The story of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn "Matryonin Dvor" was written in 1959. It is worth paying attention to the fact that initially the work had a slightly different look: when Solzhenitsyn decided to publish his story, Tvardovsky suggested changing the original title - “There is no village without a righteous man” and the year of the events that took place in the story, otherwise there was a risk that the work would be censored.
Solzhenitsyn's story is completely autobiographical and authentic, and the life of Matryona Vasilievna is reproduced as it really was.
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Despite the fact that the story has a changed title, each of the titles contains the meaning that the author wanted to convey to us.
He calls Matryona a righteous man. A righteous person is a saint living in the world of ordinary people, one who is ready to help at any moment. The essence of his deeds is virtue. And indeed, throughout the story, we can notice that Matryona is a sympathetic woman, she helps people for free, for her help “She does not take money. Involuntarily you hide it in her ... ".
The narrator, on behalf of whom the narration is being conducted, set himself something like a goal: "to get lost and get lost in the very interior of Russia, if there was such a place, lived." And he finds what he was looking for in Matryona’s house: “I didn’t like this place in the whole village.” Matryona's yard is all its inhabitants and buildings, including even cockroaches and mice. The name Matryona means mother, mother, matryoshka, that is, she is, as it were, the mother of everything that is in her yard. The main feature of her character is, perhaps, kindness.
Matryona's courtyard can be called the embodiment of calm, all its components: the house, the goat, the cat, mice, cockroaches, ficuses and Matryona herself are indivisible, and if one is destroyed, then everything else will be destroyed. And so it happened when the relatives decided to divide her “good”, separating part of the house, they brought down the whole way, ruined the whole yard and the hostess herself.
Thus died Matryona, whose righteousness lay in the fact that she knew how to preserve her pure soul in conditions that were absolutely unsuitable for this. With this work, Solzhenitsyn wanted to say how little Matryon was left, because it was with him that the fate of the Russian village was connected. Without Matryon, "the village cannot stand," says Solzhenitsyn.
Updated: 2019-11-26
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UMK ed. B. A. Lanina. Literature (5-9)
Literature
For modern schoolchildren, it, as a rule, causes a depressing impression: those who manage to finish reading it perceive the story as one continuous stream of negativity. But Solzhenitsyn's pictures of life in the Soviet post-war village deserve a closer look. The key task of a literature teacher is to make sure that students do not confine themselves to the formal memorization of the finale, but, first of all, see in a dark and sad story what saves a person in the most inhuman conditions - the light of a saved soul.
This is one of the leading themes of Soviet literature of the 60s and 70s: the experience of the individual existence of a person in the midst of a total downward movement of the state and society.
The story is based on real events - the fate and death of Matryona Zakharova, from whom the author, having been released after a ten-year imprisonment and a three-year exile, settled in the village of Miltsevo, Gus-Khrustalny district of the Vladimir region (in the story - Talnovo). His desire was to get as far away from the annoyingly thundering loudspeakers as possible, to get lost, to be as close as possible to interior, deep Russia. In fact, Solzhenitsyn saw the hopeless poverty of the people and the impudent irresponsibility of local authorities - something that leads a person to moral impoverishment, depreciation of goodness, selflessness and nobility. Solzhenitsyn recreates the panorama of this life.
In the story "Matryona Dvor" we see a bunch of vulgar, greedy, spiteful people who, probably, could be completely different in different conditions, if not for the endless disasters: two world wars (an episode about marriage), chronic malnutrition (assortment of a store and "menu" of the narrator), lack of rights, bureaucracy (the plot is about pensions and certificates), the blatant inhumanity of local authorities (about work on the collective farm) ... And this ruthlessness is projected onto relations between people: not only relatives are merciless to each other, the person himself merciless to himself (an episode of Matrena's illness). No one owes a man anything here, no one is a friend or a brother... but should he?
Easy answers are yes or no. But they are not about Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva, the only one who, until the end of her days, retained her personality, inner core and human dignity.
Matryona only seems to be a spineless, unrequited slave, although this is how selfish neighbors, relatives, the impudent wife of the collective farm chairman see her - those who are unaware that work can warm a person from the inside, that goodness is not property, but a state of mind, and saving the soul is more important than external well-being.
Matrena herself knows what to do and why, to whom she owes what, and to herself first of all: to survive without doing evil, to give without regret. This is “her yard”, the place of “living not by lies”. This courtyard was built in the middle of a flawed, slovenly life with mice and cockroaches, contrary to the unfairly cruel female fate, in which to escape means to give up a lot.
The story is about the fact that this Court is doomed, that “good people” are gradually rolling it out on a log, and now there is nothing and nowhere for the soul to live after the incomprehensible human barbarism. Nature itself froze before the significance of Matryona's death (an episode of the nightly expectation of her return). And people continue to drink vodka and share property.
The workbook is included in the teaching materials for literature for grade 7 (author G.V. Moskvin, N.N. Puryaeva, E.L. Erokhin). Designed for independent work of students, but can also be used in the classroom.
Portrait of nothingness. The description of Matryona's hut gives us a repulsive impression, but the narrator remains to live here and does not even resist the cockroach paw found in his soup: "there was no falsehood in this." What do you think about the narrator in this regard?
Unequal battle. Matryona is constantly at work, constantly acting, but her actions resemble a battle with a terrible invincible force. “They oppress me,” she says of herself. It is forbidden to collect peat to heat the stove in winter: they will be caught and put on trial. Getting grass for a goat is only illegal. The vegetable gardens have been pruned, and apart from potatoes, nothing can be grown - and weeds grow on the land taken away. Matryona is sick, but she is embarrassed to disturb the doctor. Nobody helps Matryona, but both the neighbors and the collective farm call on her for help (she herself was expelled from the collective farm as an invalid). She refuses no one and does not take money. But why? Why doesn't she fight back, refuse, never snap at her tormentors, but continues to allow herself to be used? And how to call this invincible force that cannot defeat (humiliate, trample) Matryona? What is the power of Matryona? What about weakness?
A village does not stand without a righteous man. This is the first title of the story. Tvardovsky, speaking about this story, called it "The Righteous", but rejected the title as straightforward. Because the reader needs to get to the end in order to understand that this flawed Matryona is the righteous woman that the title promised. Note: Matryona has nothing to do with religion; in the story there is no God as a higher power, therefore there can be no righteous person in the full sense of the word. And there is an ordinary person who survives at the expense of work, gentleness and harmony with himself: “Matryona is always busy with work, deeds, and after working, she returns to her unsettled life fresh and radiant.” “Matryona never spared her labor or her kindness” ... “Year after year, for many years, she did not earn from anywhere ... not a ruble. Because they didn’t pay her pensions... And on the collective farm she worked not for money, but for sticks.”
People ruined by life. During life, Matryona is always alone, one on one with all the troubles. But when she dies, it turns out that she has sisters, a brother-in-law, a niece, a sister-in-law - and all of them did not try to help her for a minute. They did not appreciate, did not love, even after death they speak of her "with contemptuous regret." As if they are with Matryona from different worlds. Take the word “good”: “How did it happen with us that people call property good?” the narrator asks. Answer him, please, using the facts from the story (after the death of Matryona, the whole environment begins to divide her property among themselves, even looking at the old fence. The sister-in-law blames: why did Matryona not keep a piglet in the household? (And you and I can guess why? ).
Particular attention should be paid to the image of Fadey, deliberately demonized by the author. After the accident on the railway tracks, Matrena's brother-in-law Fadey, who had just witnessed the terrible death of several people, including his own son, is most concerned about the fate of good logs, which will now be used for firewood. Greed, leading to the loss of not only spirituality, but also the mind.
But is it really the fault of the difficult living conditions of people and the inhuman regime? Is this the only reason why people deteriorate: they become greedy, narrow-minded, vile, envious? Perhaps spiritual degradation and the surrender of human positions are the lot of the mass man in any society? What is a "mass man"?
Eloquent details. This story was highly appreciated by contemporaries not only in terms of content (the January NM magazine for 1963 could not be obtained for several years in a row), but also from the artistic side: Anna Akhmatova and Lidia Chukovskaya wrote about the impeccable language and style of the text immediately after reading, further - more. Precise and figurative details are Solzhenitsyn's strong point as an artist. Those eyebrows of Fadey, which converged and diverged like bridges; the wall in Matrena's kitchen seems to be moving from the abundance of cockroaches; "a crowd of frightened ficuses" at the hour of Matryona's death; mice were "taken over by madness", "a separate log cabin of the upper room was dismantled by the ribs"; the sisters “flocked”, “captured”, “gutted”, and more: “... they came loudly and in overcoats”. That is, how did you come? Scary, unceremonious, domineering? It is interesting to look for and write out figurative details and correlate them with the “signals” that the text gives: danger, obscurity, madness, falseness, dehumanization ...
It is good to perform this task in groups, considering several topics-moods at once. If you use the "Classwork" service of the LECTA platform, it will be convenient for you not to waste the time of the lesson, but to set work on the text at home. Divide the class into groups, create workspaces for each group, and watch as students complete a spreadsheet or presentation. The service allows you to work not only with text, but also with illustrations, audio and video materials. Ask students from different groups to look for illustrations for the story or simply relevant visuals - for example, paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a famous medieval village singer.
literary allusions. There are a lot of them in the story. Start with Nekrasov: students themselves can easily recall Matryona Korchagina from “Who Lives Well in Rus'” and the famous passage from the poem “Frost-Red Nose”: what is similar, what is different? Is such a chanting of a woman possible in European culture... why... and what is accepted there?
The implicit motif of the “little man” from Gogol’s “Overcoat”: Matryona, having received a hard-earned pension, sewed herself an overcoat from a railway overcoat and sewed 200 rubles into the lining for a rainy day, which soon arrived. What does the allusion with Bashmachkin refer to? “We didn’t live well, we don’t even need to start”? “Whoever was born in poverty, that person will die in poverty”? - these and other proverbs of the Russian people support the psychology of humility and humility. Is it possible to think that Solzhenitsyn also supports?
Tolstoy's motives are inevitable; Solzhenitsyn's portrait hung over his bedside table. Matryona and Platon Karataev are both chubby, unreflective, but possessing the right instinct for life. Matryona and Anna Karenina are the motive for the tragic death on the railway: for all the dissimilarity of the heroines, both can neither accept the current situation nor change it.
The theme of a blizzard is like the hands of fate (Pushkin's): before the fatal catastrophe, a blizzard blew on the tracks for two weeks, postponing the transportation of logs, but no one came to their senses. After that, Matryona's cat disappeared. A strange delay - and an ominous prediction.
And there is a lot about madness - in what sense and why do the characters of the story go crazy? Is the reader in his right mind, who wrote in the review "kindness and brought Matryona Vasilievna to death"?
Subject
The theme of the story is a description of the life of the patriarchal Russian village, which reflects how flourishing egoism and rapacity disfigure Russia and "destroy communications and meaning." The writer raises in a short story the serious problems of the Russian village of the early 50s. (her life, customs and mores, the relationship between power and a working person). The author repeatedly emphasizes that the state needs only working hands, and not the person himself: “She was lonely all around, but 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 with the unscrupulous attitude of others to business.
Idea
The problems raised in the story are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the Christian Orthodox worldview of the heroine. On the example of the fate of a village woman, to show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly show the measure of the human in each of the people. But Matryona dies - and this world collapses: her house is pulled apart by a log, her modest belongings are greedily divided. And there is no one to protect Matryona's yard, no one even thinks that with the departure of Matryona, something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, passes away.
“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand. No city. Not all our land." The last phrases expand the boundaries of the Matryona Dvor (as the personal world of the heroine) to the scale of humanity.
Main heroes
The main character of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva. Matryona is a lonely destitute peasant woman with a generous and disinterested soul. She lost her husband in the war, buried six of her own and raised other people's children. Matrena gave her pupil the most precious thing in her life - the house: "... she did not feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, as well as neither her labor nor her goodness ...".
The heroine has endured many hardships in life, but has not lost the ability to empathize with others, joy and sorrow. She is disinterested: she sincerely rejoices in someone else's good harvest, although she never has it on the sand herself. All the wealth of Matrena is a dirty white goat, a lame cat and large flowers in tubs.
Matryona is the concentration of the best features of the national character: she is shy, understands the "education" of the narrator, respects him for it. The author appreciates in Matryona her delicacy, the absence of annoying curiosity about the life of another person, hard work. For a quarter of a century she worked on a collective farm, 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 received a pension. Life was extremely difficult. She got grass for a goat, peat for warmth, collected old stumps turned out by a tractor, soaked lingonberries for the winter, grew potatoes, helping those who were nearby to survive.
The image of Matryona and individual details in the story are symbolic. 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 life is like the lives of saints. Her house, as it were, symbolizes the ark of the biblical Noah, in which he escapes from the global flood. The death of Matryona 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 sisters, sister-in-law, adopted daughter Kira, the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated it. She lived in poverty, wretchedly, lonely - a "lost old woman", exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, everyone condemned Matryona in chorus that she was funny and stupid, she worked for others for free all her life. Everyone mercilessly used Matryona's kindness and innocence - and unanimously judged her for this. Among the people around her, the author treats her heroine with great sympathy, her son Fadcea and her pupil Kira love her.
The analysis of the story "Matryona Dvor" includes a description of its characters, a summary, the history of creation, the disclosure of the main idea and problems that the author of the work raised.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the story is based on real events, "completely autobiographical."
In the center of the narrative is a picture of the life of the Russian village in the 50s. XX century, the problem of the village, reasoning on the topic of the main human values, questions of kindness, justice and compassion, the problem of labor, the ability to go to the rescue of one's neighbor who found himself in a difficult situation. All these qualities are possessed by a righteous person, without whom "the village is not worth it."
Initially, the title of the story sounded like this: "A village does not stand without a righteous man." The final version was proposed at an editorial discussion in 1962 by Alexander Tvardovsky. The writer noted that the meaning of the title should not be moralistic. In response, Solzhenitsyn good-naturedly concluded that he was unlucky with names.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008)
Work on the story was carried out over several months - from July to December 1959. Solzhenitsyn wrote it in 1961.
In January 1962, during the first editorial discussion, Tvardovsky convinced the author, and at the same time himself, that the work should not be published. Nevertheless, he asked to leave the manuscript in the editorial office. As a result, the story saw the light of day in 1963 in Novy Mir.
It is noteworthy that the life and death of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova are reflected in this work as truthfully as possible - exactly as it was in reality. The real name of the village is Miltsevo, it is located in the Kuplovsky district of the Vladimir region.
Critics warmly welcomed the work of the author, highly appreciating its artistic value. The essence of Solzhenitsyn's work was very accurately described by A. Tvardovsky: an uneducated, simple woman, an ordinary worker, an old peasant woman ... how can such a person attract so much attention and curiosity?
Maybe because her inner world is very rich and sublime, endowed with the best human qualities, and against its background everything worldly, material, empty fades. For these words Solzhenitsyn was very grateful to Tvardovsky. In a letter to him, the author noted the importance of his words for himself, and also pointed out the depth of his writer's view, from which the main idea of \u200b\u200bthe work was not hidden - the story of a loving and suffering woman.
"Matryona Dvor" refers to the genre of the story. This is a narrative epic genre, the main features of which are the small volume and unity of the event.
Solzhenitsyn's work tells about the unfairly cruel fate of an ordinary person, about the life of villagers, about the Soviet order of the 50s of the last century, when after the death of Stalin the orphaned Russian people did not understand how to live on.
The narration is conducted on behalf of Ignatich, who throughout the entire plot, as it seems to us, acts only as an abstract observer.
The list of characters in the story is not numerous, it comes down to several characters.
Matrena Grigorieva- an elderly woman, a peasant woman who worked all her life on a collective farm and who was released from heavy manual labor due to a serious illness.
She always tried to help people, even strangers. When the narrator comes to her to rent a place, the author notes the modesty and disinterestedness of this woman.
Matryona never deliberately looked for a tenant, did not seek to cash in on it. All her property consisted of flowers, an old cat and a goat. Matrona's dedication knows no bounds. Even her marital union with the groom's brother is explained by the desire to help. Since their mother died, there was no one to do housework, then Matryona took on this burden.
The peasant woman had six children, but they all died at an early age. Therefore, the woman took up the education of Kira, the youngest daughter of Thaddeus. Matryona worked from early morning until late at night, but she never showed her displeasure to anyone, did not complain about fatigue, did not grumble about her fate.
She was kind and responsive to everyone. She never complained, did not want to be a burden to someone. Matrena decided to give her room to the grown-up Kira, but for this it was necessary to divide the house. During the move, Thaddeus' things got stuck on the railroad, and the woman died under the wheels of the train. From that moment on, there was no person capable of selfless help.
Meanwhile, Matryona's relatives thought only about profit, about how to share the things left from her. The peasant woman was very different from the rest of the villagers. It was the same righteous man - the only one, irreplaceable and so invisible to the surrounding people.
Ignatich is the prototype of the writer. At one time, the hero was serving a link, then he was acquitted. Since then, the man set out to find a quiet corner where he could spend the rest of his life in peace and serenity, working as a simple school teacher. Ignatich found his refuge at Matrena.
The narrator is a private person who does not like excessive attention and long conversations. All this he prefers peace and quiet. Meanwhile, he managed to find a common language with Matryona, however, due to the fact that he understood people poorly, he could only comprehend the meaning of the life of a peasant woman after her death.
Thaddeus- former fiance of Matryona, brother of Yefim. In his youth, he was going to marry her, but he went into the army, and there was no news of him for three years. Then Matryona was given in marriage to Yefim. Returning, Thaddeus almost killed his brother and Matryona with an ax, but he came to his senses in time.
The hero is cruel and unrestrained. Without waiting for the death of Matryona, he began to demand from her part of the house for her daughter and her husband. Thus, it is Thaddeus who is to blame for the death of Matryona, who fell under a train while helping her family pull their house apart. He was not at the funeral.
The story is divided into three parts. The first tells about the fate of Ignatich, that he is a former prisoner and now works as a school teacher. Now he needs a quiet haven, which the kind Matryona gladly provides him.
The second part tells about the difficult events in the fate of the peasant woman, about the youth of the main character and the fact that the war took her lover from her and she had to connect her fate with the unloved man, the brother of her fiancé.
In the third episode, Ignatich learns about the death of a poor peasant woman, tells about the funeral and commemoration. Relatives squeeze tears out of themselves, because circumstances require it. There is no sincerity in them, their thoughts are only occupied with how it is more profitable for themselves to divide the property of the deceased.
Matrena is a person who does not require a reward for her bright deeds, she is ready for self-sacrifice for the good of another person. They do not notice it, do not appreciate it and do not try to understand it. Matryona's whole life is full of suffering, starting from her youth, when she had to join her fate with an unloved person, endure the pain of loss, ending with maturity and old age with their frequent illnesses and hard manual labor.
The meaning of the life of the heroine is in hard work, in which she forgets about all her sorrows and problems. Her joy is caring for others, helping, compassion and love for people. This is the main theme of the story.
The problem of the work is reduced to questions of morality. The fact is that in the countryside, material values are placed above spiritual values, they prevail over humanity.
The complexity of Matryona's character, the sublimity of her soul is inaccessible to the understanding of the greedy people surrounding the heroine. They are driven by a thirst for hoarding and profit, which obscures their eyes and does not allow them to see the kindness, sincerity and selflessness of the peasant woman.
Matryona serves as an example that the difficulties and hardships of life temper a strong-willed person, they are unable to break him. After the death of the main character, everything that she built begins to collapse: the house is pulled apart in pieces, the remnants of miserable property are divided, the yard is left to fend for itself. No one sees what a terrible loss has occurred, what a wonderful person has left this world.
The author shows the frailty of the material, teaches not to judge people by money and regalia. The true meaning lies in the moral character. It remains in our memory even after the death of the person from whom this amazing light of sincerity, love and mercy emanated.
to Central Russia. Thanks to new trends, a recent convict is now not refused to become a school teacher in the Vladimir village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). Solzhenitsyn settles in the hut of a local resident, Matryona Vasilievna, a woman of about sixty, who is often ill. Matryona has neither a husband nor children. Her loneliness is brightened up only by the ficuses planted everywhere in the house, and the rickety cat picked up out of pity. (See description of Matrona's house.)
With warm, lyrical sympathy, AI Solzhenitsyn describes the difficult life of Matryona. For many years she did not have a single ruble of earnings. On the collective farm, Matrena works "for the sticks of workdays in the filthy accountant's book." The law that came out after Stalin's death finally gives her the right to seek a pension, but even then not for herself, but for the loss of her husband, who went missing at the front. To do this, you need to collect a bunch of certificates, and then take them to the social security and the village council many times, 10-20 kilometers away. Matrona's hut is full of mice and cockroaches that cannot be bred. From living creatures, she keeps only a goat, and feeds mainly on “kartovy” (potatoes) no larger than a chicken egg: her sandy, unfertilized garden does not give her larger. But even with such a need, Matryona remains a bright person, with a radiant smile. A good mood helps her to maintain work - hiking for peat in the forest (with a two-pound bag over her shoulders for three kilometers), mowing hay for a goat, chores around the house. Due to old age and illness, Matryona has already been released from the collective farm, but the formidable wife of the chairman now and then orders her to help at work for free. Matryona easily agrees to help her neighbors in the gardens without money. Having received a pension of 80 rubles from the state, she puts on new felt boots, a coat from a worn railway overcoat - and believes that her life has noticeably improved.
"Matrenin Dvor" - the house of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova in the village of Miltsevo, Vladimir Region, the scene of the story by A. I. Solzhenitsyn
Soon Solzhenitsyn also learns the story of Matrena's marriage. In her youth, she was going to marry her neighbor Thaddeus. However, in 1914 he was taken to the German war - and he disappeared without a trace for three years. So without waiting for news from the groom, in the belief that he was dead, Matryona married Thaddeus' brother, Yefim. But a few months later, Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. In his hearts, he threatened to chop Matryona and Yefim with an ax, then he cooled off and took another Matryona, from a neighboring village, for himself. They lived next door to her. Thaddeus was known in Talnovo as an imperious, stingy peasant. He constantly beat his wife, although he had six children from her. Matryona and Yefim also had six, but not one of them lived more than three months. Yefim, having gone to another war in 1941, did not return from it. Matryona, friendly with his wife Thaddeus, begged her youngest daughter, Kira, for ten years raised her as her own, and shortly before Solzhenitsyna appeared in Talnovo, she married her to a locomotive driver in the village of Cherusti. The story of her two fiancés Matryona told Alexander Isaevich herself, being worried at the same time, like a young one.
Kira and her husband in Cherusty had to get a piece of land, and for this they had to quickly put up some kind of building. Old Thaddeus in the winter suggested moving there the upper room, attached to the mother's house. Matryona was already going to bequeath this room to Kira (and three of her sisters were marking the house). Under the persistent persuasion of the greedy Thaddeus, after two sleepless nights, Matryona agreed during her lifetime, breaking part of the roof of the house, dismantling the upper room and transporting it to Cherusti. Before the eyes of the hostess and Solzhenitsyn, Thaddeus with his sons and sons-in-law came to the matryona yard, clattered with axes, creaked with torn boards and dismantled the upper room into logs. The three sisters of Matryona, having learned how she succumbed to the persuasion of Thaddeus, unanimously called her a fool.
Matrena Vasilievna Zakharova - the prototype of the main character of the story
A tractor was brought in from Cherusti. The logs of the chamber were loaded onto two sledges. The thick-faced tractor driver, in order not to make an extra trip, announced that he would pull two sleds at once - so it turned out to be more profitable for him in terms of money. The disinterested Matryona herself, fussing, helped to load the logs. Already in the dark, the tractor with difficulty pulled a heavy load from the mother's yard. The restless worker did not sit at home here either - she ran away with everyone to help along the way.
She was not destined to return alive ... At the railway crossing, the cable of an overloaded tractor burst. The tractor driver with his son Thaddeus rushed to get along with him, and Matryona was carried along with them. At this time, two coupled locomotives approached the crossing, backwards and without turning on the lights. Unexpectedly flying in, they smashed to death all three who were busy at the cable, mutilated the tractor, fell off the rails themselves. A fast train with a thousand passengers almost got into the wreck, approaching the crossing.
At dawn, everything that was left of Matryona was brought from the crossing on a sled under a dirty bag thrown over. The body had no legs, no half of the torso, no left arm. And the face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead. One woman crossed herself and said:
- The Lord left her the right hand. There will be prayers to God...
The village began to gather for the funeral. Women relatives lamented over the coffin, but self-interest was visible in their words. And it was not hidden that Matrena's sisters and her husband's relatives were preparing for a fight for the legacy of the deceased, for her old house. Only the wife of Thaddeus and the pupil of Cyrus sobbed sincerely. Thaddeus himself, who lost his once beloved woman and son in that catastrophe, clearly thought only of how to save the logs of the upper room scattered during the crash near the railway. Asking for permission to return them, he continually rushed from the coffins to the station and village authorities.
AI Solzhenitsyn in the village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). October 1956
On Sunday Matryona and son Thaddeus were buried. The memorials are over. In the coming days, Thaddeus pulled out a barn and a fence from his mother's sisters, which he immediately dismantled with his sons and transported on a sled. Alexander Isaevich moved in with one of Matryona's sister-in-laws, who often and always with contemptuous regret spoke of her cordiality, simplicity, how she was "stupid, helped strangers for free", "didn't chase after the equipment and didn't even keep a pig." For Solzhenitsyn, it was precisely from these disdainful words that a new image of Matryona surfaced, which he did not understand her, even living side by side with her. This stranger to her sisters, ridiculous to her sister-in-law, a non-possessive woman who did not accumulate property for death, buried six children, but did not like her sociable disposition, felt sorry for the rickety cat, and once at night, during a fire, she rushed to save not the hut, but her beloved ficuses - and there is the same righteous man, without which, according to the proverb, the village does not stand.
Solzhenitsyn Alexander Isaevich (1918 - 2008) Born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. Parents were from peasants. This did not prevent them from getting a good education. The mother was widowed six months before the birth of her son. To feed him, she went to work as a typist. In 1938, Solzhenitsyn entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University, and in 1941, having received a diploma in mathematics, he graduated from the correspondence department of the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (IFLI) in Moscow. After the start of World War II, he was drafted into the army (artillery). On February 9, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by front-line counterintelligence: when reading (opening) his letter to a friend, NKVD officers found critical remarks about I.V. Stalin. The tribunal sentenced Alexander Isaevich to 8 years in prison, followed by exile in Siberia.
In 1957, after the start of the fight against Stalin's personality cult, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated. N. S. Khrushchev personally authorized the publication of his story about the Stalinist camps One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). In 1967, after Solzhenitsyn sent an open letter to the Congress of the Writers' Union of the USSR calling for an end to censorship, his works were banned. Nevertheless, the novels In the First Circle (1968) and Cancer Ward (1969) were distributed in samizdat and were published without the consent of the author in the West. In 1970, Alexander Isaevich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 1973 the KGB confiscated the manuscript. Died August 3, 2008 new work of the writer of the year in Moscow. "The Gulag Archipelago". The "Gulag Archipelago" meant prisons, forced labor camps, settlements for exiles scattered throughout the USSR. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, accused of high treason, and deported to the FRG. In 1976 he moved to the USA and lived in Vermont, doing literary work. Only in 1994 was the writer able to return to Russia. Until recently, Solzhenitsyn continued writing and public
The main theme of this writer's work is not at all a criticism of communism and not a curse on the Gulag, but the struggle between good and evil - the eternal theme of world art. Solzhenitsyn's work grew not only on the traditions of Russian literature of the 20th century. As a rule, his works are considered against the background of an extremely limited range of socio-political and literary phenomena of the 19th and 20th centuries. The artistic space of Solzhenitsyn's prose is a combination of three worlds - ideal (Divine), real (earthly) and infernal (devilish).
This structure of the world corresponds to the arrangement of the soul of a Russian person. It is also three-part and is a combination of several principles: holy, human and bestial. In different periods, one of these principles is suppressed, the other begins to dominate, and this explains the high rises and deep falls of the Russian people. The time that Solzhenitsyn writes about in the story "Matryona Dvor", in his opinion, is one of the worst failures in Russian history, the time of the triumph of the Antichrist. For Solzhenitsyn, the diabolical anti-world is the realm of egoism and primitive rationalism, the triumph of self-interest and the denial of absolute values; it is dominated by the cult of earthly well-being, and man is proclaimed the measure of all values.
Elements of oral folk art in the story "Matryonin Dvor" The disclosure of the heroine's inner world on the basis of song style is traditional. So, Matrena has a “melodious” speech: “She didn’t speak, she sang touchingly”, “friendly words ... began with some kind of low torment, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” The impression was strengthened by the inclusion of "singing" dialectisms in the text. The dialectic words used in the story very vividly convey the speech of the heroine’s native land: kartov, cardboard soup, to the ugly (in the evening), upper room, duel (blizzard), etc. Matryona has strong ideas about how to sing “in our ”, and her memories of her youth cause the narrator to associate with “a song under the sky, which has long since fallen behind and cannot be sung with mechanisms”. The story uses proverbs that reflect the bitter experience of folk life: “The dunno lies on the stove, they lead the know-it-all on a string”, “There are two mysteries in the world: I don’t remember how I was born, I don’t know how I will die.”
At the end of the story, folk wisdom becomes the basis for evaluating the heroine: “... she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb (meaning, the proverb “A city does not stand without a saint, a village without a righteous man”), a village does not stand” . In the story "Matryona Dvor" there are repeatedly signs that promise something unkind. It should be recalled that signs are characteristic of many folklore works: songs, epics, fairy tales, etc. Tragic events are also foreshadowed by Matryona’s fear of moving (“I was afraid ... most of all for some reason ...”), and the loss of her kitten at the consecration (“... how an unclean spirit took him away"), and the fact that "in the same days, a rickety cat wandered out of the yard ...". Nature itself warns the heroine against evil. A blizzard circling for two days interferes with transportation, after which a thaw immediately begins. Thus, folklore and Christian motifs occupy a significant place in this story. Solzhenitsyn uses them because they are directly connected with the Russian people. And the fate of the people during the turmoil of the 20th century is the central theme of all Solzhenitsyn's work. . .
Year of first publication - 1963 Genre: short story Genre: epic Type of artistic speech: prose Type of plot: social, psychological
History of creation The story “Matryona Dvor” was written in 1959 and published in 1964. This is Solzhenitsyn's story about the situation in which he found himself after returning from the camp. He “wanted to get lost in the very interior of Russia”, to find “a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways”. After rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn lived in the village of Maltsevo, Kurlovsky District, Vladimir Region, with a peasant woman, Matrena Vasilievna Zakharova. The former prisoner could only be hired for hard work, he also wanted to teach.
Initially, the author called his work "A village without a righteous man is not worth it." It is known that in 1963, in order to avoid friction with censorship, the publisher A. T. Tvardovsky changed the name - the idea of righteousness referred to Christianity and was not welcomed in the early 60s of the twentieth century.
Short story In the summer of 1956, at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow, a passenger gets off along the railway line to Murom and Kazan. This is a narrator whose fate is reminiscent of the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front he “was delayed with the return of ten years”, that is, he spent time in the camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents "perepal"). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But living in the village with the wonderful name High Field did not work out, because they did not bake bread and did not sell anything edible there. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his hearing Peat product. However, it turns out that “not everything is around peat extraction” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo. . . This reconciles the narrator with his share, for it promises him "kondo Russia". In one of the villages called Talnovo, he settles. The mistress of the hut in which the narrator lodges is called Matryona Vasilievna Grigoryeva, or simply Matryona.
The fate of Matryona, about which she does not immediately, not considering it interesting for a "cultured" person, sometimes in the evenings tells the guest, fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees a special meaning in her fate, which is not noticed by fellow villagers and relatives of Matryona. The husband went missing at the beginning of the war. He loved Matryona and did not beat her like village husbands beat their wives. But Matryona herself hardly loved him. She was supposed to marry her husband's older brother, Thaddeus. However, he went to the front in the First World War and disappeared. Matryona was waiting for him, but in the end, at the insistence of the Thaddeus family, she married her younger brother, Yefim. And suddenly Thaddeus returned, who was in Hungarian captivity. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband with an ax just because Yefim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride for himself with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to Thaddeus six children, but the “first Matryona” had all the children from Yefim (also six) died before they even lived for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “spoiled”, and she herself believed in it. Then she took up the daughter of the “second Matryona” - Kira, raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.
Matryona lived all her life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. There is a huge inner strength in Matryona. For example, she is able to stop a rushing horse on the run, which men cannot stop. Gradually, the narrator realizes that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without a trace, that the whole village and the whole Russian land still rests. But this discovery hardly pleases him. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to her next? Hence the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies helping Thaddeus and his sons to drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for the death of Matryona and decided to take the inheritance for the young during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of duty than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona's property. Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.
Plot The story is absolutely documentary, there is practically no fiction in it, the events that took place are described in the story with chronological accuracy. The story begins in August 1956 and ends in June 1957. Culmination The climax is the episode of cutting off the chamber, and the denouement is the moment of Matrena's death at the crossing while transporting the log house of her chamber: “At the crossing there is a hill, the entrance is steep. There is no barrier. With the first sleigh, the tractor went over, and the cable burst, and the second sleigh ... got stuck ... in the same place ... Matryona also suffered. ”
Composition The work consists of three chapters. 1. Image of a Russian village in the early 50s. Includes a detailed exposition: the story of finding shelter and meeting the mistress of the house, when the hero is only watching Matryona. 2. The life and fate of the heroine of the story. We learn the story of Matrena, her biography, transmitted in memories. 3. Lessons of morality. The third chapter follows after the denouement and is an epilogue.
The main characters The narrator (Ignatich) is an autobiographical character. Matryona calls R. Ignatich. He served a link "in a dusty, hot desert", was rehabilitated. R. wanted to live in some village in central Russia. Once in Talnov, he began to rent a room from Matryona and teach mathematics at a local school. R. is closed, avoids people, does not like noise. He worries when Matryona accidentally puts on his padded jacket, suffers from the noise of the loudspeaker. But the hero immediately got along with Matryona herself, despite the fact that they lived in the same room: she was very quiet and helpful. But R., an intelligent and experienced person, did not immediately appreciate Matryona at its true worth. He understood the essence of M. only after the death of the heroine, equating her to the righteous ("There is no village without a righteous man," R. recalled).
Is there a detailed portrait of the heroine in the story? What portrait details does the writer focus on? Matryona is endowed with a discreet appearance. It is important for the author to depict not so much the external beauty of a simple Russian peasant woman as the inner light streaming from her eyes, and the more clearly emphasize his idea: “Those people always have good faces who are at odds with their conscience.”
What artistic details create a picture of Matryona's life? All her “wealth” is ficuses, a lopsided cat, a goat, mice and cockroaches. The whole surrounding world of Matrena in her darkish hut with a large Russian stove is a continuation of herself, a part of her life. Everything here is natural and organic: beloved ficuses "filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent, but lively crowd."
How does the theme of the heroine's past unfold in the story? The life path of the heroine is not easy. She had to sip a lot of grief and injustice in her lifetime: broken love, the death of six children, the loss of her husband in the war, hellish labor in the countryside, severe illness, a bitter resentment at the collective farm, which squeezed all the strength out of her, and then wrote it off as unnecessary . In the fate of one Matryona, the tragedy of a rural Russian woman is concentrated.
How does Matryona appear in the system of other images of the story, what is the attitude of those around her towards her? The heroes of the story fall into two unequal parts: Matryona and the narrator who understands and loves her, and those who can be called "Nematryona", her relatives. The boundary between them is indicated in the fact that the main thing in the consciousness and behavior of each of them is an interest in a common life, a desire to participate in it, an open sincere attitude towards people or a focus only on one's own interests, one's own home, one's own wealth.
The image of the righteous woman Matryona in the story is contrasted by Thaddeus. In his words about the marriage of Matryona with his brother, fierce hatred is felt. The return of Thaddeus reminded Matryona of their wonderful past. In Thaddeus, nothing faltered after the misfortune with Matryona, he even looked at her dead body with some indifference. The train crash, under which both the room and the people who transported it, was predetermined by the petty desire of Thaddeus and his relatives to save on small things, not to drive the tractor twice, but to get by with one flight. Many after her death began to reproach Matryona. So, the sister-in-law said about her: “. . . and she was unclean, and she did not chase the furnishing, and she was not careful; . . . and stupid, helped strangers for free. Even Ignatich admits with pain and remorse: “There is no Matrena. A family member was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for her quilted jacket.
The conflict between Matryona and the village is not developed in the story, it is rather indifference and neglect, misunderstanding of her worldview. We see only one unrighteous Thaddeus, who forced Matryona to give up part of the house. After the death of Matryona, the village is morally impoverished. Describing her funeral, Solzhenitsyn does not hide his dissatisfaction with fellow villagers: they buried Matryona in a poor, unpainted coffin, sang “eternal memory” in drunken, hoarse voices, hastily divided her things. Why are they so heartless? The author explains the anger of people with social problems. Social poverty has led the village to spiritual poverty. Solzhenitsyn's view of the countryside in the 1960s is distinguished by its harsh, cruel truthfulness. But this one, however, is imbued with pain, and torment, and love, and hope. Love is the desire to change the social order that has brought Russia to the edge of the abyss. The hope is that if there is at least one righteous woman in every village, and he hopes that there is.
The Theme of Righteousness Solzhenitsyn approaches the theme of righteousness, a favorite in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century, delicately, unobtrusively, and even with humor. Speaking of Matryona, his hero remarks: “Only she had fewer sins than her rickety cat. She choked mice! . ” The writer rethinks the images of the righteous in Russian literature and depicts the righteous not as a person who has gone through many sins, repented and began to live like a god. He makes righteousness a natural way of life for the heroine. At the same time, Matryona is not a typical image, she is not like other “Talnovskaya women” who live by material interests. She is one of those "three righteous people" who are so hard to find.
Idea: Using the example of revealing the fate of a village woman, to show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly show the measure of the human in each of the people. The idea of "Matryona's Court" and its problems are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the Christian-Orthodox worldview of the heroine.
Artistic space The artistic space of the story is interesting. It starts with its name, then expands to the railway station, which is located “one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the branch that goes from Murom to Kazan”, and to the villages “over the hill”, and then covers the entire country that accepts foreign delegation, and extends even into the Universe, which artificial satellites of the Earth should fill. The category of space is associated with the images of the house and the road, symbolizing the life path of the heroes.
Issues: ü The Russian village of the early 50s, its life, customs, mores ü The relationship between the authorities and the worker ü The punishing power of love ü The special holiness of the heroine's thoughts.
Values of the work A. I. Solzhenitsyn affirms universal moral values. The story "Matryonin Dvor" calls not to repeat the mistakes of the past generation, so that people become more humane and moral. After all, these are the basic values of humanity!
Anna Akhmatova about A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin Dvor” “An amazing thing ... This is more terrible than “Ivan Denisovich” ... There you can push everything into a cult of personality, but here ... After all, it’s not Matryona, but the whole Russian village fell under a steam locomotive and to smithereens…”
The statements of A. I. Solzhenitsyn about the heroine of the story “Matryonin Dvor” are the same “She is a herd, without a great man, she can’t settle the village. Not a hundred city. Not all our land." “Those people always have good faces, who are at odds with their conscience.”
“There are such born angels, they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry (violence, lies, myths about happiness and legality), without drowning in it at all.” A. I. Solzhenitsyn A true man shows himself almost only in moments of goodbye and suffering - he is this, and remember him ... V. Rasputin
ANALYSIS OF A.I. SOLZHENITSYN’S STORY “MATRENIN’S YARD”
The purpose of the lesson: to try to understand how the writer sees the phenomenon of "simple man", to understand the philosophical meaning of the story.
Methodical techniques: analytical conversation, comparison of texts.
DURING THE CLASSES
1. Teacher's word
The story "Matryona Dvor", like "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", was written in 1959, and published in 1964. "Matrenin Dvor" is an autobiographical work. This is Solzhenitsyn's story about the situation in which he found himself, returning "from the dusty hot desert", that is, from the camp. He "wanted to get lost in the very interior of Russia", to find "a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways." The former prisoner could only be hired for hard work, he also wanted to teach. After rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn worked for some time as a physics teacher in the Vladimir region, lived in the village of Miltsevo with a peasant woman, Matrena Vasilievna Zakharova (where he completed the first edition of In the First Circle). The story "Matryona Dvor" goes beyond ordinary memories, but acquires a deep meaning, is recognized as a classic. He 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 "Matryona Dvor" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".
Both stories are the stages of the writer's comprehension 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 characters is different. The first one was called “A village cannot stand without a righteous man”, and the second one – Shch-854” (One day for one convict)”. "Righteous" and "zek" are different assessments. The fact that Matryona appears as “high” (her apologetic smile in front of the formidable chairman, her compliance with the insolent pressure of relatives), in the behavior of Ivan Denisovich, is indicated as “earn some money”, “give a rich brigadier dry felt boots directly to the bed”, “run through the supply rooms, where someone needs to be served, sweep or bring something. Matryona is depicted as a saint: “Only she had fewer sins than her rickety cat. She choked mice ... ". Ivan Denisovich is an ordinary person with sins and shortcomings. Matryona is not of this world. Shukhov is at home in the world of the Gulag, he almost settled down in it, studied its laws, developed a lot of adaptations for survival. For 8 years of his imprisonment, he merged with the camp: “He himself didn’t know whether he wanted freedom or not,” he adapted: “It’s as it should be - one works, one watches”; “Work is like a stick, there are two ends in it: if you do it for people, give quality, if you do it for a fool, show off.” True, he managed not to lose his human dignity, not to stoop to the position of a "wick" that licks bowls.
Ivan Denisovich himself is not aware of the surrounding absurdity, he is not aware of the horror of his existence. He meekly and patiently bears his cross, like Matrena Vasilievna.
But the patience of a heroine 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 person. In "One day in Ivan Denisovich" the world is seen only through the eyes of the hero, evaluated by him. The reader also assesses what is happening and cannot but be horrified, but experience the shock of 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 did not chase the equipment; 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 the wilderness." See Matryona's poverty from all angles: “For many years, Matryona Vasilievna did not earn a single ruble from anywhere. Because she didn't get paid. Relatives helped her a little. And on the collective farm, she worked not for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in a littered account book.
But the story is not only about the suffering, troubles, 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, however, her spiritual world is endowed with such a quality that we talk with her, as with Anna Karenina. Solzhenitsyn answered this to Tvardovsky: “You pointed out the very essence - a loving and suffering woman, while all the criticism scoured all the time from above, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and neighboring ones.” Writers come to the main theme of the story - "how people live." To survive what Matryona Vasilievna had to go through, and remain a disinterested, open, delicate, sympathetic person, not to get angry at fate and people, to keep her “radiant smile” until old age - what mental strength is needed for this!
The movement of the plot is aimed at comprehending the secrets of the character of the main character. Matryona is revealed not so much in the ordinary present as in the past. Recalling her youth, she says: “It was you who had not seen me before, Ignatich. All my bags were, I didn’t consider five pounds heavy. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona, you will break your back!” The divir didn’t come up to me to put my end of the log on the front end. ”It turns out that Matryona was once young, strong, beautiful, one of those Nekrasov peasant women who “stop a galloping horse”: “Since the horse, with a fright, carried the sleigh to the lake, the peasants jumped off, but I, however, grabbed the bridle, stopped ... ”And at the last moment of her life, she rushed to“ help the peasants ”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 ... Almost did not come out, Ignatich. The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to the war... He went to war and disappeared... For three years I hid, waiting. And not news, and not a bone ...
Tied with an old faded handkerchief, Matrona's round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp - as if freed from wrinkles, from everyday careless attire - frightened, girlish, before a terrible choice.
These lyrical, light lines reveal the charm, spiritual beauty, depth of Matryona's experiences. Outwardly unremarkable, restrained, undemanding, Matryona turns out to be an unusual, sincere, pure, open person. The more acute is the feeling of guilt experienced by the narrator: “There is no Matryona. A family member was killed. And on the last day I reproached her quilted jacket. “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand. Neither city. Not all our land." The final words of the story return to the original title - "A village does not stand 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 "Matryona Dvor"?
Many symbols of Solzhenitsyn are associated with Christian symbols, images-symbols of the way of the cross, the righteous, the martyr. This is directly indicated by the first name “Matryona Dvora2. And the very name "Matryona Dvor" is of a generalizing nature. The yard, Matrona's house is the haven that the narrator finally finds in search of "interior Russia" after many years of camps and homelessness: "I didn’t like this place in the whole village." The symbolic likening of the House of Russia is traditional, because the structure of the house is likened to the structure of the world. In the fate of the house, as it were, it is repeated, the fate of its mistress is predicted. Forty years have passed here. In this house, she survived two wars - German and Patriotic, the death of six children who died in infancy, the loss of her husband, who went missing in the war. The house decays - the hostess grows old. The house is being dismantled like a man - "by the ribs", and "everything showed that the breakers are not builders and do not assume that Matryona will have to live here for a long time."
As if nature itself opposes the destruction of the house - first a long snowstorm, exorbitant snowdrifts, then a thaw, damp fogs, streams. And the fact that the holy water at Matryona inexplicably disappeared seems to be a bad omen. Matryona dies along with the upper room, with part of her house. The mistress dies - the house is completely destroyed. Matrona's hut was filled until spring, like a coffin, - they were buried.
Matryona's fear of the railway is also symbolic, because it is the train, the symbol of the hostile peasant life of the world, civilization, that will flatten both the upper room and Matryona herself.
Sh. WORD OF THE TEACHER.
The righteous Matryona is the moral ideal of the writer, on which, in his opinion, the life of society should be based. According to Solzhenitsyn, the meaning of earthly existence is not in prosperity, but in the development of the soul. This idea is connected with the writer's understanding of the role of literature, its connection with the Christian tradition. Solzhenitsyn continues one of the main traditions of Russian literature, according to which the writer sees his mission in preaching the truth, spirituality, he is convinced of the need to raise "eternal" questions and seek answers to them. He spoke about this in his Nobel lecture: “In Russian literature, the idea has long been innate to us that a writer can do a lot in his people - and should ... he is an accomplice in all the evil committed in his homeland or by his people.
”The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, which made the name of Solzhenitsyn known throughout the country and far beyond its borders. A year later, in the same magazine, Solzhenitsyn published several stories, including "Matryona's Dvor". Postings have stopped at this point. 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 "Matryona Dvor" was called "A village does not stand 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 Dvor", as the author himself noted, "is completely autobiographical and reliable." In all the notes to the story, the prototype of the heroine is reported - Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova from the village of Miltsovo, Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region. The narrator, like the author himself, teaches in the Ryazan village, living with the heroine of the story, and the narrator's patronymic - Ignatich - is consonant with A. Solzhenitsyn's patronymic - 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 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 qualities that we talk with her as with Anna Karenina. After reading these words in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Solzhenitsyn immediately wrote to Tvardovsky: “Needless to say, the paragraph of your speech referring to Matryona means a lot to me. You pointed to the very essence - to a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism scoured all the time from above, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and neighboring ones.
The first title of the story “Doesn't Stand Without the Righteous” contained a deep meaning: the Russian village rests on people whose way of life is based on the universal 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 (the rules that determine the mores, behavior, spiritual and spiritual qualities necessary for a person in society). The second name - "Matryona Dvor" - somewhat changed the angle of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the Matrenin Dvor. On a larger scale of the village, they are blurred, the people around the heroine are often different from her. Having titled the story "Matryona's Dvor", Solzhenitsyn focused the readers' attention on the wonderful world of the Russian woman.
Genus, genre, creative method
Solzhenitsyn once remarked that he rarely turned to the genre of the story, for “artistic pleasure”: “You can put a lot in 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 "Matryona Dvor" all facets are honed with brilliance, and meeting with the story becomes, in turn, a great pleasure for the reader. The story is usually based on a case that reveals the character of the protagonist.
Regarding the story "Matryona Dvor" in literary criticism, there were two points of view. One of them presented Solzhenitsyn's story as a phenomenon of "village prose". V. Astafiev, calling "Matryona 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 "Matryona Dvor" was associated with the original genre of "monumental story" that was formed 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” were recognizable in A. Solzhenitsyn’s Matrenin Dvor, V. Zakrutkin’s The Human Mother, and E. Kazakevich’s In the Light of Day. The main difference of this genre is the image of a simple person who is the custodian of universal human values. Moreover, the image of a simple person is given in sublime colors, and the story itself is focused on a high genre. So, in the story "The Fate of a Man" features of the epic are visible. And in the "Matryona Dvor" the emphasis is on the lives of the saints. Before us is the life of Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva, the righteous and great martyr of the era of "solid collectivization" and the tragic experiment on the whole country. Matryona was portrayed by the author as a saint ("Only she had fewer sins than a rickety cat").
Subject
The theme of the story is a description of the life of the patriarchal Russian village, which reflects how flourishing egoism and rapacity disfigure Russia and "destroy communications and meaning." The writer raises in a short story the serious problems of the Russian village of the early 50s. (her life, customs and mores, the relationship between power and a working person). The author repeatedly emphasizes that the state needs only working hands, and not the person himself: “She was lonely all around, but 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 with the unscrupulous attitude of others to business.
Idea
The problems raised in the story are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the Christian Orthodox worldview of the heroine. On the example of the fate of a village woman, to show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly show the measure of the human in each of the people. But Matryona dies - and this world collapses: her house is pulled apart by a log, her modest belongings are greedily divided. And there is no one to protect Matryona's yard, no one even thinks that with the departure of Matryona, something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, passes away.
“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand. No city. Not all our land." The last phrases expand the boundaries of the Matryona Dvor (as the personal world of the heroine) to the scale of humanity.
Main heroes
The main character of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva. Matryona is a lonely destitute peasant woman with a generous and disinterested soul. She lost her husband in the war, buried six of her own and raised other people's children. Matrena gave her pupil the most precious thing in her life - the house: "... she did not feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, as well as neither her labor nor her goodness ...".
The heroine has endured many hardships in life, but has not lost the ability to empathize with others, joy and sorrow. She is disinterested: she sincerely rejoices in someone else's good harvest, although she never has it on the sand herself. All the wealth of Matryona is a dirty white goat, a lame cat and big ones in tubs.
Matryona is the concentration of the best features of the national character: she is shy, understands the "education" of the narrator, respects him for it. The author appreciates in Matryona her delicacy, the absence of annoying curiosity about the life of another person, hard work. For a quarter of a century she worked on a collective farm, 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 received a pension. Life was extremely difficult. She got grass for a goat, peat for warmth, collected old stumps turned out by a tractor, soaked lingonberries for the winter, grew potatoes, helping those who were nearby to survive.
The image of Matryona and individual details in the story are symbolic. 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 life is like the lives of saints. Her house, as it were, symbolizes the ark of the biblical Noah, in which he escapes from the global flood. The death of Matryona 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 sisters, sister-in-law, adopted daughter Kira, the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated it. She lived in poverty, wretchedly, lonely - a "lost old woman", exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, everyone condemned Matryona in chorus that she was funny and stupid, she worked for others for free all her life. Everyone mercilessly used Matryona's kindness and innocence - and unanimously judged her for this. Among the people around her, the author treats her heroine with great sympathy, her son Fadcea 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.
Matrena's courtyard is one of the key images of the story. The description of the courtyard, 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 the house and the person: if the house is destroyed, its mistress will also die. This unity is already stated in the very title of the story. The hut for Matryona is filled with a special spirit and light, the life of a woman is connected with the "life" of the house. Therefore, for a long time she did not agree to break the hut.
Plot and composition
The story consists of three parts. In the first part, we are talking about how fate threw the hero-narrator to the station with a strange name for Russian places - Peat product. A former prisoner, now a school teacher, longing to find peace in some remote and quiet corner of Russia, finds shelter and warmth in the house of an elderly and familiar life Matrena. “Maybe, to someone from the village, who is richer, Matryona’s hut didn’t seem well-lived, but we were quite good with her that winter: it didn’t leak from the rains and the cold winds blew the furnace heat out of it not immediately, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side. In addition to Matryona and me, they also lived in the hut - a cat, mice and cockroaches. They immediately find a common language. Next to Matryona, the hero calms down with his soul.
In the second part of the story, Matrena recalls her youth, the terrible ordeal that befell her. Her fiancé Thaddeus went missing in World War I. The younger brother of her missing husband, Yefim, who was left alone after death with the younger children in his arms, asked her to woo her. She took pity on Matryona Efim, married an unloved one. And here, after three years of absence, Thaddeus himself unexpectedly returned, whom Matryona continued to love. The hard life did not harden Matrena's heart. In worries about daily bread, she went her way to the end. And even death overtook a woman in labor worries. Matryona dies helping Thaddeus and his sons to drag part of their own hut bequeathed to Kira across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for the death of Matryona and decided to take the inheritance for the young during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death.
In the third part, the tenant learns about the death of the mistress of the house. The description of the funeral and commemoration showed the true attitude of people close to her towards Matryona. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of duty 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
The artistic world in the story is built linearly - in accordance with the life story of the heroine. In the first part of the work, the whole story about Matryona is given through the perception of the author, a man who has endured a lot in his lifetime, who dreamed of "getting lost and getting lost in the very interior of Russia." The narrator evaluates her life from the outside, compares it with the environment, becomes an authoritative witness of righteousness. In the second part, the heroine talks about herself. The combination of lyrical and epic pages, the chaining of episodes according to the principle of emotional contrast allows the author to change the rhythm of the narration, its tone. In this 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 is opened by the beginning, which tells about the tragedy at the railway siding. We 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 - the “radiant”, “kind”, “apologising” smile of Matryona. 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: “From the red frosty sun, the frozen window of the canopy, now shortened, filled with a little pink, and Matryona’s face warmed this reflection.” And then - a direct author's description: "Those people always have good faces, who are at odds with their conscience." Even after the terrible death of the heroine, her "face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead."
Matryona embodies the national character, which is primarily manifested in her speech. Expressiveness, a bright individuality gives her language an abundance of colloquial, dialectal vocabulary (hurried, kuzhotkom, summer, lightning). The manner of her speech is also deeply folk, the way she pronounces her words: “They began with some kind of low warm murmur, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” "Matryona Dvor" minimally includes the landscape, it pays more attention to the interior, which appears not by itself, but in a lively interweaving with the "inhabitants" and with sounds - from the rustling of mice and cockroaches to the state of ficuses and a crooked cat. Every detail here characterizes not only the peasant life, Matryona's yard, but also the storyteller. The voice of the narrator reveals in him a psychologist, a moralist, even a poet - in the way he observes Matryona, her neighbors and relatives, 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, translating the speech into blank verse:
“We all lived next to her / and did not understand / that she is the one
the most righteous, / without whom, according to the proverb, / the village does not stand.
/Nor the city./Nor all our land.
The writer was looking for something new. An example of this is his convincing articles on language in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Dahl's fantastic commitment (the researchers note that about 40% of the vocabulary in the story Solzhenitsyn borrowed from Dahl's dictionary), ingenuity in vocabulary. In the story "Matryona's Dvor" Solzhenitsyn came to the language of preaching.
The meaning of the work
“There are such born angels,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in the article “Repentance and Self-Restriction”, as if characterizing Matryona, “they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry, without drowning in it at all, even touching its surface with their feet? Each of us met such people, there are not ten or a hundred of them in Russia, they are the righteous, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), used their good, in good moments answered them the same, they dispose, - and immediately sank back to our doomed depths."
What is the essence of Matrona's righteousness? In life, not by lies, we will now say in the words of the writer himself, uttered much later. Creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of rural collective farm life in the 1950s. The righteousness of Matrena lies in her ability to preserve her humanness even in such inaccessible conditions for this. As N.S. Leskov wrote, righteousness is the ability to live “without lying, without deceit, without condemning one’s neighbor and without condemning a biased enemy.”
The story was called "brilliant", "a truly brilliant work." In reviews of him, it was noted that even among Solzhenitsyn's stories he stands out for his strict artistry, the integrity of the poetic embodiment, and the consistency of artistic taste.
The story of A.I. Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin Dvor" - for all time. It is especially relevant today, when the issues of moral values and life priorities are acute in modern Russian society.
The journal Novy Mir published several works by Solzhenitsyn, among them Matrenin Dvor. The story, according to the writer, "is completely autobiographical and authentic." It talks about the Russian village, about its inhabitants, about their values, about kindness, justice, sympathy and compassion, work and help - qualities that fit in a righteous man, without whom "the village does not stand."
"Matryona Dvor" is a story about the injustice and cruelty of a person's fate, about the Soviet order of the post-Stalin era and about the life of the most ordinary people who live far from city life. The narration is conducted not on behalf of the main character, but on behalf of the narrator, Ignatich, 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 have passed since the death of Stalin, and then the Russian people did not yet know and did not realize how to live on.
Matrenin Dvor is divided into three parts:
Matrena 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 settles in her hut, the author mentions that she never intentionally looked for a lodger, that is, she did not want to earn money on this basis, she did not even profit from what she could. Her wealth was pots of ficuses and an old domestic cat that she took from the street, a goat, and also mice and cockroaches. Matryona also married her fiancé's brother out of a desire to help: "Their mother died ... they did not have enough hands."
Matryona herself also had children, six, but they all died in early childhood, so she later took her youngest daughter Fadeya Kira to be raised. Matryona got up early in the morning, worked until dark, but did not show fatigue or discontent to anyone: she was kind and responsive to everyone. She was always very afraid of becoming someone's burden, she did not complain, she was even afraid to call the doctor once again. Matryona, who had matured, Kira, wanted to donate her room, for which it was necessary to share the house - during the move, Fadey's things got stuck in a sled on the railway tracks, and Matryona fell under a train. Now there was no one to ask for help, there was no person ready to selflessly come to the rescue. But the relatives of the deceased kept in mind only the thought of gain, of sharing what was left of the poor peasant woman, already thinking about it at the funeral. Matryona stood out very much against the background of her fellow villagers; she was thus irreplaceable, invisible and the only righteous man.
Narrator, Ignatich, to some extent is the prototype of the writer. He left the link and was acquitted, then set off in search of a calm and serene life, he wanted to work as a school teacher. He found refuge at Matryona. Judging by the desire to move away from the bustle of the city, the narrator is not very sociable, he loves silence. He worries when a woman mistakenly takes his quilted jacket, and finds no place for himself from the volume of the loudspeaker. The narrator got along with the mistress of the house, this shows that he is still not completely asocial. However, he does not understand people very well: he understood the meaning that Matryona lived only after she passed away.
Solzhenitsyn in the story "Matryona Dvor" tells about the life of the inhabitants of the Russian village, about the system of relationships between power and man, about the high meaning of selfless labor in the realm of selfishness and greed.
Of all this, the theme of labor is most clearly shown. Matryona is a person who does not ask for anything in return, and is ready to give herself everything for the benefit of others. They don’t appreciate it and don’t even try to understand it, but this is a person who experiences a tragedy every day: at first, the mistakes of 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 lead her to death. The meaning of Matrena's life is precisely this, and also care, help, the desire to be needed. Therefore, active love for neighbor is the main theme of the story.
The problem of morality also occupies an important place in the story. Material values in the village are exalted above the human soul and its labor, above humanity in general. The secondary characters are simply incapable of understanding the depth of Matryona's character: greed and the desire to possess more blind their eyes and do not allow them to see kindness and sincerity. Fadey lost his son and wife, his son-in-law is threatened with imprisonment, but his thoughts are how to save the logs that they did not have time to burn.
In addition, there is a theme of mysticism in the story: the motive of an unidentified righteous man and the problem of cursed things - which were touched by people full of self-interest. Fadey made Matryona's upper room cursed, undertaking to bring it down.
The above themes and problems in the story "Matryona Dvor" are aimed at revealing the depth of the pure worldview of the main character. An ordinary peasant woman is an example of the fact that difficulties and losses only harden a Russian person, and do not break him. With the death of Matrena, everything that she figuratively built collapses. Her house is being torn apart, the rest of the property is divided among themselves, the yard remains empty, ownerless. Therefore, her life looks pitiful, no one is aware of the loss. But won't the same thing happen to the palaces and jewels of the mighty of this world? The author demonstrates the frailty of the material and teaches us not to judge others by wealth and achievements. The true meaning is the moral image, 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 they are missing a very important part of their lives: invaluable values. Why disclose global moral problems in such a wretched scenery? And what then is the meaning of the title of the story "Matryona Dvor"? The last words that Matryona was a righteous woman erase the boundaries of her court and push them to the scale of the whole world, thereby making the problem of morality universal.
Solzhenitsyn argued in the article “Repentance and Self-Restriction”: “There are such born angels, they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry, without drowning in it at all, even touching its surface with their feet? Each of us met such people, there are not ten or a hundred of them in Russia, they are the righteous, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), used their good, in good moments answered them the same, they dispose, - and immediately sank back to our doomed depths."
Matryona is distinguished from the rest by the ability to maintain humanity and a solid core inside. To those who shamelessly used her help and kindness, it might seem that she was weak-willed and malleable, but the heroine helped, based only on inner disinterestedness and moral greatness.
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