Matryona's phrases from the story Matryona's Dvor. Essay “Characteristics of the image of Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva
Analyze this passage. Think about what character traits and inner world Are the Matryonas revealed in the work Matrenin Dvor?
The above fragment reveals the best features of the heroine’s nature: her patience, kindness, independence, mental fortitude, hard work.
Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona was accustomed to relying only on herself; she worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, however, being sick, she never registered for disability and did not obtain a pension “for her husband.” But, despite all the hardships and adversities, she did not lose her spiritual sensitivity and desire to live according to her conscience. A.I. Solzhenitsyn manages to create this image with the help of various artistic means. The heroine’s appearance may be inconspicuous, but an inner light emanates from her soul. The author manages to convey this with the help of the epithets “enlightened”, “with a kind smile”. One gets the impression that Matryona is a holy person who lives exclusively according to the laws of morality.
An important means of creating the image of Matryona is also speech characteristic. The author saturates the heroine’s remarks with dialect words (for example, “letos”) and vernacular (“tepericha”, “skolischa”). In general, these lexical means give Matryona’s speech figurativeness, poetry, and expressiveness. The words “duel”, “kartov”, “lyubota”, sounding from the lips of a simple Russian woman, acquire special meaning. Such word creation testifies to the heroine’s talent, her closeness to folklore traditions, to people's life.
Matryona is a real hard worker. Her whole life is filled with troubles and labors. The heroine does not sit idle for a minute, despite senile infirmity and illness. She finds solace in work: digging potatoes, picking berries. And thereby regains his good mood. The author's description of Matryona includes verbs with the meaning of movement (“walked,” “returned,” “digged”).
The writer in this story denotes the confrontation between the individual and the state: his heroine, trying to defend her rights, faces insurmountable bureaucratic barriers. According to the author, this state is indifferent to the fate common man. Talking about how the heroine achieves her pension, the author uses the technique of syntactic parallelism in the narrative: “go again,” “the third day go again,” “the fourth day go because...” So the writer once again emphasizes the heroine’s perseverance and perseverance in achieving her “ righteous" goal. The peculiarities of Matryona’s speech are also conveyed using incomplete sentences, inversions. These syntactic devices help the author to show emotionality, spontaneity village woman.
Matryona reminds us of the heroines N.A. Nekrasova. Let us remember Matryona Timofeevna from the poem “Who Lives Well in Russia.” Heroine A.I. Solzhenitsyn is similar to her in her pure peasant soul. This is an honest, fair, but poor, unhappy woman; a man of a selfless soul, absolutely unrequited, humble; righteous woman, without whom, according to A.I. Solzhenitsyn, “a village is not worth it.” So multifaceted amazing image The writer manages to create a Russian peasant woman using various artistic means.
Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva - central character story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn “ Matrenin Dvor" We learn her story from the perspective of the narrator, Ignatyich, who, after 10 years in the camps, accidentally came to the small village of Talnovo and became Matryona’s guest.
Poor hut and good-natured elderly woman, although plagued by illnesses, her owner immediately took a liking to Ignatyich.
Matryona is a typical Russian peasant woman who lived difficult life. She is about 60 years old, she is lonely and lives very modestly, having worked hard all her life, she has never accumulated any goods. And even though her hut was large and was built under big family, but very poor - for 25 years of work on the collective farm, she was not even entitled to a pension, because she worked not for money, but for “sticks” of workdays. During her life, the old woman earned enough to earn five such pensions, but due to bureaucratic confusion she remained completely destitute.
And for last years the woman began to suffer from some kind of illness, which completely deprived her of strength. Sick and tired, Ignatyich sees her for the first time:
“...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...”
Regularly suffering from attacks, Matryona still does not go to the paramedic - some kind of innate delicacy and shyness does not allow her to complain and be a burden, even for the village doctor.
But neither illness, nor great need, nor loneliness made her callous. Amazing all-forgiving kindness and humanity are reflected even in her appearance:
“...Those people always have good faces, who are at peace with their conscience...” the simple-minded face was kind and bright, and the smile was lively.
IN native village Matryona was treated with misunderstanding and even disdain. How can you understand a person who rushes to help everyone around him, but doesn’t take a penny for it?! But such was Matryona’s soul. Selfless help became a meaning for her, and work became a way to forget all the hardships, a cure for adversity that always put her on her feet.
"...But her forehead did not remain clouded for long. I noticed: she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work. Immediately she either grabbed a shovel and dug the chard. Or, with a bag under her arm, she went for peat. Otherwise, with a wicker body - up to the berries in the distant forest...".
Having learned about her unfortunate fate, Ignatyich was more amazed not at her childish kindness and bright naivety, but at the callousness and disgust of those around her. The wretchedness of her housing and inability to earn money irritated them, but, nevertheless, no one neglected her selflessness and constant desire to be useful.
The unhappy woman knew neither love, nor family, nor simple female happiness. Having married, as fate would have it, an unloved man, she ultimately realized that he had never loved her either. She gave birth to and buried six children who were not even three months old. And after the war I was left completely alone. But nothing could break her, and she remained pure and generous. But do people really need this? The world rests on the righteous, but the world refuses them.
So, wanting to do a good deed, Matryona sacrifices part own home, dismantled to build a home for a stranger, which ultimately leads her to an absurd death, but not to the understanding and compassion of those around her. So true beauty her soul, her greatness kind heart remain noticeable only to her modest guest Ignatyich.
"...We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Not the city. Not our whole land..."
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.”
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 history of the creation of Solzhenitsyn’s work “Matryonin’s Dvor”
In 1962 in the magazine " New world“The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, which made Solzhenitsyn’s name known throughout the country and far beyond its borders. A year later, in the same magazine, Solzhenitsyn published several stories, including “Matrenin’s Dvor.” The publications stopped there. None of the writer’s works were allowed to be published in the USSR. And in 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Initially, the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” was called “A village is not worth it without the righteous.” But, on the advice of A. Tvardovsky, in order to avoid censorship obstacles, the name was changed. For the same reasons, the year of action in the story from 1956 was replaced by the author with 1953. “Matrenin’s Dvor,” as the author himself noted, “is completely autobiographical and reliable.” All notes to the story report on the prototype of the heroine - Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova from the village of Miltsovo, Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region. The narrator, like the author himself, teaches in a Ryazan village, living with the heroine of the story, and the very middle name of the narrator - Ignatich - is consonant with the patronymic of A. Solzhenitsyn - Isaevich. The story, written in 1956, tells about the life of a Russian village in the fifties.
Critics praised the story. The essence of Solzhenitsyn’s work was noted by A. Tvardovsky: “Why does the fate of an old peasant woman, told on a few pages, represent such a thing for us? big interest? This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. And yet her spiritual world is endowed with such qualities that we talk to her as if we were talking to Anna Karenina.” Having read these words in " Literary newspaper“, Solzhenitsyn immediately wrote to Tvardovsky: “Needless to say, the paragraph of your speech relating to Matryona means a lot to me. You pointed to the very essence - to a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism was always scouring the surface, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and the neighboring ones.”
The first title of the story “A village is not worth it without the righteous” contained deep meaning: the Russian village is based on people whose way of life is based on the universal human values of kindness, labor, sympathy, and help. Since a righteous person is called, firstly, a person who lives in accordance with religious rules; secondly, a person who does not sin in any way against the rules of morality (rules defining morals, behavior, spiritual and mental qualities, necessary for a person in society). The second name - "Matrenin's Dvor" - slightly changed the angle of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the Matryona yard. On a larger scale of the village, they are blurred; the people surrounding the heroine are often different from her. By titling the story “Matrenin’s Dvor,” Solzhenitsyn focused readers’ attention on amazing world Russian woman.
Kind, genre, creative method of the analyzed work
Solzhenitsyn once noted that he rarely turned to the short story genre, for “artistic pleasure”: “In small form You can fit a lot, and it is a great pleasure for an artist to work on a small form. Because in a small form you can hone the edges with great pleasure for yourself.” In the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” all facets are honed with brilliance, and encountering the story becomes, in turn, a great pleasure for the reader. The story is usually based on an incident that reveals the character of the main character.
There were two points of view in literary criticism regarding the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. One of them presented Solzhenitsyn’s story as a phenomenon of “village prose.” V. Astafiev, calling “Matrenin’s Dvor” “the pinnacle of Russian short stories,” believed that our “ village prose” came out of this story. Somewhat later, this idea was developed in literary criticism.
At the same time, the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” was associated with the original genre of “monumental story” that emerged in the second half of the 1950s. An example of this genre is M. Sholokhov’s story “The Fate of a Man.”
In the 1960s, the genre features of the “monumental story” are recognized in “Matryona’s Court” by A. Solzhenitsyn, “Mother of Man” by V. Zakrutkin, “In the Light of Day” by E. Kazakevich. The main difference of this genre is the depiction of a simple person who is the custodian of universal human values. Moreover, the image of a common man is given in sublime tones, and the story itself is focused on high genre. Thus, in the story “The Fate of Man” the features of an epic are visible. And in “Matryona’s Dvor” the focus is on the lives of saints. Before us is the life of Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva, a righteous woman and great martyr of the era of “total collectivization” and a tragic experiment over an entire country. Matryona was portrayed by the author as a saint (“Only she had fewer sins than a lame-legged cat”).
Subject of the work
The theme of the story is a description of the life of a patriarchal Russian village, which reflects how thriving selfishness and rapacity are disfiguring Russia and “destroying connections and meaning.” The writer raises a short story serious problems Russian village of the early 50s. (her life, customs and morals, the relationship between power and the human worker). The author repeatedly emphasizes that the state only needs working hands, and not the person himself: “She was lonely all around, and since she began to get sick, she was released from the collective farm.” A person, according to the author, should mind his own business. So Matryona finds the meaning of life in work, she is angry at the unscrupulous attitude of others to the work.
An analysis of the work shows that the problems raised in it are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the heroine’s Christian-Orthodox worldview. Using the example of the fate of a village woman, show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly reveal the measure of humanity in each person. But Matryona dies and this world collapses: her house is torn apart log by log, her modest belongings are greedily divided. And there is no one to protect Matryona’s yard, no one even thinks that with Matryona’s departure something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, is leaving life. “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Not a city. Neither the whole land is ours.” The last phrases expand the boundaries of Matryonya’s courtyard (as the heroine’s personal world) to the scale of humanity.
The main characters of the work
The main character of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva. Matryona is a lonely, destitute peasant woman with a generous and selfless soul. She lost her husband in the war, buried six of her own, and raised other people’s children. Matryona gave her pupil the most precious thing in her life - a house: “... she didn’t feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, like neither her labor nor her goods...”.
The heroine suffered many hardships in life, but did not lose the ability to empathize with others' joy and sorrow. She is selfless: she sincerely rejoices at someone else’s good harvest, although she herself never has one in the sand. Matryona’s entire wealth consists of a dirty white goat, a lame cat and large flowers in tubs.
Matryona is the concentration of the best features national character: shy, understands the “education” of the narrator, respects him for it. The author appreciates in Matryona her delicacy, lack of annoying curiosity about the life of another person, and hard work. She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get it for her husband, that is, for the breadwinner. As a result, she never achieved a pension. Life was extremely difficult. She obtained grass for the goat, peat for warmth, collected old stumps torn up by a tractor, soaked lingonberries for the winter, grew potatoes, helping those around her to survive.
Analysis of the work says that the image of Matryona and individual parts in the story are symbolic in nature. Solzhenitsyn's Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of a Russian woman. As noted in critical literature, the appearance of the heroine is like an icon, and her life is like the lives of saints. Her house symbolizes the ark of the biblical Noah, in which he escapes from global flood. Matryona's death symbolizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world in which she lived.
The heroine lives according to the laws of Christianity, although her actions are not always clear to others. Therefore, the attitude towards it is different. Matryona is surrounded by her sisters, sister-in-law, adopted daughter Kira, and the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated it. She lived poorly, squalidly, alone - a “lost old woman”, exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost never showed up at her house; they all condemned Matryona in unison, saying that she was funny and stupid, that she had been working for others for free all her life. Everyone mercilessly took advantage of Matryona’s kindness and simplicity - and unanimously judged her for it. Among the people around her great sympathy The author treats his heroine; both her son Thaddeus and her pupil Kira love her.
The image of Matryona is contrasted in the story with the image of the cruel and greedy Thaddeus, who seeks to get Matryona’s house during her lifetime.
Matryona's courtyard is one of key images story. The description of the yard, the house is detailed, with a lot of details, devoid of bright colors Matryona lives “in the wilderness.” It is important for the author to emphasize the inseparability of a house and a person: if the house is destroyed, its owner will also die. This unity is already stated in the title of the story. For Matryona, the hut is filled with a special spirit and light; a woman’s life is connected with the “life” of the house. Therefore, for a long time she did not agree to demolish the hut.
Plot and composition
The story consists of three parts. In the first part we're talking about about how fate threw the hero-storyteller to a station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoprodukt. Former prisoner and now school teacher, eager to find peace in some remote and quiet corner Russia, finds shelter and warmth in the house of the elderly Matryona, who has experienced life. “Perhaps to some from the village, who are richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem good-natured, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good: it had not yet leaked from the rains and the cold winds did not blow the stove heat out of it right away, only in the morning , especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side. Besides Matryona and me, the other people living in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.” They find it right away mutual language. Next to Matryona, the hero calms down his soul.
In the second part of the story, Matryona recalls her youth, the terrible ordeal that befell her. Her fiancé Thaddeus went missing in the First World War. Wooed her younger brother missing husband, Efim, left alone after death with his youngest children in his arms. Matryona felt sorry for Efim and married someone she didn’t love. And here, after three years of absence, Thaddeus himself unexpectedly returned, whom Matryona continued to love. Hard life did not harden Matryona's heart. Caring for her daily bread, she walked her way to the end. And even death overtook a woman in labor worries. Matryona dies while helping Thaddeus and his sons drag 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.
In the third part, the tenant learns about the death of the owner of the house. Description of the funeral and wake was shown true attitude to Matryona people close to her. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of obligation than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property. And Thaddeus doesn’t even come to the wake.
Artistic features of the analyzed story
The artistic world in the story is built linearly - in accordance with the heroine’s life story. In the first part of the work, the entire narrative about Matryona is given through the perception of the author, a man who has endured a lot in his life, who dreamed of “getting lost and lost in the very interior of Russia.” The narrator evaluates her life from the outside, compares it with her surroundings, and becomes an authoritative witness of righteousness. In the second part, the heroine talks about herself. The combination of lyrical and epic pages, the coupling of episodes according to the principle of emotional contrast allows the author to change the rhythm of the narrative and its tone. This is the way the author goes to recreate a multi-layered picture of life. Already the first pages of the story serve as a convincing example. It opens with an opening story about a tragedy at a railway siding. We will learn the details of this tragedy at the end of the story.
Solzhenitsyn in his work does not give a detailed, specific description of the heroine. Only one portrait detail is constantly emphasized by the author - Matryona’s “radiant”, “kind”, “apologetic” smile. Nevertheless, by the end of the story the reader imagines the appearance of the heroine. Already in the very 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 it’s straight author's description: “Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.” Even after the terrible death of the heroine, her “face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.”
Incarnated in Matryona folk character, which primarily manifests itself in her speech. Expressiveness and bright individuality are given to her language by the abundance of colloquial, dialectal vocabulary (prispeyu, kuzhotkamu, letota, molonya). Her manner of speech, the way she pronounces her words, is also deeply folkish: “They began with some kind of low, warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” “Matryonin’s Dvor” minimally includes the landscape; he pays more attention to the interior, which appears not on its own, but in a lively interweaving with the “residents” and with sounds - from the rustling of mice and cockroaches to the state of ficus trees and a lanky cat. Every detail here characterizes not only peasant life, Matryonin's yard, but also the narrator. The narrator's voice reveals a psychologist, a moralist, even a poet in him - in the way he observes Matryona, her neighbors and relatives, and how he evaluates them and her. The poetic feeling is manifested in the author’s emotions: “Only she had fewer sins than a cat...”; “But Matryona rewarded me...” The lyrical pathos is especially obvious at the very end of the story, where even the syntactic structure changes, including paragraphs, turning the speech into blank verse:
“The Veems lived next to her / and did not understand / that she was the very righteous person / without whom, according to the proverb, / the village would not stand. /Neither the city./Nor our whole land.”
The writer was looking for a new word. An example of this is his convincing articles on language in Literaturnaya Gazeta, his fantastic commitment to Dahl (researchers note that Solzhenitsyn borrowed approximately 40% of the vocabulary in the story from Dahl’s dictionary), and his inventiveness in vocabulary. In the story "Matrenin's Dvor" Solzhenitsyn came to the language of preaching.
Meaning of the work
“There are such born angels,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in the article “Repentance and Self-Restraint,” as if characterizing Matryona, “they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry, without drowning in it at all, even if their feet touch its surface? Each of us has met such people, there are not ten or a hundred of them in Russia, these are righteous people, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), took advantage of their goodness, good moments They answered them in kind, they disposed, and immediately plunged again into our doomed depths.”
What is the essence of Matryona's righteousness? In life, not by lies, we will now say in the words of the writer himself, spoken much later. In creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of rural collective farm life in the 50s. Matryona's righteousness lies in her ability to preserve her humanity even in such inaccessible conditions. As N.S. Leskov wrote, righteousness is the ability to live “without lying, without being deceitful, without condemning one’s neighbor and without condemning a biased enemy.”
The story was called “brilliant,” “a truly brilliant work.” Reviews about it noted that among Solzhenitsyn’s stories it stands out for its strict artistry, integrity of poetic expression, and consistency of artistic taste.
Story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrenin's Dvor" - for all times. It is especially relevant today, when questions moral values And life priorities are acute in modern Russian society.
Point of view
Anna Akhmatova
When his big work came out (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”), I said: all 200 million should read this. And when I read “Matryona’s Dvor”, I cried, and I rarely cry.
V. Surganov
In the end, it is not so much the appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona that evokes an internal rebuff in us, but rather the author’s frank admiration for the beggarly selflessness and the no less frank desire to exalt and contrast it with the rapacity of the owner nesting in the people around her, close to her.
(From the book “The Word Makes Its Way.”
Collection of articles and documents about A.I. Solzhenitsyn.
1962-1974. - M.: Russian way, 1978.)
This is interesting
On August 20, 1956, Solzhenitsyn went to his place of work. There were many names such as “Peat Product” in the Vladimir region. Peat product (the local youth called it “Tyr-pyr”) was a railway station 180 kilometers and a four-hour drive from Moscow along the Kazan road. The school was located in the nearby village of Mezinovsky, and Solzhenitsyn had a chance to live two kilometers from the school - in the Meshchera village of Miltsevo.
Only three years will pass, and Solzhenitsyn will write a story that will immortalize these places: a station with a crude name, a village with a tiny market, a landlady’s house Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova and Matryona herself, the righteous woman and sufferer. The photograph of the corner of the hut, where the guest puts a cot and, pushing aside the owner's ficus trees, arranges a table with a lamp, will go around the whole world.
The teaching staff of Mezinovka numbered about fifty members that year and significantly influenced the life of the village. There were four schools here: primary, seven-year, secondary and evening schools for working youth. Solzhenitsyn received a referral to high school— it was in an old one-story building. The school year began with an August teachers' conference, so, having arrived in Torfoprodukt, the teacher of mathematics and electrical engineering of grades 8-10 had time to go to the Kurlovsky district for the traditional meeting. “Isaich,” as his colleagues dubbed him, could, if desired, refer to serious illness, but no, he didn’t talk to anyone about her. We just saw how he was looking for a birch chaga mushroom and some herbs in the forest, and answered questions briefly: “I make medicinal drinks.” He was considered shy: after all, a person suffered... But that was not the point at all: “I came with my purpose, with my past. What could they know, what could they tell them? I sat with Matryona and wrote a novel every free minute. Why would I chatter to myself? I didn't have that manner. I was a conspirator to the end." Then everyone will get used to the fact that this thin, pale, tall man in a suit and tie, who, like all the teachers, wore a hat, coat or raincoat, keeps his distance and does not get close to anyone. He will remain silent when the document on rehabilitation arrives in six months - just the school head teacher B.S. Protserov will receive a notification from the village council and send the teacher for a certificate. No talking when the wife starts arriving. “What does anyone care? I live with Matryona and live.” Many were alarmed (was he a spy?) that he walked everywhere with a Zorkiy camera and took pictures that were not at all what amateurs usually take: instead of family and friends - houses, dilapidated farms, boring landscapes.
Arriving at school at the beginning school year, he proposed his own methodology - he gave all classes a test, divided the students into strong and mediocre based on the results, and then worked individually.
In the lessons everyone received separate task, so there was neither the opportunity nor the desire to write off. Not only the solution to the problem was valued, but also the method of solution. The introductory part of the lesson was shortened as much as possible: the teacher wasted time on “trifles.” He knew exactly who needed to be called to the board and when, who to ask more often, who to trust independent work. The teacher never sat at the teacher's table. He didn’t enter the class, but burst into it. He ignited everyone with his energy and knew how to structure a lesson in such a way that there was no time to get bored or doze off. He respected his students. He never shouted, didn’t even raise his voice.
And only outside the classroom Solzhenitsyn was silent and withdrawn. He went home after school, ate the “cardboard” soup Matryona had prepared and sat down to work. The neighbors remembered for a long time how inconspicuously the guest lived, did not organize parties, did not participate in the fun, but read and wrote everything. “I loved Matryona Isaich,” Shura Romanova, Matryona’s adopted daughter (in the story she is Kira), used to say. “It used to be that she would come to me in Cherusti, and I would persuade her to stay longer.” “No,” he says. “I have Isaac - I need to cook for him, light the stove.” And back home."
The lodger also became attached to the lost old woman, valuing her selflessness, conscientiousness, heartfelt simplicity, and smile, which he tried in vain to catch in the camera lens. “So Matryona got used to me, and I got used to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening classes, didn’t bother me with any questions.” She completely lacked womanly curiosity, and the lodger also did not stir her soul, but it turned out that they opened up to each other.
She learned about the prison, and about the serious illness of the guest, and about his loneliness. And there was no worse loss for him in those days than the absurd death of Matryona on February 21, 1957 under the wheels of a freight train at the crossing of one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow along the branch that goes to Murom from Kazan, exactly six months after the day he settled in her hut.
(From the book “Alexander Solzhenitsyn” by Lyudmila Saraskina)
Matryona's yard is as poor as before
Solzhenitsyn’s acquaintance with the “conda”, “interior” Russia, in which he so wanted to end up after the Ekibastuz exile, a few years later was embodied in the world-famous story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. This year marks 40 years since its creation. As it turned out, in Mezinovsky itself this work of Solzhenitsyn has become a second-hand book rarity. This book is not even in Matryona’s yard, where Lyuba, the niece of the heroine of Solzhenitsyn’s story, now lives. “I had pages from a magazine, my neighbors once asked me when they started reading it at school, but they never returned it,” complains Lyuba, who today is raising her grandson within the “historical” walls on a disability benefit. Matryona got her hut from her mother - herself younger sister Matryona. The hut was transported to Mezinovsky from the neighboring village of Miltsevo (in Solzhenitsyn’s story - Talnovo), where Matryona Zakharova (Solzhenitsyn - Matryona Grigorieva) lived future writer. In the village of Miltsevo, a similar, but much more solid house was hastily erected for Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s visit here in 1994. Soon after Solzhenitsyn’s memorable visit, Matrenina’s fellow countrymen uprooted the window frames and floorboards from this unguarded building on the outskirts of the village.
The “new” Mezinovskaya school, built in 1957, now has 240 students. In the unpreserved building of the old one, in which Solzhenitsyn taught classes, about a thousand studied. Over the past half century, not only has the Miltsevskaya river become shallow and the peat reserves in the surrounding swamps have become depleted, but also neighboring villages. And at the same time, Solzhenitsyn’s Thaddeus has not ceased to exist, calling the people’s good “ours” and believing that losing it is “shameful and stupid.”
Matryona's crumbling house, moved to a new location without a foundation, is sunk into the ground, and buckets are placed under the thin roof when it rains. Like Matryona’s, cockroaches are in full swing here, but there are no mice: there are four cats in the house, two of their own and two that have strayed. A former foundry worker at a local factory, Lyuba, like Matryona, who once spent months straightening out her pension, goes through the authorities to extend her disability benefits. “Nobody except Solzhenitsyn helps,” she complains. “Once one came in a jeep, called himself Alexey, looked around the house and gave me money.” Behind the house, like Matryona’s, there is a vegetable garden of 15 acres, in which Lyuba plants potatoes. As before, “mushy potatoes,” mushrooms and cabbage are the main products for her life. Besides cats, she doesn’t even have a goat in her yard, like Matryona had.
This is how many Mezinov righteous people lived and live. Local historians write books about the great writer’s stay in Mezinovsky, local poets compose poems, new pioneers write essays “On the difficult fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate“, as they once wrote essays about Brezhnev’s “Virgin Land” and “Malaya Zemlya”. They are thinking about reviving Matryona’s museum hut again on the outskirts of the deserted village of Miltsevo. And the old Matryonin’s yard still lives the same life as half a century ago.
Leonid Novikov, Vladimir region.
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