ANALYSIS OF A.I. SOLZHENITSYN’S STORY “MATRENIN’S Dvor”
The purpose of the lesson: to try to understand how the writer sees the phenomenon of a “common man”, to understand the philosophical meaning of the story.
Methodological techniques: analytical conversation, comparison of texts.
DURING THE CLASSES
1.Teacher's word
The story "Matrenin's Dvor", like "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", was written in 1959 and published in 1964. “Matrenin’s Dvor” is an autobiographical work. This is Solzhenitsyn’s story about the situation in which he found himself after returning “from the dusty hot desert,” that is, from the camp. He “wanted to worm his way in and get lost in the very interior of Russia,” to find “a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways.” The former camp inmate could only get hired for hard work, but he wanted to teach. After his rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn worked for some time as a physics teacher in the Vladimir region, living in the village of Miltsevo with the peasant woman Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova (there he completed the first edition of “In the First Circle”). The story “Matrenin’s Dvor” goes beyond ordinary memories, but acquires deep meaning and is recognized as a classic. It was called “brilliant,” “a truly brilliant work.” Let's try to understand the phenomenon of this story.
P. Checking homework.
Let's compare the stories "Matrenin's Dvor" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
Both stories are stages in the writer’s understanding of the phenomenon of the “common man,” the bearer of mass consciousness. The heroes of both stories are “ordinary people”, victims of a soulless world. But the attitude towards the heroes is different. The first was called “A village does not stand without a righteous person,” and the second was called Shch-854 (One Day of One Prisoner).” “Righteous” and “convict” are different assessments. What appears to Matryona as “high” (her apologetic smile in front of the formidable chairwoman, her compliance in the face of the insolent pressure of her relatives), in Ivan Denisovich’s behavior is indicated by “working extra money,” “serving a rich brigadier with dry felt boots right on his bed,” “running through the quarters, where someone needs to serve someone, sweep or offer something.” Matryona is depicted as a saint: “Only she had fewer sins than her lame cat. She was strangling mice...” Ivan Denisovich is an ordinary person with sins and shortcomings. Matryona is not of this world. Shukhov belongs to the world of the Gulag, he has almost settled down in it, studied its laws, and developed a lot of devices for survival. During the 8 years of his imprisonment, he became accustomed to the camp: “He himself didn’t know whether he wanted it or not,” he adapted: “It’s as it should be - one works, one watches”; “Work is like a stick, it has two ends: if you do it for people, give it quality; if you do it for a fool, give it show.” True, he managed not to lose his human dignity, not to sink to the position of a “wick” that licks bowls.
Ivan Denisovich himself is not aware of the surrounding absurdity, is not aware of the horror of his existence. He humbly and patiently bears his cross, just like Matryona Vasilievna.
But the heroine’s patience is akin to the patience of a saint.
In “Matryona’s Dvor” the image of the heroine is given in the perception of the narrator; he evaluates her as a righteous woman. In “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” the world is seen only through the eyes of the hero and is assessed by him himself. The reader also evaluates what is happening and cannot help but be horrified and shocked by the description of the “almost happy” day.
How is the character of the heroine revealed in the story?
What is the theme of the story?
Matryona is not of this world; the world, those around her condemn her: “and she was unclean; and I didn’t chase the factory; and not careful; and she didn’t even keep a pig, for some reason she didn’t like to feed it; and, stupid, helped strangers for free...”
In general, he lives “in desolation.” Look at Matryona’s poverty from all angles: “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 a littered accountant’s book.”
But the story is not only about the suffering, troubles, and injustice that befell the Russian woman. A.T. Tvardovsky wrote about it this way: “Why is the fate of the old peasant woman, told on a few pages, of such great interest to us? This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. And yet, her spiritual world is endowed with such a quality that we talk to her as if we were talking to Anna Karenina.” Solzhenitsyn responded to Tvardovsky: “You pointed out the very essence - a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism was always scouring the top, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and the neighboring ones.” Writers go to the main theme of the story - “how people live.” To survive what Matryona Vasilievna had to go through and remain a selfless, open, delicate, sympathetic person, not to become embittered at fate and people, to preserve her “radiant smile” until old age - what mental strength is needed for this!
The movement of the plot is aimed at understanding the secrets of the character of the main character. Matryona reveals herself not so much in the everyday present as in the past. Remembering her youth, she says: “It’s you who haven’t seen me before, Ignatich. All my bags were five pounds, I didn’t consider them heavy. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona, you’ll break your back!” The Divir didn’t come near me to put my end of the log on the front.” It turns out that Matryona was once young, strong, beautiful, one of those Nekrasov peasant women who “stopped a galloping horse”: “Once the horse was frightened and carried the sleigh to the lake, the men jumped away, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped...” And at the last moment of her life, she rushed to “help the men” at the crossing - and died.
And Matryona reveals herself from a completely unexpected side when she talks about her love: “for the first time I saw Matryona in a completely new way,” “That summer... we went with him to sit in the grove,” she whispered. - There was a grove here... I didn’t get out without a little, Ignatich. The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war... He went to war and disappeared... For three years I hid, waited. And no news, and not a bone...
Tied with an old faded handkerchief, Matryona’s round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp - as if freed from wrinkles, from an everyday careless outfit - frightened, girlish, faced with a terrible choice.
These lyrical, bright lines reveal the charm, spiritual beauty, and depth of Matryona’s experiences. Outwardly unremarkable, reserved, undemanding, Matryona turns out to be an extraordinary, sincere, pure, open person. The more acute is the feeling of guilt that the narrator experiences: “There is no Matryona. A loved one was killed. And on the last day I reproached her padded jacket.” “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.” The final words of the story return to the original title - “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” and fill the story about the peasant woman Matryona with a deep generalizing, philosophical meaning.
What is the symbolic meaning of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”?
Many of Solzhenitsyn’s symbols are associated with Christian symbolism, images-symbols of the way of the cross, a righteous man, a martyr. The first title “Matryonina Dvora2” directly points to this. And the name “Matrenin’s Dvor” itself is general in nature. The courtyard, Matryona’s house, is the refuge that the narrator finally finds in search of “inner Russia” after many years of camps and homelessness: “I didn’t like this place any more in the whole village.” The symbolic likening of the House to Russia is traditional, because the structure of the house is likened to the structure of the world. In the fate of the house, the fate of its owner is, as it were, repeated, predicted. Forty years have passed here. In this house she survived two wars - German and World War II, the death of six children who died in infancy, the loss of her husband, who went missing during the war. The house is deteriorating - the owner is getting old. The house is being dismantled like a person - “rib by ribs”, and “everything showed that the breakers are not builders and do not expect Matryona to have to live here for a long time.”
It’s as if nature itself resists the destruction of the house - first a long snowstorm, enormous snowdrifts, then a thaw, damp fogs, streams. And the fact that Matryona’s holy water inexplicably disappeared seems like a bad omen. Matryona dies along with the upper room, with part of her house. The owner dies and the house is completely destroyed. Until spring, Matryona's hut was stuffed like a coffin - buried.
Matryona’s fear of the railway is also symbolic in nature, because it is the train, a symbol of a world and civilization hostile to peasant life, that will flatten both the upper room and Matryona herself.
Sh. TEACHER'S WORD.
The righteous Matryona is the writer’s moral ideal, on which, in his opinion, the life of society should be based. According to Solzhenitsyn, the meaning of earthly existence is not prosperity, but the development of the soul.” Connected with this idea is the writer’s understanding of the role of literature and its connection with the Christian tradition. Solzhenitsyn continues one of the main traditions of Russian literature, according to which the writer sees his purpose in preaching truth, spirituality, and is convinced of the need to pose “eternal” questions and seek answers to them. He spoke about this in his Nobel lecture: “In Russian literature, we have long been ingrained in the idea that a writer can do a lot among his people - and should... Once he has taken up his word, he can never evade: a writer is not an outside judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is a co-author of all the evil committed in his homeland or by his people.”
The history of the creation of Solzhenitsyn’s work “Matryonin’s Dvor”
In 1962, the magazine “New World” published the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” 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 is the fate of an old peasant woman, told on a few pages, of such great interest to us? 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 Literaturnaya Gazeta, 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 worthwhile without the righteous,” contained a deep meaning: the Russian village rests on people whose way of life is based on the universal human values of goodness, 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 that determine morals, behavior, spiritual and mental qualities necessary for a person in society). The second name - "Matrenin's Dvor" - somewhat changed the point of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the boundaries of Matryonin's Dvor. 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 the readers’ attention on the wonderful world of the Russian woman.
Type, genre, creative method of the analyzed work
Solzhenitsyn once noted that he rarely turned to the short story genre, for “artistic pleasure”: “You can put a lot into a small form, 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 from 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 an ordinary person is given in sublime tones, and the story itself is focused on a 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 in a short story the serious problems of the 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 traits of the national character: she is shy, understands the “education” of the narrator, and respects him for this. 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.
An analysis of the work says that the image of Matryona and individual details 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 heroine’s appearance 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 is saved from the 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, the author treats her heroine with great sympathy; 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 the key images of the story. The description of the yard and 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 are talking about how fate threw the hero-storyteller to a station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoprodukt. A former prisoner, and now a school teacher, eager to find peace in some remote and quiet corner of 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 immediately find a common 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. The younger brother of the missing husband, Efim, who was left alone after death with his youngest children in his arms, wooed her. 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 part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death.
In the third part, the tenant learns about the death of the owner of the house. The descriptions of the funeral and wake showed the true attitude of the people close to her towards Matryona. 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 tonality of the phrase, the selection of “colors” one can feel the author’s attitude towards Matryona: “The frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, was filled with a little pink from the red frosty sun, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection.” And then - a direct author’s description: “Those people always have good faces, who are in harmony with their conscience.” Even after the terrible death of the heroine, her “face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.”
Matryona embodies a folk character, which is primarily manifested 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, in good moments responded to them in kind, they have a positive attitude, and immediately immersed again to 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 issues of 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 clumsy name, a village with a tiny market, the house of the landlady Matryona Vasilyevna 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 was sent to a secondary school - it was located 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 he wanted, refer to a serious illness, but no, he did not talk about it with anyone. 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 the school at the beginning of the school year, he proposed his own methodology - he gave all classes a test, based on the results he divided the students into strong and mediocre, and then worked individually.
During the lessons, everyone received a separate task, so there was neither the opportunity nor the desire to cheat. 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 and when to call to the board, who to ask more often, who to entrust with 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 studies, did not annoy 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. She inherited Matryona's hut from her mother, Matryona's youngest sister. The hut was transported to Mezinovsky from the neighboring village of Miltsevo (in Solzhenitsyn’s story - Talnovo), where the future writer lived with Matryona Zakharova (in Solzhenitsyn’s - Matryona Grigorieva). 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 course of half a century, not only did the Miltsevskaya river become shallow and the peat reserves in the surrounding swamps became depleted, but the neighboring villages were also deserted. 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 Mezinovskoye, local poets compose poems, new pioneers write essays “On the difficult fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 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.
Gang Yu. Solzhenitsyn’s Service // New Time. - 1995. No. 24.
Zapevalov V. A. Solzhenitsyn. To the 30th anniversary of the publication of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” // Russian literature. - 1993. No. 2.
Litvinova V.I. Don't live a lie. Methodological recommendations for studying the creativity of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. - Abakan: KhSU Publishing House, 1997.
MurinD. One hour, one day, one human life in the stories of A.I. Solzhenitsyn // Literature at school. - 1995. No. 5.
Palamarchuk P. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Guide. — M.,
1991.
SaraskinaL. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. ZhZL series. — M.: Young
Guard, 2009.
The word makes its way. Collection of articles and documents about A.I. Solzhenitsyn. 1962-1974. - M.: Russian way, 1978.
ChalmaevV. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Life and Work. - M., 1994.
Urmanov A.V. The works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. - M., 2003.
Solzhenitsyn's surname these days is associated exclusively with his novel “The Gulag Archipelago” and its scandalous fame. However, he began his journey as a writer as a talented short story writer, who in his stories depicted the fate of ordinary Russian people of the mid-twentieth century. The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” is the most striking example of Solzhenitsyn’s early work, which reflected his best writing talents. The many-wise Litrecon offers you its analysis.
The history of writing the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” is a series of interesting facts:
- The story is based on Solzhenitsyn’s memories of his life after returning from a labor camp, when he lived for some time in the village of Maltsevo, in the house of the peasant woman Matryona Zakharova. She became the prototype of the main character.
- Work on the work began in the summer of '59 in Crimea, and was completed in the same year. The publication was supposed to take place in the magazine “New World”, but the work passed the editorial committee only the second time, thanks to the help of editor A.T. Tvardovsky.
- The censors did not want to let a story with the title “A village not stand without a righteous man” (this was the first title of Solzhenitsyn’s work) go into print. They saw in it unacceptable religious overtones. Under pressure from the editors, the author changed the title to a neutral one.
- “Matrenin’s Dvor” became Solzhenitsyn’s second work after the book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It gave rise to many disputes and disagreements, and after the author emigrated, it was completely banned, like all the books of the dissident writer.
- Readers saw the story only in 1989, during the era of Perestroika, when a new principle of USSR policy - glasnost - came into force.
Direction and genre
The story "Matryonin's Dvor" was written within the framework. The writer strives for a reliable depiction of the surrounding reality. The images he created, their words and actions breathe authenticity and naturalism. The reader can believe that the events described in the story could actually happen.
The genre of this work can be defined as a story. The narrative covers a short period of time and includes a minimal number of characters. The problem is local in nature and does not affect the world as a whole. The absence of any specifics only emphasizes the typicality of the events shown.
Meaning of the name
Initially, Solzhenitsyn gave his story the title “A village is not worth without a righteous man,” which emphasized the writer’s main idea about a highly spiritual main character who unselfishly sacrifices herself for the sake of those around her and thereby binds people embittered by poverty together.
However, in the future, in order to avoid Soviet censorship, Tvardovsky advised the writer to replace the title with a less provocative one, which was done. “Matrenin’s Dvor” is both a reflection of the denouement of the work (the death of the heroine and the division of her property), and an indication of the main theme of the book - the life of a righteous woman in a village exhausted by wars and the predatory policies of the authorities.
Composition and Conflict
The story is divided into three chapters.
- The first chapter is devoted to exposition: the author introduces us to his hero and tells us about Matryona herself.
- In the second chapter, the beginning occurs, when the main conflict of the work is revealed, as well as the climax, when the conflict reaches its highest point.
- The third chapter is reserved for the finale, in which all storylines come to a logical conclusion.
The conflict in the work is local in nature between the righteous old woman Matryona and those around her, who use her kindness for their own purposes. However, the artistic features of the story create a feeling of typicality of this situation. Thus, Solzhenitsyn gives this conflict an all-Russian philosophical character. People have become embittered due to unbearable living conditions, and only a few are able to retain kindness and responsiveness.
The bottom line: what is it about?
The story begins with the fact that the narrator, having spent ten years in exile in a labor camp, settles in the village of Torfoprodukt, in the house of Grigorieva Matryona Vasilievna.
Gradually, the main character learns the whole story of Matryona’s life, about her unsuccessful marriage, about the death of her children and husband, about her conflict with her ex-fiancé, Thaddeus, about all the difficulties that she had to go through. The narrator develops respect for the old woman, seeing in her the support on which not only the local collective farm, but the whole of Russia rests.
At the end of the story, Matryona, under pressure from Thaddeus’s family, gives it to her daughter Kira, whom she raised, as her part of her hut, bequeathed to her. However, while helping to transport the dismantled room, he dies. Matryona's relatives are sad only for show, rejoicing at the opportunity to share the old woman's inheritance.
The main characters and their characteristics
The system of images in the story “Mother’s Court” is presented by the Many-Wise Litrecon in table format.
| heroes of the story "Mother's Court" | characteristic |
| Matryona | an ordinary Russian peasant woman. a kind, sympathetic and submissive old woman who sacrificed herself for others all her life. after her fiancé, Thaddeus, went missing, under family pressure she married his brother, Efim. unfortunately, all her children died before they even lived three months, so many began to consider Matryona “damaged.” Then Matryona took Kira, Thaddeus’s daughter from his second marriage, to raise her, and sincerely fell in love with him, bequeathing to her part of her hut. she worked for nothing and devoted her whole life to people, being content with little. |
| kira | a simple village girl. Before her marriage, she was raised by Matryona and lived with her. the only person, besides the narrator, who sincerely mourns the deceased. She is grateful to the old woman for her love and kindness, but she treats her family coldly, because she was simply given away as a puppy to a strange woman. |
| Thaddeus | sixty-year-old Russian peasant. was Matryona's favorite fiancé, but was captured during the war, and for a long time nothing was heard about him. After returning, he hated Matryona because she did not wait for him. married a second time to a woman also named Matryona. an authoritarian head of the family who does not hesitate to use brute force. a greedy person who strives to accumulate wealth at any cost. |
| narrator Ignatyich |
a kind and sympathetic person, observant and educated, unlike the villagers. At first, the village does not accept him because of his dubious past, but Matryona helps him join the team and find shelter. It is no coincidence that the author indicates the exact coordinates of the village, emphasizing that he was forbidden to approach the city at a distance of 100 km. this is a reflection of the author himself, even his patronymic is similar to the hero’s patronymic - Isaevich. |
Themes
The theme of the story “Mother’s Court” is universal and is food for thought for all generations of people:
- Soviet village life– Solzhenitsyn portrays the life of Soviet peasants as an ordeal. Village life is difficult, and the peasants themselves are mostly rude and their morals are cruel. A person has to make great efforts to remain himself in such a hostile atmosphere. The narrator emphasizes that people are exhausted by eternal wars and reforms in agriculture. They have a slave position and no prospects.
- Kindness– the focus of kindness in the story is Matryona. The author sincerely admires the old woman. And, although in the end those around her use the heroine’s kindness for selfish purposes, Solzhenitsyn has no doubt that this is exactly how one should live - to give one’s all for the good of society and the people, and not to fill bags with wealth.
- Responsiveness– in the Soviet village, according to the writer, there is no place for responsiveness and sincerity. All peasants think only about their survival and do not care about the needs of other people. Only Matryona was able to retain her kindness and desire to help others.
- Fate– Solzhenitsyn shows that often a person is not able to control his life and must obey circumstances, like Matryona, but only he controls a person’s soul, and he always has a choice: to become embittered at the world and become callous, or to preserve his humanity.
- Righteousness– Matryona, in the eyes of the writer, looks like the ideal of a righteous Russian person who gives all of himself for the good of other people, on whom the entire Russian people and Russia rest. The theme of righteousness is revealed in the actions and thoughts of a woman, in her difficult fate. No matter what happens, she does not lose heart and does not complain. She only pities others, but not herself, although fate does not spoil her with attention. This is the essence of the righteous - to preserve the moral wealth of the soul, having gone through all life's trials, and to inspire people to moral deeds.
Problems
The problems of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” are a reflection of the problems of the development and formation of the USSR. The victorious revolution did not make the life of the people easier, but only complicated it:
- Indifference- the main problem in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. The villagers are indifferent to each other, they are indifferent to the fate of their fellow villagers. Everyone tries to get their hands on someone else's penny, earn extra and live more satisfyingly. All people’s concerns are only about material success, and the spiritual side of life is as indifferent to them as the fate of their neighbor.
- Poverty– Solzhenitsyn shows the unbearable conditions in which Russian peasants live, upon whom the difficult trials of collectivization and war fell. People survive, not live. They have neither medicine, nor education, nor the benefits of civilization. Even the morals of people are similar to those of the Middle Ages.
- Cruelty– peasant life in Solzhenitsyn’s story is subordinated to purely practical interests. In peasant life there is no place for kindness and weakness; it is cruel and rude. The kindness of the main character is perceived by fellow villagers as “eccentricity” or even a lack of intelligence.
- Greed– the focus of greed in the story is Thaddeus, who is ready, during Matryona’s lifetime, to dismantle her hut in order to increase his wealth. Solzhenitsyn condemns this approach to life.
- War– the story mentions a war, which becomes another difficult test for the village and indirectly becomes the cause of many years of discord between Matryona and Thaddeus. She cripples people's lives, robs villages and ruins families, taking away the best of the best.
- Death– Matryona’s death is perceived by Solzhenitsyn as a catastrophe on a national scale, because along with her, that idealistic Christian Rus', which the writer so admired, dies.
main idea
In his story, Solzhenitsyn depicted the life of a Russian village in the mid-twentieth century without any embellishment, with all its lack of spirituality and cruelty. This village is contrasted with Matryona, who lives the life of a true Christian. According to the writer, it is thanks to such selfless individuals as Matryona that the whole country, clogged with poverty, war and political miscalculations, lives. The meaning of the story “Matryona’s Dvor” lies in the priority of eternal Christian values (kindness, responsiveness, mercy, generosity) over the “worldly wisdom” of greedy and mired peasants. Freedom, equality and brotherhood could not replace simple truths in the minds of the people - the need for spiritual development and love for one's neighbor.
The main idea in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” is the need for righteousness in everyday life. People cannot live without moral values - kindness, mercy, generosity and mutual assistance. Even if everyone loses them, there must be at least one guardian of the soul's treasury who will remind everyone of the importance of moral qualities.
What does it teach?
The story “Matryona’s Court” promotes Christian humility and self-sacrifice, which Matryona demonstrated. He shows that not everyone can live such a life, but he emphasizes that this is exactly how a real person should live. This is the moral laid down by Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn condemns the greed, rudeness and selfishness that reign in the village, calls on people to be kinder to each other, to live in peace and harmony. This conclusion can be drawn from the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”.
Criticism
Alexander Tvardovsky himself admired Solzhenitsyn’s work, calling him a real writer, and his story a true work of art.
Before Solzhenitsyn’s arrival today, I re-read his “Righteous Woman” since five in the morning. Oh my god, writer. No jokes. A writer who is solely concerned with expressing what lies “at the core” of his mind and heart. Not a shadow of a desire to “hit the bull’s eye”, to please, to make the task of an editor or critic easier - whatever you want, get out of it, but I won’t get out of my way. I can only go further
L. Chukovskaya, who moved in journalistic circles, described the story as follows:
...What if they don’t publish Solzhenitsyn’s second work? I liked her more than the first one. She stuns with her courage, astonishes with her material, and, of course, with her literary skill; and “Matryona”... here you can already see a great artist, humane, returning to us our native language, loving Russia, as Blok said, with mortally insulted love.
“Matryonin’s Dvor” caused a real explosion in the literary community and often mirror opposite reviews. Nowadays, the story is considered one of the most outstanding prose works of the second half of the twentieth century and a striking example of the work of early Solzhenitsyn.
"Magrenip yard"
The action of the story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrenin's Dvor" takes place in the mid-50s of the 20th century. The events described in it are shown through the eyes of the narrator, an unusual person who dreams of getting lost in the very interior of Russia, while the bulk of the population wants to move to big cities. Later, the reader will understand the reasons why the hero strives for the outback: he was in prison and wants a quiet life.
The hero goes to teach in a small place called “Peat Product”, from which, as the author ironically notes, it was difficult to leave. Neither the monotonous barracks nor the dilapidated five-story buildings attract the main character. Finally, he finds housing in the village of Talnovo. This is how the reader gets acquainted with the main character of the work - a lonely sick woman Matryona. She lives in a darkish hut with a dim mirror through which it was impossible to see anything, and two bright posters about the book trade and the harvest. The contrast between these interior details is obvious. It anticipates one of the key problems raised in the work - the conflict between the ostentatious bravado of the official chronicle of events and the real life of ordinary Russian people. The story conveys a deep understanding of this tragic discrepancy.
Another, no less striking contradiction in the story is the contrast between the extreme poverty of peasant life, among which Matryona’s life passes, and the richness of her deep inner world. The woman worked on a collective farm all her life, and now she doesn’t even receive a pension either for her work or for the loss of her breadwinner. And it is almost impossible to achieve this pension due to bureaucracy. Despite this, she has not lost her pity, humanity, and love of nature: she grows ficus trees and adopted a lanky cat. The author emphasizes in his heroine a humble, good-natured attitude towards life. She does not blame anyone for her plight, does not demand anything.
Solzhenitsyn constantly emphasizes that Matryona’s life could have turned out differently, because her house was built for a large family: money and grandchildren could sit on stools instead of ficus trees. Through the description of Matryona's life we learn
about the difficult life of the peasantry. The only food in the village is potatoes and barley. The store only sells margarine and combined fat. Only once a year does Matryona buy local “delicacies” for the shepherd at the general store, which she herself does not eat: canned fish, sugar and butter. And when she put on a coat from a worn railway overcoat and began to receive a pension, her neighbors even began to envy her. This detail not only testifies to the miserable situation of all residents of the village, but also sheds light on the unsightly relationships between people.
It’s paradoxical, but in the village called “Torfoprodukt” people don’t even have enough peat for the winter. Peat, of which there was a lot around, was sold only to the authorities and one car at a time - to teachers, doctors, and factory workers. When the hero talks about this, his heart aches: it’s scary to think to what degree of downtroddenness and humiliation an ordinary person can be reduced in Russia. Due to the same stupidity of economic life, Matryona cannot have a cow. There is a sea of grass all around, and you can’t mow it without permission. So the old sick woman has to look for grass for her goat on the islands in the swamp. And there’s nowhere to get hay for a cow.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn consistently shows what difficulties the life of an ordinary hard-working peasant woman is fraught with. Even if she tries to improve her plight, there are obstacles and prohibitions everywhere.
At the same time, in the image of Matryona A.I. Solzhenitsyn embodied the best features of a Russian woman. The narrator often admires her kind smile, notes that the cure for all the heroine’s troubles was work, which she easily got involved in: either digging potatoes or going to the distant forest to pick berries. 11th immediately, only in the second part of the story, we learn about Matryona’s past life: she had six children. For eleven years she waited for her missing husband from the war, who, as it turned out, was not faithful to her.
In the story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn constantly sharply criticizes the local authorities: winter is just around the corner, and the collective farm chairman talks about everything except fuel. You won’t be able to find the secretary of the village council locally, and even if you do get some paperwork, you’ll have to redo it later, since all these people who are called upon to ensure law and order in the country work carelessly, and you won’t find any government for them. A.I. writes with indignation. Solzhenitsyn said that the new chairman “first of all cut off the gardens of all disabled people,” even though the cut-off acres were still empty behind the fence.
Matryona did not even have the right to mow the grass on the collective farm land, but when there was a problem on the collective farm, the chairman’s wife came to her and, without saying hello, demanded that she go to work, and even with her pitchfork. Matryona helped not only the collective farm, but also her neighbors.
A number of artistic details by A.I. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes in the story how far the achievements of civilization are from the real life of a peasant in the Russian outback. The invention of new machines and artificial satellites of the Earth is heard on the radio as wonders of the world, from which no sense or benefit will be added. The peasants will still load peat with pitchforks and eat empty potatoes or porridge.
Also, A.I. tells along the way. Solzhenitsyn and about the situation in school education: Antoshka Grigoriev, a complete failure student, did not even try to learn anything: he knew that he would be transferred to the next class anyway, since the main thing for school is not the quality of students’ knowledge, but the struggle for a “high percentage of academic performance” .
The tragic end of the story is prepared during the development of the plot by a remarkable detail: someone stole Matryona’s pot of holy water at the blessing of water: “She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t have any.”
In addition to the cruelty of state power and its representatives towards people, A.I. Solzhenitsyn raises the problem of human callousness towards others. Matryona's relatives force her to dismantle and give the upper room to her niece (adopted daughter). After this, Matryona’s sisters cursed her as a fool, and the lanky cat, the old woman’s last joy, disappeared from the yard.
While taking out the upper room, Matryona herself dies at a crossing under the wheels of the train. With bitterness in her heart, the author tells how Matryona’s sisters, who had quarreled with her before her death, flocked to share her wretched inheritance: a hut, a goat, a chest and two hundred funeral rubles.
Only a phrase from one old woman transforms the narrative plan from the everyday to the existential: “There are two riddles in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember, how I die - I don’t know.” People glorified Matryona even after her death. There was talk that her husband didn’t love her, he walked away from her, and in general she was stupid, since she dug up people’s gardens for free, but never acquired any property of her own. The author’s point of view is extremely succinctly expressed by the phrase: “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.”
The work of the Russian Soviet prose writer A. I. Solzhenitsyn is one of the brightest and most significant pages of our literature. His main merit to readers lies in the fact that the author made people think about their past, about the dark pages of history, told the cruel truth about many inhumane orders of the Soviet regime and revealed the origins of the lack of spirituality of subsequent - post-perestroika - generations. The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” is the most indicative in this regard.
History of creation and autobiographical motives
So, the history of creation and analysis. “Matrenin's Dvor” refers to short stories, although its size significantly exceeds the traditional framework of the one mentioned. It was written in 1959, and published - thanks to the efforts and efforts of Tvardovsky, editor of the most progressive literary magazine at that time, "New World" - in 1963. Four years of waiting is a very short period of time for a writer who served time in camps labeled “enemy of the people” and was disgraced after the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”
Let's continue the analysis. Progressive criticism considers “Matrenin’s Dvor” an even stronger and more significant work than “One Day...”. If in the story about the fate of the prisoner Shukhov the reader was captivated by the novelty of the material, the courage of the choice of topic and its presentation, the accusatory power, then the story about Matryona amazes with its amazing language, masterful command of the living Russian word and the highest moral charge, pure spirituality, with which the pages of the work are filled. Solzhenitsyn planned to title the story: “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man,” so that the main theme and idea would be stated from the beginning. But censorship would hardly have missed a name so shocking for Soviet atheistic ideology, so the writer inserted these words at the end of his work, titling it after the name of the heroine. However, the story only benefited from the rearrangement.
What else is important to note as we continue our analysis? “Matrenin’s Dvor” is classified as so-called village literature, rightly noting its fundamental importance for this trend in Russian literary art. The author’s integrity and artistic truthfulness, a strong moral position and heightened conscientiousness, the inability to make compromises, as demanded by the censors and the market situation, became the reason for the further silencing of the story, on the one hand, and a bright, living example for writers - Solzhenitsyn’s contemporaries, on the other. could not be more fully correlated with the theme of the work. And it could not be otherwise, telling the story of the righteous Matryona, an elderly peasant woman from the village of Talnovo, living in the most “interior”, original Russian outback.
Solzhenitsyn was personally acquainted with the prototype of the heroine. In fact, he talks about himself - a former military man who spent a decade in camps and settlements, immensely tired of the hardships and injustices of life and yearning to rest his soul in the calm and simple provincial silence. And Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva is Matryona Zakharova from the village of Miltsevo, in whose hut Alexander Isaevich rented a corner. And Matryona’s life from the story is a somewhat artistically generalized fate of a real, simple Russian woman.
Theme and idea of the work
Anyone who has read the story will not be difficult to analyze. “Matrenin’s Dvor” is a kind of parable about a disinterested woman, a woman of amazing kindness and gentleness. Her whole life is serving people. She worked on the collective farm for “workdays”, lost her health, and did not receive a pension. It’s difficult for her to go to the city and bother, and she doesn’t like to complain, cry, much less demand something. But when she demands to go to work harvesting or weeding, no matter how bad Matryona felt, she still went and helped the common cause. And when the neighbors asked to help dig potatoes, she behaved the same way. She never took payment for work, she rejoiced from the heart at someone else’s rich harvest and did not envy when her own potatoes were small, like fodder.
Analysis of the work “Matrenin’s Dvor” helps to identify an interesting pattern. During their lifetime, people like Matryona Vasilyevna cause bewilderment, irritation, and condemnation in those around them and relatives. The same sisters of the heroine, “mourning” her, lament that nothing was left after her from things or other wealth, they have nothing to profit from. But with her death, it was as if some light had gone out in the village, as if it had become darker, duller, sadder. After all, Matryona was the righteous woman on whom the world rests, and without whom neither the village, nor the city, nor the Earth itself stands.
Yes, Matryona is a weak old woman. But what will happen to us when such last guardians of humanity, spirituality, cordiality and kindness disappear? This is what the writer invites us to think about...