhere it was cramped and crowded.
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. “But her latrine 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 to look like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the frame 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 the internal steps rose to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up to upper room– a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.
It had been built long ago and soundly, for a large family, but now lived a lonely woman of about sixty.
When I entered the hut, it was lying on the Russian stove, right there at the entrance, covered with an indefinite dark rag, 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 rest of the light, and also 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 bad 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.
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 fate 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 across railway on the sleigh is part of his own hut, bequeathed to Kira. 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.
Grigorieva Matryona Vasilievna- a peasant woman, a single woman of sixty years old, released from the collective farm due to illness. The story documents the life of Matrena Timofeevna Zakharova, a resident of the village of Miltsevo (near Solzhenitsyn’s Talnovo) in the Kurlovsky district. Vladimir region. Original title“A village is not worth without a righteous man” was changed at the suggestion of Tvardovsky, who believed that it revealed the meaning too straightforwardly central image and the whole story. M., according to her fellow villagers, “didn’t chase after money,” dressed haphazardly, “helped strangers for free.”
The house is old, in the corner of the door by the stove is Matryona’s bed, the best part of the hut near the window is lined with stools and benches, on which tubs and pots with her favorite ficus trees are her main wealth. Among the living creatures - a lanky old cat, which M. took pity on and picked up on the street, a dirty white goat with crooked horns, mice and cockroaches.
M. got married even before the revolution, because “their mother died... they didn’t have enough hands.” She married Efim the younger, and loved the eldest, Thaddeus, but he went to war and disappeared. She waited for him for three years - “no news, not a bone.” On Peter's Day they got married to Efim, and Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity to Mikola in the winter and almost chopped them both with an ax. She gave birth to six children, but they “didn’t survive” - they didn’t live to see three months. During World War II, Efim disappeared and M. was left alone. For eleven post-war years(the action takes place in 1956) M. decided that he was no longer alive. Thaddeus also had six children, all were alive, and M. took in the youngest girl, Kira, and raised her.
M. did not receive a pension. She was ill, but was not considered disabled; she worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century “by the sticks.” True, later they began to pay her eighty rubles, and she received more than a hundred more from the school and the resident teacher. She didn’t start anything “good”, didn’t rejoice at the chance to get a lodger, didn’t complain about illness, although she was sick twice a month. But she unquestioningly went to work when the chairman’s wife came running for her, or when a neighbor asked her to help dig potatoes - M. never refused anyone and never took money from anyone, for which they considered her stupid. “She was always interfering in men’s affairs. And a horse once almost knocked her into an ice hole in the lake,” and finally, when they took away her room, they could have done without her - no, “Matryona got carried away between the tractor and the sleigh.” That is, she was always ready to help another, ready to neglect herself, to give her last. So she gave the upper room to her pupil Kira, which means she will have to tear down the house and halve it - an impossible, wild act, from the owner’s point of view. And she even rushed to help transport it.
She got up at four or five o’clock, had plenty of things to do until the evening, had a plan in advance of what to do, but no matter how tired she was, she was always friendly.
M. was characterized by innate delicacy - she was afraid to burden herself and therefore, when she was sick, she did not complain, did not moan, and was embarrassed to call a doctor from the village first-aid post. She believed in God, but not earnestly, although she began every business - “With God!” While rescuing Thaddeus's property, which was stuck on a sleigh at a railway crossing, M. was hit by a train and died. Its absence on this earth affects immediately: who will now go sixth to harness the plow? Who should I contact for help?
Against the backdrop of M.'s death, the characters of her greedy sisters, Thaddeus - her former lover, her friend Masha, and everyone who takes part in the division of her poor belongings - appear. There is a cry over the coffin, which turns into “politics”, into a dialogue between contenders for Matrenino’s “property”, of which there is only a dirty white goat, a lanky cat and ficus trees. Matrenin's guest, observing all this, remembering the living M., suddenly clearly understands that all these people, including him, lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous man without whom “the village would not stand.”
