Plan of Matryona's characteristics from the story Matryona's Dvor. "Matrenin's Dvor" main characters

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You have probably met more than once such people who are ready to work with all their might for the benefit of others, but at the same time remain outcasts in society. No, they are not degraded either morally or mentally, but no matter how good their actions are, they are not appreciated. A. Solzhenitsyn tells us about one such character in the story “ Matrenin Dvor».

We are talking about the main character of the story. The reader gets to know Matryona Vasilievna Grigoreva at an already advanced age - she was about 60 years old when we first see her on the pages of the story.

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Her house and yard are gradually falling into disrepair - “the wood chips have rotted, the logs of the log house and the gates, once mighty, have turned gray with age, and their cover has thinned out.”

Their owner is often sick and cannot get up for several days, but once upon a time everything was different: everything was built with a large family in mind, with high quality and soundness. The fact that now only a lonely woman lives here already sets the reader up to perceive tragedy life story heroines.

Matryona's youth

About childhood main character Solzhenitsyn does not tell the reader anything - the main emphasis of the story is on the period of her youth, when the main factors of her future unhappy life were laid.



When Matryona was 19 years old, Thaddeus wooed her; at that time he was 23. The girl agreed, but the war prevented the wedding. There was no news about Thaddeus for a long time, Matryona was faithfully waiting for him, but she did not receive any news or the guy himself. Everyone decided that he had died. His younger brother, Efim, invited Matryona to marry him. Matryona did not love Efim, so she did not agree, and, perhaps, the hope of Thaddeus’s return did not completely leave her, but she was still persuaded: “the smart one comes out after the Intercession, and the fool comes out after Petrov. They didn't have enough hands. I'll go." And as it turned out, it was in vain - her lover returned to Pokrova - he was captured by the Hungarians and therefore there was no news about him.

The news about the marriage of his brother and Matryona came as a blow to him - he wanted to chop up the young people, but the concept that Efim was his brother stopped his intentions. Over time, he forgave them for such an act.

Efim and Matryona remained to live in their parents' house. Matryona still lives in this yard; all the buildings here were made by her father-in-law.



Thaddeus did not marry for a long time, and then he found himself another Matryona - they have six children. Efim also had six children, but none of them survived - all died before the age of three months. Because of this, everyone in the village began to believe that Matryona had the evil eye, they even took her to the nun, but they could not achieve a positive result.

After the death of Matryona, Thaddeus talks about how his brother was ashamed of his wife. Efim preferred to “dress culturally, but she preferred to dress haphazardly, everything in a country style.” Once upon a time, the brothers had to work together in the city. Efim cheated on his wife there: he started a relationship, and didn’t want to return to Matryona

New grief came to Matryona - in 1941 Efim was taken to the front and he never returned from there. Whether Yefim died or found someone else is not known for sure.

So Matryona was left alone: ​​“misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband.”

Living alone

Matryona was kind and sociable. She maintained contact with her husband's relatives. Thaddeus’s wife also often came to her “to complain that her husband was beating her, and that her husband was stingy, pulling the veins out of her, and she cried here for a long time, and her voice was always in tears.”

Matryona felt sorry for her, her husband hit her only once - the woman walked away as a protest - after this it never happened again.

The teacher, who lives in an apartment with a woman, believes that it is likely that Efim’s wife was luckier than Thaddeus’s wife. The elder brother's wife was always severely beaten.

Matryona didn’t want to live without children and her husband, she decides to ask “that second downtrodden Matryona - the womb of her little snatches (or Thaddeus’ little blood?) - for their youngest girl, Kira. For ten years she raised her here as her own, instead of her own who failed.” At the time of the story, the girl lives with her husband in a neighboring village.

Matryona worked hard on the collective farm “not for money - for sticks”, in total she worked for 25 years, and then, despite the hassle, she managed to get a pension for herself.

Matryona worked hard - she had to prepare peat for the winter and gather lingonberries (on good days, she “brought six bags” per day).

lingonberries. We also had to prepare hay for the goats. “In the morning she took a bag and a sickle and left (...) Having filled the bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. A bag of grass made dried hay - a fork.” In addition, she also managed to help others. By her nature, she could not refuse help to anyone. It often happened that one of the relatives or just acquaintances asked her to help dig up potatoes - the woman “left her line of work and went to help.” After harvesting, she, along with other women, harnessed the plow instead of a horse and plowed the gardens. She didn’t take money for her work: “you’ll have to hide it for her.”

Once every month and a half she had troubles - she had to prepare dinner for the shepherds. On such days, Matryona went shopping: “I bought canned fish, and bought sugar and butter, which I did not eat myself.” Such was the order here - it was necessary to feed her as best as possible, otherwise she would have been made a laughing stock.

After receiving a pension and receiving money for renting out housing, Matryona’s life becomes much easier - the woman “ordered new felt boots for herself. I bought a new padded jacket. And she straightened her coat.” She even managed to save 200 rubles “for her funeral,” which, by the way, didn’t have to wait long. Matryona takes an active part in moving the room from her plot to her relatives. At a railway crossing, she rushes to help pull out a stuck sleigh - an oncoming train hits her and her nephew to death. They took off the bag to wash it. Everything was a mess - no legs, no half of the torso, no left arm. One woman crossed herself and said:

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

After the woman’s death, everyone quickly forgot her kindness and, literally on the day of the funeral, began to divide her property and condemn Matryona’s life: “and she was unclean; and she didn’t chase after the plant, stupid, she helped strangers for free (and the very reason to remember Matryona came - there was no one to call the garden to plow with a plow).”

Thus, Matryona’s life was full of troubles and tragedies: she lost both her husband and children. For everyone, she was strange and abnormal, because she did not try to live like everyone else, but retained a cheerful and kind disposition until the end of her days.

The life of Matryona in the story “Matryona’s Dvor” by A. Solzhenitsyn in quotes

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Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva is a peasant, a lonely 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. In the eleven post-war years (the action takes place in 1956), M. decided that he was no longer alive. Thaddeus also had six children, all of whom 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 I gave the upper room to my pupil Kira, which means that I will have to tear the house down, halve it - 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.”

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In the magazine " New world"Several of Solzhenitsyn's works were published, among them "Matrenin's Dvor". The story, according to the writer, is “completely autobiographical and reliable.” It talks about the Russian village, about its inhabitants, about their values, about goodness, justice, sympathy and compassion, work and help - qualities that fit in the righteous man, without whom “the village is not worth it.”

"Matrenin's Dvor" is a story about the injustice and cruelty of human fate, about the Soviet order of post-Stalin times and about the life of the most ordinary people living far from city life. The narration is told not from the perspective of the main character, but from the perspective of the narrator, Ignatyich, who in the whole story seems to play the role of only an outside observer. What is described in the story dates back to 1956 - three years passed after the death of Stalin, and then Russian people I still didn’t know and didn’t understand how to live further.

“Matrenin’s Dvor” is divided into three parts:

  1. The first tells the story of Ignatyich, it begins at the Torfprodukt station. The hero immediately reveals his cards, without making any secret of it: he is a former prisoner, and now works as a teacher at a school, he came there in search of peace and tranquility. In Stalin's time, it was almost impossible for people who had been imprisoned to find workplace, and after the death of the leader, many became school teachers (a profession in short supply). Ignatyich stays with an elderly hardworking woman named Matryona, with whom he finds it easy to communicate and has peace of mind. Her dwelling was poor, the roof sometimes leaked, but this did not mean at all that there was no comfort in it: “Perhaps to someone from the village, who was richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem friendly, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good."
  2. The second part tells about Matryona’s youth, when she had to go through a lot. The war took her fiancé Fadey away from her, and she had to marry his brother, who still had children in his arms. Taking pity on him, she became his wife, although she did not love him at all. But three years later, Fadey, whom the woman still loved, suddenly returned. The returning warrior hated her and her brother for their betrayal. But hard life could not kill her kindness and hard work, because it was in work and caring for others that she found solace. Matryona even died while doing business - she helped her lover and her sons drag part of her house across the railroad tracks, which was bequeathed to Kira (his daughter). And this death was caused by Fadey’s greed, avarice and callousness: he decided to take away the inheritance while Matryona was still alive.
  3. The third part talks about how the narrator learns about Matryona’s death and describes the funeral and wake. Her relatives are not crying out of grief, but rather because it is customary, and in their heads there are only thoughts about the division of the property of the deceased. Fadey is not at the wake.

Main characters

Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva is an elderly woman, a peasant woman, who was released from work on a collective farm due to illness. She was always happy to help people, even strangers. In the episode when the narrator moves into her hut, the author mentions that she never intentionally looked for a lodger, that is, she did not want to make money on this basis, and did not profit even from what she could. Her wealth was pots of ficus trees and an old domestic cat that she took from the street, a goat, as well as mice and cockroaches. Matryona also married her fiancé’s brother out of a desire to help: “Their mother died...they didn’t have enough hands.”

Matryona herself also had children, six, but they all died in early childhood, so she later took Fadey’s youngest daughter Kira into her upbringing. Matryona rose early morning, worked until dark, but did not show fatigue or dissatisfaction to anyone: she was kind and responsive to everyone. She was always very afraid of becoming a burden to someone, she did not complain, she was even afraid to call the doctor again. As Kira grew up, Matryona wanted to give her room as a gift, which required dividing the house - during the move, Fadey’s things got stuck in a sled on the railroad tracks, and Matryona got hit by a train. Now there was no one to ask for help, there was no person ready to unselfishly come to the rescue. But the relatives of the deceased kept in mind only the thought of profit, of dividing what was left of the poor peasant woman, already thinking about it at the funeral. Matryona stood out very much from the background of her fellow villagers, and was thus irreplaceable, invisible and the only righteous person.

Narrator, Ignatyich, to some extent, is a prototype of the writer. He served his exile and was acquitted, after which he set out in search of a calm and serene life, he wanted to work as a school teacher. He found refuge with Matryona. Judging by the desire to move away from the bustle of the city, the narrator is not very sociable and loves silence. He worries when a woman takes his padded jacket by mistake, and is confused by the volume of the loudspeaker. The narrator got along with the owner of the house; this shows that he is still not completely antisocial. However, he doesn’t understand people very well: he understood the meaning by which Matryona lived only after she passed away.

Topics and issues

Solzhenitsyn in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” talks about the life of the inhabitants of the Russian village, about the system of relationships between power and people, about the high meaning of selfless work in the kingdom of selfishness and greed.

Of all this, the theme of labor is shown most clearly. Matryona is a person who does not ask for anything in return and is ready to give herself all for the benefit of others. They don’t appreciate her and don’t even try to understand her, but this is a person who experiences tragedy every day: first, the mistakes of her youth and the pain of loss, then frequent illnesses, hard work, not life, but survival. But from all the problems and hardships, Matryona finds solace in work. And, in the end, it is work and overwork that leads her to death. The meaning of Matryona’s life is precisely this, and also care, help, the desire to be needed. Therefore, active love for others is the main theme of the story.

The problem of morality also occupies an important place in the story. Material assets in the village they exalt themselves over human soul and her work, on humanity in general. Understand the depth of Matryona's character minor characters they are simply incapable: greed and the desire to possess more blinds them to their eyes and does not allow them to see kindness and sincerity. Fadey lost his son and wife, his son-in-law faces imprisonment, but his thoughts are on how to protect the logs that were not burned.

In addition, the story has a theme of mysticism: the motive of an unidentified righteous man and the problem of cursed things - which were touched by people full of self-interest. Fadey made the upper room of Matryona's hut cursed, undertaking to knock it down.

Idea

The above-mentioned themes and problems in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” are aimed at revealing the depth of the main character’s pure worldview. An ordinary peasant woman serves as an example of the fact that difficulties and losses only strengthen a Russian person, and do not break him. With the death of Matryona, everything that she figuratively built collapses. Her house is torn apart, the remains of her property are divided among themselves, the yard remains empty and ownerless. Therefore, her life looks pitiful, no one realizes the loss. But won't the same thing happen to the palaces and jewels of the powerful? The author demonstrates the frailty of material things and teaches us not to judge others by their wealth and achievements. True meaning has moral character, which does not fade even after death, because it remains in the memory of those who saw its light.

Maybe over time the heroes will notice that a very important part of their life is missing: invaluable values. Why disclose global moral issues in such poor scenery? And what then is the meaning of the title of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”? The last words that Matryona was a righteous woman erase the boundaries of her court and expand them to the scale of the whole world, thereby making the problem of morality universal.

Folk character in the work

Solzhenitsyn reasoned in the article “Repentance and Self-Restraint”: “There are such born angels, 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.”

Matryona is distinguished from the rest by her ability to preserve her humanity and a strong core inside. To those who unscrupulously used her help and kindness, it might seem that she was weak-willed and pliable, but the heroine helped based only on her inner selflessness and moral greatness.

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"Matrenin's yard" An old village woman who lives alone and does not receive support from anyone, but who constantly and selflessly helps people.

History of creation

Solzhenitsyn wrote the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” in 1959, and the first publication took place in 1963 in literary magazine"New World". Solzhenitsyn initially gave the story the title “A Village Is Not Standing Without a Righteous Man,” but the magazine’s editors insisted on changing the title so as not to encounter problems with censorship.

The writer began working on the story in the summer of 1959, when he was visiting friends in one of the Crimean villages. By winter the story was already over. In 1961, the author sent the story to Alexander Tvardovsky, editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine, but he considered that the story should not be published. The manuscript was discussed and put aside for a while.

In the meantime, Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, which was a great success among the reading public. After this, Tvardovsky decided to once again discuss with the editor the possibility of releasing “Matryona’s Dvor”, and the story began to be prepared for publication. The title of the story was changed before publication at the insistence of the editor-in-chief, but this did not save the text from the wave of controversy that arose in the Soviet press after the publication of the magazine.


Illustration for Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin's Dvor"

Solzhenitsyn’s work was hushed up for a long time, and only in the late 80s of the twentieth century the writer’s texts began to be published again in the USSR. “Matrenin’s Dvor” was Solzhenitsyn’s first story to be published after a long break. The story was published in the Ogonyok magazine in 1989 with a huge circulation of three million copies, but the publication was not agreed upon with the author, so Solzhenitsyn called it “pirated.”

The story "Matrenin's yard"

The full name of the heroine is Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva. This is a lonely woman of sixty years old, a poor widow, in whose house there was not even a radio. When Matryona was 19 years old, a neighbor's boy Thaddeus wooed her, but the wedding did not take place because the First World War began. world war, Thaddeus was taken to fight, and he went missing.


Three years later, the heroine marries Efim, Thaddeus’s younger brother. And after the wedding, it suddenly turns out that Thaddeus is alive - he is returning home from captivity. However, there is no scandal. Thaddeus forgives his brother and his failed wife and marries another girl.

Matryona's husband disappeared at the beginning of World War II, and twelve years have passed since then at the time of the story. At the same time, Efim probably did not die, but simply took advantage of the situation so as not to return to his unloved wife, and after the war he lived somewhere else with another woman.

Thaddeus is left with his youngest daughter, Kira, whom the lonely Matryona takes in to raise. The girl lives with the heroine for ten years, and she takes care of Kira as if she were her own, and shortly before the tenant arrives, she marries her to a young driver in another village.


The heroine lives alone in the village of Talnovo somewhere in the central zone of the USSR. No one helps the elderly woman, Matryona has no one to talk to. At one time, the heroine had six children, but one after another they died in infancy.

The only person in the entire village with whom Matryona communicated was her friend Masha. They had been close friends since their youth. Masha was sincerely attached to Matryona and came to look after the goat and the hut when the heroine herself was ill. Of Matryona's relatives, there were three younger sisters who were little interested in the fate of the heroine.

The heroine wears “vague dark rags” and “senile faded handkerchiefs” and looks sick and tortured. Matryona has the roundish, wrinkled face of an unhealthy yellow and dull pale blue eyes. From time to time, the heroine experiences attacks of an unknown illness, when Matryona cannot get out of bed or even move for two or three days. During such periods, the heroine does not eat or drink, does not receive any medical care, however, she does not complain about her serious condition, simply waiting out the next “attack”.


The heroine worked on the collective farm until the end, and Matryona was released from there only when she became completely ill. At the same time, the old woman was not paid a pension, Matryona had no opportunity to earn money, and her relatives rarely remembered heroin and practically did not help. The heroine's life improved when she got a tenant - in fact, a narrator on whose behalf the story is told. The narrator pays the heroine to stay, plus that same winter, Matryona begins to receive a pension for the first time in her life, and the old woman has money.

Having acquired money, the heroine orders new felt boots, buys a padded jacket, and orders a coat from a worn railway overcoat to be sewn from a village tailor. He sews the heroine a “nice coat” with a cotton lining, which the heroine has never seen in “six decades.”

The heroine’s house is old and small, but the narrator is quite comfortable in it. In the house, the woman keeps many ficus trees in pots and tubs, which “fill the loneliness” of the heroine.


Illustrations based on the story "Matrenin's Dvor"

For all her loneliness, Matryona is a sociable woman by nature, simple and warm-hearted, tactful and delicate. The heroine does not annoy the tenant with questions and does not interfere with his work in the evenings. The narrator notes that Matryona never even asked if he was married. While busy around the house, Matryona tries not to make noise so as not to disturb the guest.

The heroine lives modestly and in harmony with her own conscience. At the same time, Matryona has little interest in housekeeping and does not strive to equip the house. She doesn’t keep cattle because she doesn’t like to feed them, she doesn’t take care of things, but she doesn’t strive to acquire them, she’s indifferent to clothes and her own external image. Of the entire household, Matryona had only a dirty white goat and a cat, which the heroine took in out of pity, because the cat was old and lame. The heroine milks the goat and gets hay for it.


"Matrenin Dvor" on the stage of the theater

Despite the fact that the heroine is not preoccupied with the household and is indifferent to her own life, she never regrets either property or her own labor and willingly helps to strangers just like that, without asking for money for it. In the evening, a neighbor could come to the heroine or distant relative and demand that Matryona go in the morning to help dig potatoes - and the woman resignedly went to do what she was told. At the same time, the heroine does not envy other people’s wealth, does not want anything for herself and refuses to take for own work money.

The heroine works hard so as not to think about misfortunes. Matryona gets up at four or five in the morning, walks around with a sack of peat and works in the garden, where she exclusively grows potatoes. At the same time, the heroine’s land is not fertile, sandy, and for some reason Matryona does not want to fertilize and put the garden in order, nor does she want to grow anything there other than potatoes. But he goes into the distant forest to pick berries and carries bundles of firewood - in the summer on himself, in the winter on a sled. Despite the difficult and unsettled life, Matryona herself considered herself happy man.


Illustration for the story "Matrenin's Dvor"

Matryona is a superstitious and probably religious woman, but the heroine is never seen praying or crossing herself in public. The heroine experiences an incomprehensible fear of trains, and is also afraid of fires and lightning. Matryona’s speech contains rare and outdated words, these are “ folk speech", filled with dialectisms and expression. Despite her lack of education, the heroine loves music and enjoys listening to romances on the radio. Matryona's difficult biography ends with tragic death under the wheels of a train.

Quotes

“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.”
“She didn’t announce what for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unhusked cardboard soup, or cardboard soup (that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley in battle - as the cheapest one, they fattened pigs and took them in bags).”
“Then I learned that crying over the deceased is not just crying, but a kind of politics. Matryona’s three sisters flew in, seized the hut, the goat and the stove, locked her chest, gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat, and explained to everyone who came that they were the only ones close to Matryona.”

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, Solzhenitsyn published several stories in the same magazine, 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 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 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 readers’ attention on amazing world 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”: “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 “Matrenin’s Dvor” was associated with the original genre"monumental story". An example of this genre is M. Sholokhov’s story “The Fate of a Man.”
In the 1960s genre features“monumental stories” 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 between this genre is the image common man, 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 of the Russian village in 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 workers, 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 Vasilievna 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.
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 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, 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, 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, longing 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. “Maybe to some from the village, who are richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem like a good-looking hut, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good: it had not yet leaked from the rains and the cold winds did not blow the stove 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 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 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. 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 tone of the phrase, the selection of “colors” one can feel author's attitude to Matryona: “From the 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 - 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.”
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, 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”, “genuinely a work of genius" 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 him looking for a birch chaga mushroom and some herbs in the forest, and briefly answered questions: “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 talk 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 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 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 received world fame 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, for the visit of Alexander Solzhenitsyn here in 1994, a similar, but much more solid house was hastily erected. 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 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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