Analysis of the story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin's Dvor". Detailed analysis of the story “Matrenin Dvor” by Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn Matrenin Dvor main idea

Analysis of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” includes characteristics of its characters, a summary, the history of its creation, disclosure of the main idea and problems raised by the author of the work.

According to Solzhenitsyn, the story is based on real events and is “completely autobiographical.”

At the center of the story is a picture of life in a Russian village in the 50s. 20th century, the problem of the village, discussions on the main human values, issues of goodness, justice and compassion, the problem of labor, the ability to help a neighbor who finds himself in a difficult situation. The righteous man possesses all these qualities, without whom “the village does not stand.”

The history of the creation of "Matryonin's Dvor"

Initially, the title of the story was: “A village is not worthwhile 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 moralizing. In response, Solzhenitsyn good-naturedly concluded that he had no luck with names.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008)

Work on the story took place 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 was not worth publishing. And yet he asked to leave the manuscript with the editor. As a result, the story was published in 1963 in the New World.

It is noteworthy that the life and death of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova are reflected in this work as truthfully as possible - exactly as it really happened. The real name of the village is Miltsevo, it is located in the Kuplovsky district of the Vladimir region.

Critics warmly greeted the author's work, praising 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, and empty fades. Solzhenitsyn was very grateful to Tvardovsky for these words. 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 vision, from which the main idea of ​​​​the work was not hidden - a story about a loving and suffering woman.

Genre and idea of ​​the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn

"Matrenin's Dvor" belongs to the short story genre. 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 the common man, 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 told on behalf of Ignatyich, who throughout the entire plot, as it seems to us, acts only as an abstract observer.

Description and characteristics of the main characters

The list of characters in the story is small; it comes down to a few characters.

Matryona Grigorieva- an elderly woman, a peasant 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 house, the author notes the modesty and selflessness of this woman.

Matryona never intentionally looked for a tenant and did not seek to profit from this. All her property consisted of flowers, an old cat and a goat. Matryona's dedication knows no bounds. Even her marital union with the groom's brother is explained by her 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 began raising Kira, Thaddeus’s youngest daughter. Matryona worked from early morning until late evening, but never showed her dissatisfaction to anyone, did not complain about fatigue, did not grumble about fate.

She was kind and sympathetic to everyone. She never complained and didn't want to be a burden to anyone. Matryona decided to give her room to the grown-up Kira, but to do this it was necessary to divide the house. During the move, Thaddeus's things got stuck on the railway, and the woman died under the wheels of the train. From that moment on, there was no longer a person capable of selfless help.

Meanwhile, Matryona's relatives thought only about profit, about how to divide the things left from her. The peasant woman was very different from the rest of the villagers. This was the same righteous man - the only one, irreplaceable and so invisible to the people around him.

Ignatyich is the prototype of the writer. At one time, the hero served exile, 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. Ignatyich found his refuge with Matryona.

The narrator is a private person who does not like excessive attention and long conversations. He prefers peace and quiet to all this. Meanwhile, he managed to find a common language with Matryona, but due to the fact that he did not understand people well, he was able to comprehend the meaning of the peasant woman’s life only after her death.

Thaddeus- Matryona’s former fiancé, Efim’s brother. 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 Efim. Returning, Thaddeus almost hacked to death his brother and Matryona with an ax, but came to his senses in time.

The hero is distinguished by cruelty and intemperance. Without waiting for Matryona’s death, he began to demand part of the house from her for her daughter and her husband. Thus, it is Thaddeus who is to blame for the death of Matryona, who was hit by a train while helping her relatives take apart their house piece by piece. He was not at the funeral.

The story is divided into three parts. The first talks about the fate of Ignatyich, that he is a former prisoner and now works as a school teacher. Now he needs a quiet refuge, which the kind Matryona gladly provides him with.

The second part tells about the difficult events in the life of a peasant woman, about the youth of the main character and the fact that the war took her lover away from her and she had to throw in her lot with an unloved man, the brother of her fiancé.

In the third episode, Ignatyich learns about the death of a poor peasant woman and talks about the funeral and wake. Relatives squeeze out tears because circumstances require it. There is no sincerity in them, their thoughts are occupied only with how best to divide the property of the deceased.

Problems and arguments of the work

Matryona is a person who does not demand rewards for her good deeds; she is ready to sacrifice herself for the good of another person. They don’t notice her, don’t appreciate her, and don’t try to understand her. Matryona's whole life is full of suffering, starting from her youth, when she had to unite her fate with an unloved person, experiencing the pain of loss, ending with maturity and old age with their frequent illnesses and hard manual labor.

The meaning of the heroine’s life is in hard work, in which she forgets about all the 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 comes down to issues of morality. The fact is that in the village material values ​​are placed above spiritual ones, they prevail over humanity.

The complexity of Matryona's character and the sublimity of her soul are inaccessible to the understanding of the greedy people surrounding the heroine.

They are driven by the thirst for accumulation and profit, which obscures their vision and does not allow them to see the kindness, sincerity and dedication 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 taken away into pieces, the remains of the pitiful property are divided, the yard is left to the mercy of fate. No one sees what a terrible loss has occurred, what a wonderful person has left this world.

The author shows the frailty of material things, teaches not to judge people by money and regalia. The true meaning lies in 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.

In winter, the relatives of Matryona’s husband take away part of the house from the heroine - the upper room. While transporting a dismantled room, Matryona Vasilievna dies at a railway crossing under the wheels of a steam locomotive, trying to help the men remove a stuck sleigh with logs from the crossing. Matryona appears in the story as a moral ideal, as the embodiment of the lofty spiritual and moral principles of people's life that have been displaced by the course of history. She, in the eyes of the hero-narrator, is one of those righteous people on whom the world stands.

With its genre features, Solzhenitsyn’s story comes close to an essay and goes back to the Turgenev tradition of “Notes of a Hunter.” Along with this, “Matrenin’s Dvor” seems to continue the tradition of Leskov’s stories about Russian righteous people. In the author’s version, the story was called “A village is not worth it without a righteous man,” but was first published under the title “Matrenin’s Dvor.”

The fate of the hero-narrator of Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matrenin’s Dvor” is correlated with the fate of the heroes of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Ignatyich, as it were, continues the fate of Shukhov and his fellow camp inmates. His story tells what awaits prisoners in life after release. Therefore, the first important problem in the story is the problem of the hero choosing his place in the world.

Ignatyich, who spent ten years in prison and a camp, after living in exile in a “dusty hot desert,” seeks to settle in a quiet corner of Russia, “where it would not be a shame to live and die.” The hero wants to find a place in his native land that would preserve unchanged the original features and signs of folk life. Ignatyich hopes to find spiritual and moral support and peace of mind in the traditional national way of life, which has withstood the destructive influence of the inexorable course of history. He finds it in the village of Talnovo, settling in the hut of Matryona Vasilievna.

What explains this choice of the hero?

The hero of the story refuses to accept the terrible inhuman absurdity of existence, which has become the norm of life of contemporaries and has diverse manifestations in the everyday way of life of people. Solzhenitsyn shows this with the mercilessness of a publicist in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor.” One example is the careless, nature-destroying actions of the collective farm chairman, who received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for the successful destruction of centuries-old forests.

The tragic fate of the hero is a consequence of the abnormal course of history and the illogical way of life. The absurdity and unnaturalness of the new way of life is especially noticeable in cities and industrial towns. Therefore, the hero strives to the outback of Russia, wants to “settle... forever” “somewhere away from the railway.” The railway is a traditional symbol for Russian classical literature of a soulless modern civilization that brings destruction and death to humans. The railway also appears in this meaning in Solzhenitsyn’s story.

At first, the hero's desire seems impossible. He bitterly notices both in the life of the village of Vysokoye Pole and in the village of Torfoprodukt (“Ah, Turgenev didn’t know that you could write something like that in Russian!” says the narrator about the name of the village) the terrible realities of the new way of life. Therefore, the village of Talnovo, Matryona’s house and she herself become the last hope for the hero, the last opportunity to fulfill his dream. Matrenin's yard becomes for the hero the desired embodiment of that Russia, which it was so important for him to find.

In Matryona, Ignatyich sees the spiritual and moral ideal of the Russian person. What character traits, personality traits of Matryona allow us to see in her the embodiment of the lofty spiritual and moral principles of people’s life that have been displaced by the course of history? What storytelling techniques are used to create the image of the heroine in the story?

First of all, we see Matryona in an ordinary setting, in a series of daily worries and affairs. Describing the heroine’s actions, the narrator seeks to penetrate their hidden meaning and understand their motives.

In the story about the first meeting of Ignatyich and Matryona, we see the sincerity, simplicity, and unselfishness of the heroine. “I only found out later,” says the narrator, “that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilievna did not earn a ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid a pension. Her family didn't help her much. And on the collective farm she didn’t work for money - for sticks.” But Matryona is not trying to get a profitable tenant. She fears that she will not be able to please the new person, that he will not like it in her house, which she directly tells the hero. But Matryona is happy when Ignatyich still stays with her, because with a new person her loneliness comes to an end.

Matryona is characterized by inner tact and delicacy. Getting up long before the guest, she “quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, heated the Russian stove, went to milk the goat,” “she did not invite guests to her place in the evenings, respecting my activities,” says Ignatyich. Matryona lacks “womanish curiosity”; she “did not annoy the hero with any questions.” Ignatyich is especially captivated by Matryona’s goodwill; her kindness is revealed in a disarming “radiant smile” that transforms the heroine’s entire appearance. “Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience,” the narrator concludes.

“Things called to life,” the narrator says about Matryona. Work becomes for the heroine a way to restore peace in her soul. “She had a sure way to regain her good spirits - work,” notes the narrator.

Working on a collective farm, Matryona did not receive anything for her work; helping her fellow villagers, she refused money. Her work is selfless. For Matryona, working is as natural as breathing. Therefore, the heroine considers taking money for her work inconvenient and impossible.

A new way to create the image of Matryona is to introduce the heroine’s memories into the narrative. They demonstrate new facets of her personality, in them the heroine is fully revealed.

From Matryona’s memoirs we learn that in her youth, like Nekrasov’s heroine, she stopped a galloping horse. Matryona is capable of a decisive, even desperate act, but behind this is not a love of risk, not recklessness, but a desire to avert trouble. The desire to avert trouble and help people will dictate the behavior of the heroine in the last minutes of her life before her death, when she rushed to help the men pull out the sleigh stuck at the railway crossing. Matryona remains true to herself to the end.

“But Matryona was by no means fearless,” notes the narrator. “She was afraid of the fire, she was afraid of the Molonia, and most of all, for some reason, of the train.” Just the sight of the train “makes Matryona feel hot, her knees are shaking.” The panic fear experienced by Matryona from the mere sight of a train, which at first evokes a smile, by the end of the story, after the death of the heroine under its wheels, takes on the meaning of a tragically true premonition.

In the heroine's memories of her experience, it is revealed that she has a sense of self-esteem, cannot bear insults and strongly protests when her husband raised his hand to her.

The outbreak of the First World War separates her from her beloved man, Thaddeus, and predetermines the entire subsequent tragic course of Matryona’s life. In three years, new tragedies have occurred in the life of Russia: “And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned upside down." Matryona’s life also turned upside down. Like the whole country, Matryona faces a “terrible choice”: she must choose her destiny, answer the question: how to live further? Thaddeus’s younger brother, Efim, wooed Matryona. The heroine married him - started a new life, chose her destiny. But the choice was wrong. Six months later, Thaddeus returns from captivity. In the disastrous game of passions that gripped him, Thaddeus is ready to kill Matryona and her chosen one. But Thaddeus is stopped by a moral prohibition that still exists in life - he does not dare to go against his brother.

There is no turning back for the heroine. Matryona's choice does not bring her happiness. The new life does not work out, her marriage is fruitless.

In 1941, the world war began again, and the tragedy experienced in the First World War repeated itself in Matryona’s life. Just as Matryona lost her beloved in the first war, so in the second she loses her husband. The inexorable passage of time dooms Matryona’s courtyard to death: “The once noisy, but now deserted hut rotted and grew old - and the deserted Matryona grew old in it.”

Solzhenitsyn strengthens this motive, showing that the terrible inhuman absurdity of existence, which has become the norm of life for people in a new historical era and from which the hero sought salvation in Matryona’s house, did not escape the heroine. The new way of life relentlessly invades Matryona’s life. The eleven post-war years of collective farm life were marked by aggressive, inhuman stupidity and cynicism of the collective farm order. It seems that a survival experiment was carried out on Matryona and her fellow villagers: on the collective farm they did not pay money for work, they “cut off” personal gardens, did not provide mowing for livestock, and were deprived of fuel for the winter. A triumph of the absurdity of collective farm life appears in the story in the listing of the property of Matryona, who worked on the collective farm for many years: “a dirty white goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees.” But Matryona managed to overcome all the hardships and hardships and keep the peace of her soul unchanged.

Matryona's house and its mistress appear as opposed to the surrounding world and the illogical and unnatural way of life that has established itself in it. The human world feels this and takes cruel revenge on Matryona.

This motif receives plot development in the story of the destruction of Matrenin's yard. Despite fate, which doomed her to loneliness, Matryona raised Thaddeus’s daughter, Kira, for ten years and became her second mother. Matryona decided: after her death, half the house, the upper room, should be inherited by Kira. But Thaddeus, with whom Matryona once wanted to unite her life, decides to take the upper room while its mistress is still alive.

In the actions of Thaddeus and his assistants, Solzhenitsyn sees a manifestation of the triumph of a new way of life. The new way of life formed a special attitude towards the world and determined a new nature of human relationships. The terrible inhumanity and absurdity of human existence is revealed by the author in the substitution of concepts that has become established in the minds of contemporaries, when “our language fearfully calls our property our property” as “good.” In the plot of the story, this “good” turns into all-crushing evil. The pursuit of such “good”, which “is considered shameful and stupid to lose in front of people,” turns out in the story into a different, immeasurably greater loss of genuine and enduring good: the world loses a kind, wonderful person - Matryona, high spiritual and moral principles are lost in life. A desperate and reckless pursuit of “good property” brings death to the human soul and brings to life the terrible destructive properties of human nature - selfishness, cruelty, greed, aggressiveness, greed, cynicism, pettiness. All these base passions will manifest themselves in the people surrounding Matryona, determining their behavior in the story of the destruction of her house and the death of herself. Matryona's soul, her inner world is contrasted with the souls and inner world of the people around her. Matryona's soul is beautiful because, Solzhenitsyn believes, Matryona's goal in life was not goodness-property, but goodness-love.

Matryona's house in Solzhenitsyn's story becomes a symbol of the harmonious traditional way of peasant life, high spiritual and moral values, the keeper of which is Matryona. Therefore, she and the house are inseparable. The heroine intuitively senses this: “it was terrible for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. ...for Matryona this was the end of her entire life,” the narrator concludes. But Thaddeus and his assistants think differently. The hero’s disastrous passions are no longer restrained by anything—there are no longer any previously existing moral prohibitions standing in their way. They “knew that her house could be broken during her lifetime.”

Matrenin's yard, in which the hero of the story found spiritual and moral support, becomes the last stronghold of the traditional national way of life, which was unable to withstand the destructive influence of the inexorable course of history.

The destruction of Matryona's house becomes in the story a symbol of a violation of the natural course of historical time, fraught with catastrophic upheavals. Thus, the death of Matryonin’s court becomes an indictment of a new historical era.

The final chord in creating the image of the heroine comes at the end of the story, after the death of Matryona, by comparing her with the people around her. The tragic death of Matryona was supposed to shock people, make them think, awaken their souls, shake off the scales from their eyes. But this doesn't happen. The new way of life has devastated the souls of people, their hearts have become hardened, there is no place in them for compassion, empathy, or true sorrow. Solzhenitsyn shows this at the farewell ceremonies, funerals, and wakes of Matryona. The rituals lose their high, mournful, tragic meaning; all that remains of them is a ossified form, mechanically repeated by the participants. The tragedy of death is not able to stop people’s mercantile and vain aspirations.

Matryona's loneliness during life after her death takes on a special and new meaning. She is lonely because Matryona’s spiritual and moral world, objectively, against the will of the heroine, opposes the values ​​of the world of the people around her. Matryona's world was alien and incomprehensible to them, causing irritation and condemnation. Thus, the image of Matryona allows the author to show in the story the moral troubles and spiritual emptiness of modern society.

The narrator's acquaintance with the people surrounding Matryona helps him fully understand her high purpose in the world of people. Matryona, who did not accumulate property, endured cruel trials and remained strong in spirit, is “the very righteous man without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand.

Neither the city.

Neither the whole land is ours.”

"Magrenip yard"

The hero goes to teach in a small place called “Peat Product”, from which, as the author ironically notes, it was difficult to leave. Neither the monotonous barracks nor the dilapidated five-story buildings attract the main character. Finally, he finds housing in the village of Talnovo. This is how the reader gets acquainted with the main character of the work - a lonely sick woman Matryona. She lives in a darkish hut with a dim mirror through which it was impossible to see anything, and two bright posters about the book trade and the harvest. The contrast between these interior details is obvious. It anticipates one of the key problems raised in the work - the conflict between the ostentatious bravado of the official chronicle of events and the real life of ordinary Russian people. The story conveys a deep understanding of this tragic discrepancy.

Another, no less striking contradiction in the story is the contrast between the extreme poverty of peasant life, among which Matryona’s life passes, and the richness of her deep inner world. The woman worked on a collective farm all her life, and now she doesn’t even receive a pension either for her work or for the loss of her breadwinner. And it is almost impossible to achieve this pension due to bureaucracy. Despite this, she has not lost her pity, humanity, and love of nature: she grows ficus trees and adopted a lanky cat. The author emphasizes in his heroine a humble, good-natured attitude towards life. She does not blame anyone for her plight, does not demand anything.

Solzhenitsyn constantly emphasizes that Matryona’s life could have turned out differently, because her house was built for a large family: money and grandchildren could sit on stools instead of ficus trees. Through the description of Matryona's life we ​​learn

about the difficult life of the peasantry. The only food in the village is potatoes and barley. The store only sells margarine and combined fat. Only once a year does Matryona buy local “delicacies” for the shepherd at the general store, which she herself does not eat: canned fish, sugar and butter. And when she put on a coat from a worn railway overcoat and began to receive a pension, her neighbors even began to envy her. This detail not only testifies to the miserable situation of all residents of the village, but also sheds light on the unsightly relationships between people.

It’s paradoxical, but in the village called “Torfoprodukt” people don’t even have enough peat for the winter. Peat, of which there was a lot around, was sold only to the authorities and one car at a time - to teachers, doctors, and factory workers. When the hero talks about this, his heart aches: it’s scary to think to what degree of downtroddenness and humiliation an ordinary person can be reduced in Russia. Due to the same stupidity of economic life, Matryona cannot have a cow. There is a sea of ​​grass all around, and you can’t mow it without permission. So the old sick woman has to look for grass for her goat on the islands in the swamp. And there’s nowhere to get hay for a cow.

A.I. Solzhenitsyn consistently shows what difficulties the life of an ordinary hard-working peasant woman is fraught with. Even if she tries to improve her plight, there are obstacles and prohibitions everywhere.

At the same time, in the image of Matryona A.I. Solzhenitsyn embodied the best features of a Russian woman. The narrator often admires her kind smile, notes that the cure for all the heroine’s troubles was work, which she easily got involved in: either digging potatoes or going to the distant forest to pick berries. 11th immediately, only in the second part of the story, we learn about Matryona’s past life: she had six children. For eleven years she waited for her missing husband from the war, who, as it turned out, was not faithful to her.

In the story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn constantly sharply criticizes the local authorities: winter is just around the corner, and the collective farm chairman talks about everything except fuel. You won’t be able to find the secretary of the village council locally, and even if you do get some paperwork, you’ll have to redo it later, since all these people who are called upon to ensure law and order in the country work carelessly, and you won’t find any government for them. A.I. writes with indignation. Solzhenitsyn said that the new chairman “first of all cut off the gardens of all disabled people,” even though the cut-off acres were still empty behind the fence.

Matryona did not even have the right to mow the grass on the collective farm land, but when there was a problem on the collective farm, the chairman’s wife came to her and, without saying hello, demanded that she go to work, and even with her pitchfork. Matryona helped not only the collective farm, but also her neighbors.

A number of artistic details by A.I. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes in the story how far the achievements of civilization are from the real life of a peasant in the Russian outback. The invention of new machines and artificial satellites of the Earth is heard on the radio as wonders of the world, from which no sense or benefit will be added. The peasants will still load peat with pitchforks and eat empty potatoes or porridge.

Also, A.I. tells along the way. Solzhenitsyn and about the situation in school education: Antoshka Grigoriev, a complete failure student, did not even try to learn anything: he knew that he would be transferred to the next class anyway, since the main thing for school is not the quality of students’ knowledge, but the struggle for a “high percentage of academic performance” .

The tragic end of the story is prepared during the development of the plot by a remarkable detail: someone stole Matryona’s pot of holy water at the blessing of water: “She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t have any.”

In addition to the cruelty of state power and its representatives towards people, A.I. Solzhenitsyn raises the problem of human callousness towards others. Matryona's relatives force her to dismantle and give the upper room to her niece (adopted daughter). After this, Matryona’s sisters cursed her as a fool, and the lanky cat, the old woman’s last joy, disappeared from the yard.

While taking out the upper room, Matryona herself dies at a crossing under the wheels of the train. With bitterness in her heart, the author tells how Matryona’s sisters, who had quarreled with her before her death, flocked to share her wretched inheritance: a hut, a goat, a chest and two hundred funeral rubles.

Only a phrase from one old woman transforms the narrative plan from the everyday to the existential: “There are two riddles in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember, how I die - I don’t know.” People glorified Matryona even after her death. There was talk that her husband didn’t love her, he walked away from her, and in general she was stupid, since she dug up people’s gardens for free, but never acquired any property of her own. The author’s point of view is extremely succinctly expressed by the phrase: “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand.”

The magazine “New World” published several works by Solzhenitsyn, 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 the Russian people did not yet know or understand how to live on.

“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 a job, 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 home 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 six children, but they all died in early childhood, so she later took in Fadey’s youngest daughter, Kira, to raise her. Matryona rose early in the 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 values ​​in the village are exalted over the human soul and its work, over humanity in general. The secondary characters are simply unable to understand the depth of Matryona’s character: greed and the desire to possess more clouds 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 being 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. The true meaning is the 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 reveal global moral problems in such poor settings? 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 of them 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 answered them in kind, they disposed - and immediately immersed again to 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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