Analysis of Solzhenitsyn's story “Matrenin's Dvor. Matrenin Dvor - analysis and plot of the work Matrenin Dvor written in

History of creation and publication

The story began in late July - early August 1959 in the village of Chernomorskoye in western Crimea, where Solzhenitsyn was invited by friends in Kazakhstan exile by the spouses Nikolai Ivanovich and Elena Alexandrovna Zubov, who settled there in 1958. The story was completed in December of the same year.

Solzhenitsyn conveyed the story to Tvardovsky on December 26, 1961. The first discussion in the magazine took place on January 2, 1962. Tvardovsky believed that this work could not be published. The manuscript remained with the editor. Having learned that censorship had cut out Veniamin Kaverin’s memories of Mikhail Zoshchenko from “The New World” (1962, No. 12), Lydia Chukovskaya wrote in her diary on December 5, 1962:

After the success of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Tvardovsky decided to re-edit the discussion and prepare the story for publication. In those days, Tvardovsky wrote in his diary:

Before Solzhenitsyn’s arrival today, I re-read his “Righteous Woman” since five in the morning. Oh my god, writer. No jokes. A writer who is solely concerned with expressing what lies “at the core” of his mind and heart. Not a shadow of a desire to “hit the bull’s eye”, to please, to make the task of an editor or critic easier - whatever you want, get out of it, but I won’t get out of my way. I can only go further.

The name “Matryonin Dvor” was proposed by Alexander Tvardovsky before publication and approved during an editorial discussion on November 26, 1962:

“The title shouldn’t be so edifying,” argued Alexander Trifonovich. “Yes, I have no luck with your names,” Solzhenitsyn responded, however, quite good-naturedly.

Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was generally positively received by critics, Matryonin’s Dvor caused a wave of controversy and discussion in the Soviet press. The author's position in the story was at the center of a critical discussion on the pages of Literary Russia in the winter of 1964. It began with an article by the young writer L. Zhukhovitsky “Looking for a co-author!”

In 1989, “Matryonin Dvor” became the first publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s texts in the USSR after many years of silence. The story was published in two issues of the magazine “Ogonyok” (1989, No. 23, 24) with a huge circulation of more than 3 million copies. Solzhenitsyn declared the publication “pirated” because it was carried out without his consent.

Plot

In the summer of 1956, “at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes to Murom and Kazan,” a passenger gets off the train. This is the narrator, whose fate resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front he was “delayed in returning for ten years,” that is, he served in a camp and was in exile, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents was “searched”). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it didn’t work out to live in the village with the wonderful name Vysokoye Polye: “Alas, they didn’t bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The whole village was dragging food in bags from the regional city.” And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his ears, Torfoprodukt. However, it turns out that “not everything is about peat mining” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo...

This reconciles the narrator with his lot: “A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy Russia.” He settles in one of the villages called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which the narrator lives is called Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva or simply Matryona.

Matryona's fate, about which she does not immediately, not considering it interesting for a “cultured” person, sometimes tells the guest in the evenings, fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees a special meaning in her fate, which Matryona’s fellow villagers and relatives do not notice. My husband went missing at the beginning of the war. He loved Matryona and did not beat her, like the village husbands of their wives. But it’s unlikely that Matryona herself 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 Thaddeus’s family, she married her younger brother, Efim. And then Thaddeus, who was in Hungarian captivity, suddenly returned. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband to death with an ax only because Efim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, but all the children from Efim (also six) of the “first Matryona” died without even living for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “corrupted,” and she herself believed it. Then she took in the daughter of the “second Matryona”, Kira, and 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 worked for someone: for a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asked for money for it. Matryona has enormous inner strength. For example, she is able to stop a running horse, which men cannot stop. Gradually, the narrator understands that Matryona, who gives herself to others without reserve, and “... is... the very righteous man, without whom... the village does not stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.” But he is hardly pleased with this discovery. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to it next?

Hence the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies while helping Thaddeus and his sons drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry out of obligation rather than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property. Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.

Characters and prototypes

Notes

Literature

• A. Solzhenitsyn. Matryonin's yard and other stories. Texts of stories on the official website of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Zhukhovitsky L. Looking for a co-author! // Literary Russia. - 1964. - January 1
• Brovman Gr. Is it necessary to be a co-author? // Literary Russia. - 1964. - January 1
• Poltoratsky V. “Matryonin Dvor” and its surroundings // Izvestia. - 1963. - March 29
• Sergovantsev N. The tragedy of loneliness and “continuous life” // October. - 1963. - No. 4. - P. 205.
• Ivanova L. Must be a citizen // Lit. gas. - 1963. - May 14
• Meshkov Yu. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Personality. Creation. Time. - Ekaterinburg, 1993
• Suprunenko P. Recognition... oblivion... fate... Experience of a reader's study of the work of A. Solzhenitsyn. - Pyatigorsk, 1994
• Chalmaev V. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Life and Creativity. - M., 1994.
• Kuzmin V.V. Poetics of stories by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. Monograph. - Tver: TvGU, 1998. Without ISBN.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Stories and novellas	One day of Ivan Denisovich (1959) · Matryonin yard (1959) · Right hand (1960) · The incident at Kochetovka station (1963) · For the good of the cause (1963) · Zakhar-Kalita (1965) · What a pity (1965) · Easter procession (1966) · Tiny (1958-1963, 1996-1999)
Novels	In the first circle (1955-1958) · Cancer building (1963-1966)
Memories	A calf butted heads with an oak tree (1967-1974) · A grain landed between two millstones
Poems, poems	Dorozhenka (1947–1952) · Prussian nights (1947–1952)
Dramaturgy	Feast of the Winners (1951-1953) · Prisoners (1952-1953) · Deer and bowerbird (1954)
Essays and journalism	It’s not the custom to whiten cabbage soup with tar, that’s why sour cream (1965) · Peace and violence (1973) · On the return of breathing and consciousness (1974) · Repentance and self-restraint as categories of national life (1974) · Education (1974) · Don't live by lies (1974) · Shredding Freedom (1976) · Our pluralists (1982) · ...Your tripod is shaking (1984) · How can we arrange Russia? (1990) · Russia in collapse (1998) · Reflections on the February Revolution (2007)
Other	Gulag Archipelago (1973) · Red wheel · The Russian question towards the end of the 20th century (1994) · Russian language extension dictionary (1990-2000) · Two hundred years together (2001-2002)
Film adaptations	One day of Ivan Denisovich (1970) · In the first circle (2006)

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Matryonin Dvor is the second of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s stories published in the magazine “New World”. Andrei Sinyavsky called this work the “fundamental thing” of all Russian “village” literature. The author's title of the story “The village is not worth it... ... Wikipedia

Wikipedia has articles about other people with this last name, see Solzhenitsyn. Alexander Solzhenitsyn ... Wikipedia

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Matrenin Dvor. Read by the author

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there’s no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m wasting my time.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the …sky oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:

– Tell me, do you need mathematicians somewhere away from the railway? I want to live there forever.

They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - everyone asks to go to the city all day, and for bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoye Pole. Just the name made my soul happy.

The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.

I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked, and typed in my order: “Peat product.”

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barracks, there was a stern sign: “Only board the train from the station side!” A nail was scratched on the boards: “And without tickets.” And at the ticket office, with the same melancholic wit, it was forever cut with a knife: “No tickets.” I appreciated the exact meaning of these additions later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, thereby raising his collective farm.

The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous, poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and houses from the fifties, with carvings on the facade and glassed-in verandas. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling piercingly, pulled trains of brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunks wandering along the street - not without that, and stabbing each other with knives.

This is where my dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. There was such a fresh wind blowing there at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.

I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. In the morning, the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.

I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:

- Drink, drink with an eager soul. Are you a newcomer?

- Where are you from? – I brightened up.

And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock there is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.

A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy Russia.

And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.

I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself did not have a place (she and her husband were raising her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; it was cramped and cramped.

So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.

“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. - Only her latrine is not so good, she lives in squalor and is sick.

Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated to look like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Beyond the front door, internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up into the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down into the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

It had been built long ago and soundly, for a large family, but now lived a lonely woman of about sixty.

When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there at the entrance, covered with vague dark rags, so priceless in the life of a working man.

The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the remaining light and behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.

While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a black illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,

- ...keeps two days and three And-days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.

And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.

And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:

- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.

We agreed on the price and the peat that the school would bring.

I only found out later 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 did not work for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in the accountant’s greasy book.

So I settled with Matryona Vasilievna. We didn't share rooms. Her bed was in the corner of the door near the stove, and I unfolded my cot by the window and, pushing Matryona’s favorite ficus trees away from the light, I placed another table by another window. There was electricity in the village - it was brought in from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers then wrote “Ilyich’s light bulbs,” and the men, their eyes wide, said: “Tsar Fire!”

Maybe to some from the village, who are richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem like a good-looking hut, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good: it had not yet leaked from the rains and the cold winds did not blow the stove’s heat out of it right away, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side.

Besides Matryona and me, the other people living in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.

The cat was not young, and most importantly, it was lanky. Out of pity, she was picked up by Matryona and took root. Although she walked on four legs, she had a strong limp: she was saving one leg because it was a bad leg. When the cat jumped from the stove to the floor, the sound of her touching the floor was not cat-soft, like everyone else’s, but a strong simultaneous blow of three legs: stupid! – such a strong blow that it took me a while to get used to it, I shuddered. It was she who put up three legs at once to protect the fourth.

But it wasn’t because the lanky cat couldn’t handle them that there were mice in the hut: like lightning, she jumped into the corner after them and carried them out in her teeth. And the mice were inaccessible to the cat due to the fact that someone once, in a good life, covered Matryona’s hut with corrugated greenish wallpaper, and not just in a layer, but in five layers. The wallpaper stuck together well, but in many places it came off the wall - and it looked like the inner skin of a hut. Between the logs of the hut and the wallpaper skins, the mice made passages for themselves and rustled impudently, running along them even under the ceiling. The cat angrily looked after their rustling sound, but could not reach it.

Sometimes the cat ate cockroaches, but they made her feel unwell. The only thing that the cockroaches respected was the line of the partition that separated the mouth of the Russian stove and the kitchenette from the clean hut. They did not crawl into a clean hut. But the kitchenette was swarming at night, and if late in the evening, having gone in to drink water, I lit a light bulb there, the entire floor, the large bench, and even the wall were almost completely brown and moving. I brought borax from the chemistry laboratory, and, mixing it with the dough, we poisoned them. There were fewer cockroaches, but Matryona was afraid to poison the cat along with them. We stopped adding poison, and the cockroaches multiplied again.

At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was working at the table, the rare, rapid rustling of mice under the wallpaper was covered by the continuous, unified, continuous, like the distant sound of the ocean, rustling of cockroaches behind the partition. But I got used to him, because there was nothing evil in him, there was no lie in him. Their rustling was their life.

And I got used to the rude poster beauty, who from the wall constantly handed me Belinsky, Panferov and a stack of other books, but was silent. I got used to everything that happened in Matryona’s hut.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. The Matrenin walkers were twenty-seven years old when they were bought at the general store. They always walked forward, and Matryona did not worry - as long as they did not lag behind, so as not to be late in the morning. She turned on the light bulb behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, heated the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all of its bellies were - this one dirty-white crooked horned goat), walked through the water and cooked in three cast iron pots: one cast iron pot for me , one for yourself, one for the goat. She chose the smallest potatoes from the underground for the goat, small ones for herself, and for me - the size of a chicken egg. Her sandy garden, which had not been fertilized since the pre-war years and was always planted with potatoes, potatoes and potatoes, did not produce large potatoes.

I hardly heard her morning chores. I slept for a long time, woke up in the late winter light and stretched, poking my head out from under the blanket and sheepskin coat. They, plus a camp padded jacket on my feet, and a bag stuffed with straw underneath, kept me warm even on those nights when the cold pushed from the north into our frail windows. Hearing a restrained noise behind the partition, I each time said measuredly:

- Good morning, Matryona Vasilievna!

And the same kind words were always heard from behind the partition. They began with some kind of low, warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales:

- Mmm-mm... you too!

And a little later:

- And breakfast is in time for you.

She didn’t announce what was for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unhusked cardboard soup, or cardboard soup (that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley with battle - as the cheapest one, they fattened pigs and took them in bags). It was not always salted as it should, it often burned, and after eating it left a residue on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

But it wasn’t Matryona’s fault: there was no oil in the Peat Product, margarine was in great demand, and only combined fat was available. And the Russian stove, as I took a closer look, is inconvenient for cooking: cooking occurs hidden from the cook, the heat approaches the cast iron unevenly from different sides. But it must have come to our ancestors from the Stone Age because, once heated before dawn, it keeps warm food and drink for livestock, food and water for humans all day long. And sleep warm.

I obediently ate everything that was cooked for me, patiently putting it aside if I came across anything unusual: a hair, a piece of peat, a cockroach leg. I didn’t have the courage to reproach Matryona. In the end, she herself warned me: “If you don’t know how to cook, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it?”

“Thank you,” I said quite sincerely.

- On what? On your own on good? – she disarmed me with a radiant smile. And, looking innocently with faded blue eyes, she asked: “Well, what can I cook for you for the worst?”

By the end it meant by the evening. I ate twice a day, just like at the front. What could I order for the terrible one? All of the same, cardboard or cardboard soup.

I put up with this because life taught me not to find the meaning of everyday existence in food. What was dearer to me was that smile on her round face, which, having finally earned enough money for a camera, I tried in vain to catch. Seeing the cold eye of the lens on herself, Matryona assumed an expression either tense or extremely stern.

Once I captured how she smiled at something, looking out the window onto the street.

That autumn Matryona had many grievances. A new pension law had just come out, and her neighbors encouraged her to seek a pension. She was lonely all around, but since she began to get very sick, she was released from the collective farm. There were a lot of injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she wasn’t at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and could only get it for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But my husband had been gone for twelve years, since the beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to get those certificates from different places about him. senior and how much he received there. It was a hassle to get these certificates; and so that they write that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and certify that she lives alone and no one is helping her; and what year is she? and then carry it all to social security; and reschedule, correcting what was done wrong; and still wear it. And find out whether they will give you a pension.

These efforts were made more difficult by the fact that the social security service from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council was ten kilometers to the west, and the village council was an hour’s walk to the north. From office to office they chased her for two months - now for a period, now for a comma. Each pass is a day. He goes to the village council, but the secretary is not there today, just like that, as happens in villages. Tomorrow, then, go again. Now there is a secretary, but he does not have a seal. The third day, go again. And go on the fourth day because they signed blindly on the wrong piece of paper; Matryona’s pieces of paper are all pinned together in one bundle.

“They oppress me, Ignatich,” she complained to me after such fruitless walks. - I was concerned.

But her forehead did not remain darkened for long. I noticed: she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work. Immediately she either grabbed a shovel and dug up the cart. Or she would go for peat with a bag under her arm. And even with a wicker body - up to the berries in the distant forest. And bowing not to the office desks, but to the forest bushes, and having broken her back with burdens, Matryona returned to the hut, already enlightened, satisfied with everything, with her kind smile.

“Now I’ve got the tooth, Ignatich, I know where to get it,” she said about the peat. - What a place, love it!

- Yes, Matryona Vasilievna, isn’t my peat enough? The car is intact.

- Eww! your peat! so much more, and so much more - then, sometimes, it’s enough. Here, as winter swirls and blows at the windows, it doesn’t so much drown you as blows it out. In the summer we trained a lot of peat! Wouldn’t I have trained three cars now? So they get caught. Already one of our women is being dragged to court.

Yes, it was like that. The frightening breath of winter was already swirling and hearts aching. We stood around the forest, but there was nowhere to get a firebox. Excavators roared all around in the swamps, but the peat was not sold to residents, but only transported - to the bosses, and whoever was with the bosses, and by car - to teachers, doctors, and factory workers. There was no fuel provided - and there was no need to ask about it. The chairman of the collective farm walked around the village, looked into his eyes demandingly or dullly or innocently and talked about anything except fuel. Because he himself stocked up. And winter was not expected.

Well, they used to steal timber from the master, now they stole peat from the trust. The women gathered in groups of five or ten to be bolder. We went during the day. Over the summer, peat was dug up everywhere and piled up to dry. This is what’s good about peat, because once it’s mined, it can’t be taken away right away. It dries until the fall, or even before the snow, if the road doesn’t work or the trust gets tired. It was during this time that the women took him. At a time they carried away six peats in a bag if they were damp, ten peats if they were dry. One bag of this kind, sometimes brought three kilometers away (and it weighed two pounds), was enough for one fire. And there are two hundred days in winter. And you need to heat it: Russian in the morning, Dutch in the evening.

- Why talk about the floor! – Matryona was angry at someone invisible. “Just as there are no horses, so what you can’t carry on yourself is not in the house.” My back never heals. In winter you carry the sled, in summer you carry the bundles, by God it’s true!

Women walked a day - more than once. On good days, Matryona brought six bags. She piled my peat openly, hid hers under the bridges, and every evening she blocked the hole with a board.

“Will the enemies ever guess,” she smiled, wiping sweat from her forehead, “otherwise they won’t find it.”

What was the trust to do? He was not given the staff to place guards in all the swamps. It was probably necessary, having shown the abundant production in the reports, then to write it off - to crumbs, to the rains. Sometimes, in impulses, they assembled a patrol and caught women at the entrance to the village. The women threw their bags and ran away. Sometimes, based on a denunciation, they went from house to house with a search, drew up a report on illegal peat and threatened to take it to court. The women gave up carrying for a while, but winter was approaching and drove them out again - with sleds at night.

In general, looking closely at Matryona, I noticed that, in addition to cooking and housekeeping, every day she had some other significant task, she kept the logical order of these tasks in her head and, waking up in the morning, she always knew what her day was about today. will be busy. Besides peat, besides collecting old stumps turned up by a tractor in a swamp, besides lingonberries soaked in quarters for the winter (“Sharpen your teeth, Ignatich,” she treated me), besides digging potatoes, besides running around on pension business, she had to have somewhere else- then to get hay for his only dirty white goat.

- Why don’t you keep cows, Matryona Vasilievna?

“Eh, Ignatich,” explained Matryona, standing in an unclean apron in the kitchen doorway and turning to my table. “I can get enough milk from a goat.” If you get a cow, it will take me by itself Yu eat it with your feet. Don’t mow near the canvas - they have their own owners, and there’s no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and on the collective farm they don’t tell me - I’m not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and the collective farmers, down to the whitest flies, all go to the collective farm, and from under the snow - what kind of grass?... They used to boil with hay during low water, from Petrov to Ilyin. The herb was considered to be honey...

So, one full-grown goat had to collect hay for Matryona - a great job. In the morning she took a bag and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the edges, along the road, along the islands in the swamp. Having filled the bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. A bag of grass made dried hay - a fork.

The new chairman, recently sent from the city, first of all cut off the gardens of all the disabled people. He left fifteen acres of sand to Matryona, and ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, for fifteen hundred square meters the collective farm sipped Matryona. When there weren’t enough hands, when the women refused very stubbornly, the chairman’s wife came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, decisive, with a short gray short coat and a menacing look, as if she were a military woman.

She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona was in the way.

“So-so,” the chairman’s wife said separately. - Comrade Grigoriev? We will have to help the collective farm! We'll have to go take out the manure tomorrow!

Matryona's face formed an apologetic half-smile - as if she was ashamed of the chairman's wife, that she could not pay her for her work.

“Well,” she drawled. - I'm sick, of course. And now I’m not attached to your case. - And then hastily corrected herself: - What time should I arrive?

- And take your pitchforks! – the chairwoman instructed and left, rustling her hard skirt.

- What! - Matryona blamed after. - And take your pitchforks! There are no shovels or pitchforks on the collective farm. And I live without a man, who will force me?...

And then I thought all evening:

- What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post nor to the railing. You stand, leaning on a shovel, and wait for the factory whistle to ring at twelve. Moreover, women will start to settle scores, who got out and who didn’t get out. When we used to work on our own, there was no sound at all, just oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oink-ki, now lunch has arrived, now evening has come.

Still, in the morning she left with her pitchfork.

But not only the collective farm, but any distant relative or just a neighbor also came to Matryona in the evening and said:

- Tomorrow, Matryona, you will come to help me. We'll dig up the potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her line of work, went to help her neighbor and, returning, still said without a shadow of envy:

- Oh, Ignatich, and she has big potatoes! I dug in a hurry, I didn’t want to leave the site, by God I really did!

Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden was done without Matryona. The Talnovsky women clearly established that digging up your garden with a shovel alone is harder and longer than taking a plow and harnessing six of them to plow six gardens on your own. That's why they called Matryona to help.

- Well, did you pay her? – I had to ask later.

– She doesn’t take money. You can’t help but hide it for her.

Matryona had an even greater fuss when it was her turn to feed the goat shepherds: one - a hefty, mute one, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This line lasted a month and a half of roses, but it drove Matryona into great expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, and bought sugar and butter, which she did not eat herself. It turns out that the housewives gave their best to each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

“Be afraid of the tailor and the shepherd,” she explained to me. “The whole village will praise you if something goes wrong with them.”

And into this life, thick with worries, a severe illness still broke in from time to time, Matryona collapsed and lay flat for a day or two. She didn't complain, didn't moan, but didn't move much either. On such days, Masha, Matryona’s close friend from her youngest years, came to care for the goat and light the stove. Matryona herself did not drink, did not eat, and did not ask for anything. Calling a doctor from the village medical center to your home was surprising in Talnov, somehow indecent in front of the neighbors - they say, lady. They called me once, she arrived very angry, and told Matryona, after she had rested, to come to the first aid station herself. Matryona walked against her will, they took tests, sent her to the district hospital - and it all died out. It was also Matryona’s fault.

Things called to life. Soon Matryona began to get up, at first she moved slowly, and then again quickly.

“It’s you who haven’t seen me before, Ignatich,” she justified herself. - All my bags were five pounds each And I didn’t consider it a joke. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona! You'll break your back! Come to me And Vir did not come up to hook my end of the log onto the front. Our military horse, Volchok, was healthy...

- Why military?

- And they took ours to the war, this wounded one - in return. And he came across some kind of poetry. Once, out of fear, he carried the sleigh into the lake, the men jumped back, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped it. The horse was oatmeal. Our men loved to feed the horses. Which horses are oatmeal, those and t And or they don't recognize it.

But Matryona was by no means fearless. She was afraid of fire, she was afraid of lightning And, and most of all for some reason – trains.

- How can I go to Cherusti? The train will get out of Nechaevka, its big eyes will pop out, the rails will hum - it will make me feel hot, my knees will shake. By God it's true! – Matryona was surprised and shrugged her shoulders.

- So, maybe because they don’t give tickets, Matryona Vasilyevna?

Yet by that winter, Matryona’s life had improved as never before. They finally began to pay her eighty rubles in pension. She received more than a hundred more from the school and from me.

- Eww! Now Matryona doesn’t even need to die! – some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. “She, the old one, has nowhere to put any more money.”

– What is a pension? - others objected. – The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, but tomorrow it will take away.

Matryona ordered new felt boots to be rolled up for herself. I bought a new padded jacket. And she put on a coat from a worn railway overcoat, which was given to her by a driver from Cherustei, the husband of her former pupil Kira. The village hunchback tailor put cotton wool under the cloth, and the result was such a nice coat, the likes of which Matryona had not sewn in six decades.

And in the middle of winter, Matryona sewed two hundred rubles into the lining of this coat for her funeral. Cheerful:

“Manenko and I saw peace, Ignatich.”

December passed, January passed, and her illness did not visit her for two months. More often, Matryona began to go to Masha’s in the evenings to sit and crack some sunflower seeds. She did not invite guests over in the evenings, respecting my activities. Only at baptism, returning from school, I found dancing in the hut and was introduced to Matryona’s three sisters, who called Matryona as the eldest - lyolka or nanny. Until that day, little had been heard about the sisters in our hut - were they afraid that Matryona would ask them for help?

Only one event or omen darkened this holiday for Matryona: she went five miles to the church for the blessing of water, put her pot between the others, and when the blessing of water ended and the women rushed, jostling, to take it apart, Matryona did not make it among the first, and at the end - she was not there her bowler hat. And no other utensils were left in place of the pot. The pot disappeared, like an unclean spirit carried it away.

- Babonki! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. – Did someone take someone else’s blessed water due to a mistake? in a pot?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys called out, and there were boys there. Matryona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t have any.

It cannot be said, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even if she was a pagan, superstitions took over in her: that you couldn’t go into the garden on Ivan Lenten’s day - there would be no harvest the next year; that if a snowstorm is blowing, it means that someone has hanged himself somewhere, and if you get your leg caught in a door, you should be a guest. As long as I lived with her, I never saw her pray, nor did she even cross herself once. And she started every business “with God!” and every time I say “God bless!” said when I was walking to school. Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid of oppressing me. There was a holy corner in a clean hut, and an icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant in the kitchenette. The fortresses stood dark, and during the all-night vigil and in the morning on holidays, Matryona lit a lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her wobbly cat. She was strangling mice...

Having escaped a little from her life, Matryona began to listen more attentively to my radio (I did not fail to set up a reconnaissance device for myself - that’s what Matryona called the outlet. My radio was no longer a scourge for me, because I could turn it off with my own hand at any moment; but, Indeed, he came out of a remote hut for me - reconnaissance). That year, it was customary to receive, see off, and drive around many cities, holding rallies, two or three foreign delegations a week. And every day the news was full of important messages about banquets, dinners and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned and sighed disapprovingly:

- They drive and drive, they run into something.

Hearing that new machines had been invented, Matryona grumbled from the kitchen:

- Everything is new, new, they don’t want to work on the old ones, where are we going to put the old ones?

Back in that year, artificial Earth satellites were promised. Matryona shook her head from the stove:

- Oh, oh, oh, they’ll change something, winter or summer.

Chaliapin performed Russian songs. Matryona stood and stood, listened and said decisively:

- They sing wonderfully, not like us.

- What are you saying, Matryona Vasilyevna, listen!

I listened again. She pursed her lips:

But Matryona rewarded me. They once broadcast a concert from Glinka’s romances. And suddenly, after a heel of chamber romances, Matryona, holding her apron, came out from behind the partition, warmed up, with a veil of tears in her dim eyes:

“But this is our way...” she whispered.

2

So Matryona got used to me, and I got used to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening studies, did not annoy me with any questions. She was so lacking in womanly curiosity, or was she so delicate, that she never asked me once: was I ever married? All the Talnov women pestered her to find out about me. She answered them:

– If you need it, you ask. I know one thing - he is distant.

And when, not long after, I myself told her that I had spent a lot of time in prison, she just silently nodded her head, as if she had suspected it before.

And I also saw today’s Matryona, a lost old woman, and I also didn’t bother about her past, and I didn’t even suspect that there was anything to look for there.

I knew that Matryona got married even before the revolution, and straight into this hut, where we now lived with her, and straight to the stove (that is, neither her mother-in-law nor her older unmarried sister-in-law was alive, and from the first morning after her marriage, Matryona took up for grip). I knew that she had six children and one after another they all died very early, so that two did not live at once. Then there was some student Kira. But Matryona’s husband did not return from this war. There was no funeral either. Fellow villagers who were with him in the company said that he was either captured or died, but his body was never found. In the eleven post-war years, Matryona herself decided that he was not alive. And it’s good that I thought so. Even if he were alive now, he would be married somewhere in Brazil or Australia. Both the village of Talnovo and the Russian language are erased from his memory...

Once, coming home from school, I found a guest in our hut. A tall black old man, with his hat on his knees, was sitting on a chair that Matryona had placed for him in the middle of the room, next to the Dutch stove. His entire face was covered with thick black hair, almost untouched by gray hair: a thick, black mustache merged with his thick black beard, so that his mouth was barely visible; and continuous black whiskers, barely showing the ears, rose to the black hair hanging from the crown of the head; and wide black eyebrows were thrown towards each other like bridges. And only the forehead disappeared like a bald dome into the bald, spacious crown. The old man's entire appearance seemed to me to be full of knowledge and dignity. He sat upright, with his hands folded on his staff, the staff resting vertically on the floor - he sat in a position of patient waiting and, apparently, spoke little to Matryona, who was fiddling around behind the partition.

When I arrived, he smoothly turned his majestic head towards me and suddenly called me:

- Father!... I see you badly. My son is studying with you. Grigoriev Antoshka...

He might not have spoken further... With all my impulse to help this venerable old man, I knew in advance and rejected everything useless that the old man would say now. Grigoriev Antoshka was a round, ruddy boy from the 8th "G", who looked like a cat after pancakes. He came to school as if to relax, sat at his desk and smiled lazily. Moreover, he never prepared lessons at home. But, most importantly, fighting for that high percentage of academic performance for which the schools of our district, our region and neighboring regions were famous, he was transferred from year to year, and he clearly learned that, no matter how the teachers threatened, they would still transfer at the end of the year , and you don’t need to study for this. He just laughed at us. He was in the 8th grade, but did not know fractions and did not distinguish what kind of triangles there are. In the first quarters he was in the tenacious grip of my twos - and the same awaited him in the third quarter.

But to this half-blind old man, fit to be Antoshka’s grandfather, not his father, and who came to me to bow to me in humiliation - how could I say now that year after year the school deceived him, but I can’t deceive him any longer, otherwise I’ll ruin the whole class and turn into into a balabolka, and I will have to give a damn about all my work and my title?

And now I patiently explained to him that my son is very neglected, and he lies at school and at home, we need to check his diary more often and take a hard approach from both sides.

“It’s much cooler, father,” the guest assured me. “I’ve been beating him for a week now.” And my hand is heavy.

In the conversation, I remembered that once Matryona herself for some reason interceded for Antoshka Grigoriev, but I did not ask what kind of relative he was to her, and then also refused. Matryona has now become a wordless petitioner at the door of the kitchenette. And when Thaddeus Mironovich left me with the idea that he would come and find out, I asked:

- I don’t understand, Matryona Vasilyevna, how is this Antoshka to you?

“My son is Divira,” Matryona answered dryly and went off to milk the goat.

Disappointed, I realized that this persistent black old man was the brother of her husband, who had gone missing.

And the long evening passed - Matryona no longer touched on this conversation. Only late in the evening, when I forgot to think about the old man and was working in the silence of the hut to the rustle of cockroaches and the clicking of walkers, Matryona suddenly said from her dark corner:

– I, Ignatich, once almost married him.

I forgot about Matryona herself, that she was here, I didn’t hear her, but she said it so excitedly from the darkness, as if that old man was still harassing her.

Apparently, all evening Matryona was thinking only about that.

She got up from the wretched rag bed and slowly came out to me, as if following her words. I leaned back and for the first time saw Matryona in a completely new way.

There was no overhead light in our large room, which was filled with ficus trees like a forest. From the table lamp the light fell all around only on my notebooks, and throughout the entire room, to eyes that looked up from the light, it seemed twilight with a pink tint. And Matryona emerged from it. And it seemed to me that her cheeks were not yellow, as always, but also with a hint of pink.

- He was the first to woo me... before Efim... He was the elder brother... I was nineteen, Thaddeus was twenty-three... They lived in this very house then. It was their house. Built by their father.

I involuntarily looked back. This old gray rotting house suddenly, through the faded green skin of the wallpaper, under which mice were running, appeared to me with young, not yet darkened, planed logs and a cheerful resinous smell.

– And you…? And what?…

“That summer... we went with him to sit in the grove,” she whispered. “There was a grove here, where the horse yard is now, they cut it down... I couldn’t get out, Ignatich.” The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war.

She dropped it - and the blue, white and yellow July of 1914 flashed before me: a still peaceful sky, floating clouds and people boiling with ripe stubble. I imagined them side by side: a resin hero with a scythe across his back; her, rosy, hugging the sheaf. And - a song, a song under the sky, which the village has long since stopped singing, and you can’t sing with the machinery.

“He went to war and disappeared... For three years I hid, waited. And no news, and not a bone...

Tied with an old faded handkerchief, Matryona’s round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp - as if freed from wrinkles, from an everyday careless outfit - frightened, girlish, faced with a terrible choice.

Yes. Yes... I understand... The leaves flew around, the snow fell - and then melted. They plowed again, sowed again, reaped again. And again the leaves flew away, and again the snow fell. And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned upside down.

“Their mother died, and Efim asked me in marriage.” Like, you wanted to go to our hut, so go to ours. Efim was a year younger than me. They say here: the smart one comes out after the Intercession, and the fool comes out after Petrov. They didn't have enough hands. I went... They got married on Peter's Day, and Thaddeus returned to Mikola in winter... from Hungarian captivity.

Matryona closed her eyes.

I was silent.

She turned to the door as if it were alive:

- I stood on the threshold. I'll scream! I would throw myself at his knees!... You can’t... Well, he says, if it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both up!

I shuddered. From her anguish or fear, I vividly imagined him standing there, black, in the dark doorway and swinging an ax at Matryona.

But she calmed down, leaned on the back of the chair in front of her and said in a melodious voice:

- Oh, oh, oh, poor little head! There were so many brides in the village, but he never married. He said: I will look for your name, the second Matryona. And he brought Matryona from Lipovka, they built a separate hut, where they live now, you walk past them to school every day.

Ah, that's it! Now I realized that I saw that second Matryona more than once. I didn’t love her: she always came to my Matryona to complain that her husband was beating her, and her stingy husband was pulling the veins out of her, and she cried here for a long time, and her voice was always in tears.

But it turned out that my Matryona had nothing to regret - that’s how Thaddeus beat his Matryona all her life and to this day, and so he squeezed the whole house.

“He never beat me,” she said about Efim. “He ran down the street at the men with his fists, but didn’t give a damn about me... That is, there was one time - I had a fight with my sister-in-law, he smashed a spoon on my forehead.” I jumped up from the table: “You should choke, drones!” And she went into the forest. Didn't touch it anymore.

It seems that Thaddeus had nothing to regret: the second Matryona also gave birth to six children for him (among them my Antoshka, the youngest, scraped) - and they all survived, but Matryona and Yefim had no children: they didn’t live to see three months and sick with nothing, everyone died.

“One daughter, Elena, was just born, they washed her alive, and then she died. So I didn’t have to wash the dead one... Just as my wedding was on Peter’s Day, so I buried my sixth child, Alexander, on Peter’s Day.

And the whole village decided that there was damage in Matryona.

- The portion is in me! – Matryona nodded with conviction now. - They took me to a former nun for treatment, she made me cough - she was waiting for the portion to throw out of me like a frog. Well, I didn’t throw it away...

And the years passed, as the water floated... In '41, Thaddeus was not taken to the war because of blindness, but Efim was taken. And just like the older brother in the first war, the younger brother disappeared without a trace in the second. But this one didn't come back at all. The once noisy, but now deserted hut was rotting and aging - and the deserted Matryona was aging in it.

And she asked that second downtrodden Matryona—the womb of her snatch (or Thaddeus’ little blood?)—for their youngest girl, Kira.

For ten years she raised her here as her own, instead of her own ones who did not survive. And not long before she married me off to a young driver in Cherusti. Only from there now did she get help: sometimes sugar, when a pig was slaughtered - lard.

Suffering from illnesses and near death, Matryona then declared her will: a separate log cabin of the upper room, located under a common connection with the hut, should be given as an inheritance to Kira after her death. She said nothing about the hut itself. Three more of her sisters were aiming to get this hut.

So that evening Matryona revealed herself to me completely. And, as it happens, the connection and meaning of her life, barely becoming visible to me, began to move in those same days. Kira arrived from Cherusti, old Thaddeus became worried: in Cherusti, in order to get and hold a piece of land, the young people had to build some kind of building. Matrenina's room was quite suitable for this. And there was nothing else to put in, there was nowhere in the forest to get it from. And not so much Kira herself, and not so much her husband, as for them, old Thaddeus set out to seize this plot in Cherusty.

And so he began to visit us often, came again and again, spoke instructively to Matryona and demanded that she give up the upper room now, during her lifetime. During these visits, he did not seem to me like that old man leaning on a staff, who was about to fall apart from a push or a rude word. Although hunched over with a sore lower back, he was still stately, having retained the rich, youthful blackness of his hair over sixty, he pressed on with fervor.

Matryona did not sleep for two nights. It was not easy for her to decide. I didn’t feel sorry for the upper room itself, which stood idle, just as Matryona never felt sorry for her work or her goods. And this room was still bequeathed to Kira. But it was scary for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. Even I, a guest, felt pain that they would begin to tear off the boards and turn out the logs of the house. And for Matryona this was the end of her entire life.

But those who insisted knew that her house could be broken even during her lifetime.

And Thaddeus and his sons and sons-in-law came one February morning and knocked on five axes, screamed and creaked as the boards were being torn off. Thaddeus’s own eyes sparkled busily. Despite the fact that his back was not completely straightened, he deftly climbed under the rafters and quickly fussed around below, shouting at his assistants. He and his father once built this hut as a boy; This room was built for him, the eldest son, so that he could settle here with his wife. And now he was furiously picking it apart, piece by piece, in order to take it away from someone else’s yard.

Having marked the crowns of the frame and the boards of the ceiling flooring with numbers, the room with the basement was dismantled, and the hut itself with shortened bridges was cut off with a temporary plank wall. They left the cracks in the wall, and everything showed that the breakers were not builders and did not expect Matryona to have to live here for a long time.

And while the men were breaking, the women were preparing moonshine for the day of loading: vodka would be too expensive. Kira brought a pound of sugar from the Moscow region, Matryona Vasilyevna, under the cover of darkness, carried that sugar and bottles to the moonshiner.

The logs in front of the gate were taken out and stacked, the son-in-law driver went to Cherusti to pick up a tractor.

But on the same day a snowstorm began - a duel, in Matryona’s style. She caroused and circled for two days and covered the road with enormous snowdrifts. Then, as soon as they knew the way, a truck or two passed by - suddenly it became warmer, one day it cleared up all at once, there were damp fogs, streams gurgled through the snow, and the foot in the boot got stuck up to the top.

For two weeks the tractor couldn't handle the broken chamber! These two weeks Matryona walked as if lost. That’s why it was especially hard for her because her three sisters came, all unanimously cursed her as a fool for giving away the upper room, said that they didn’t want to see her anymore, and left.

And on those same days, a lanky cat wandered out of the yard - and disappeared. One to one. This also hurt Matryona.

Finally, the frozen road was covered with frost. A sunny day arrived, and my soul became happier. Matryona dreamed something good about that day. In the morning she found out that I wanted to take a photograph of someone at the old weaving mill (these still stood in two huts, and rough rugs were woven on them), and she smiled shyly:

- Just wait, Ignatich, a couple of days, maybe I’ll send the upper room - I’ll lay down my camp, because I’m intact - and then you’ll take it off. By God it's true!

Apparently, she was attracted to portray herself in the old days. From the red frosty sun, the frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, glowed slightly pink, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection. Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.

Just before dusk, returning from school, I saw movement near our house. The large new tractor sleigh was already loaded with logs, but a lot of things still didn’t fit - both the family of grandfather Thaddeus and those invited to help were finishing up knocking down another homemade sleigh. Everyone worked like crazy, in that ferocity that people have when they smell big money or are expecting a big treat. They shouted at each other and argued.

The dispute was about how to transport the sleigh - separately or together. One son of Thaddeus, lame, and his son-in-law, a machinist, explained that it was impossible to wallpaper the sleigh right away, the tractor would not pull away. The tractor driver, a self-confident, fat-faced big fellow, wheezed that he knew better, that he was the driver and would carry the sleigh together. His calculation was clear: according to the agreement, the driver paid him for transporting the room, and not for the flights. There was no way he would have made two flights a night - twenty-five kilometers each and one trip back. And by morning he had to be with the tractor in the garage, from where he secretly took it for the left one.

Old man Thaddeus was impatient to take away the entire upper room today - and he nodded to his men to give in. The second, hastily knocked together, sleds were hooked up behind the strong first ones.

Matryona ran among the men, fussed and helped roll logs onto the sleigh. Then I noticed that she was wearing my padded jacket and had already smeared her sleeves on the icy mud of the logs, and I told her about it with displeasure. This padded jacket was a memory for me, it warmed me during difficult years.

So for the first time I became angry with Matryona Vasilievna.

- Oh, oh, oh, poor little head! – she was puzzled. - After all, I picked up her begma, and forgot that it was yours. Sorry, Ignatich. “And she took it off and hung it up to dry.”

The loading was over, and everyone who was working, about ten men, thundered past my table and ducked under the curtain into the kitchenette. From there, glasses clattered rather dully, sometimes a bottle clinked, the voices became louder, the boasting became more fervent. The tractor driver especially boasted. The heavy smell of moonshine reached me. But they didn’t drink for long—the darkness forced us to hurry. They began to leave. The tractor driver came out smug and with a cruel face. The son-in-law, the driver, the lame son of Thaddeus and one nephew accompanied the sleigh to Cherusti. The rest went home. Thaddeus, waving a stick, was catching up with someone, in a hurry to explain something. The lame son paused at my table to smoke and suddenly started talking about how he loved Aunt Matryona, and that he had recently gotten married, and that his son had just been born. Then they shouted at him and he left. A tractor roared outside the window.

The last one to hurriedly jump out from behind the partition was Matryona. She shook her head anxiously after those who had left. I put on a padded jacket and threw on a scarf. At the door she told me:

- And why couldn’t the two be matched? If one tractor fell ill, the other would pull it up. And now what will happen - God knows!...

And she ran away after everyone.

After drinking, arguing and walking, it became especially quiet in the abandoned hut, chilled by the frequent opening of the doors. It was already completely dark outside the windows. I also got into my padded jacket and sat down at the table. The tractor died down in the distance.

An hour passed, then another. And the third. Matryona did not return, but I was not surprised: after seeing off the sleigh, she must have gone to her Masha.

And another hour passed. And further. Not only darkness, but a kind of deep silence descended on the village. I couldn’t understand then why there was silence - it turned out that during the whole evening not a single train passed along the line half a mile away from us. My receiver was silent, and I noticed that the mice were busier than ever: they were running more and more impudently, more noisily under the wallpaper, scratching and squeaking.

I woke up. It was one o'clock in the morning, and Matryona did not return.

Suddenly I heard several loud voices in the village. They were still far away, but it prompted me that it was coming to us. Indeed, soon a sharp knock was heard at the gate. Someone else's authoritative voice shouted to open it. I went out with an electric flashlight into the thick darkness. The whole village was asleep, the windows were not lit, and the snow had melted for a week and did not shine either. I unscrewed the bottom wrap and let him in. Four men in greatcoats walked towards the hut. It’s very unpleasant when people come to you loudly and in greatcoats at night.

In the light, I looked around, however, that two of them had railroad overcoats. The older man, fat, with the same face as that tractor driver, asked:

-Where is the hostess?

- Don't know.

– Did the tractor and sleigh leave this yard?

- From this.

– Did they drink here before leaving?

All four squinted and looked around in the semi-darkness of the table lamp. As I understand it, someone was arrested or wanted to be arrested.

- So what happened?

- Answer what they ask you!

- We went drunk?

-Did they drink here?

Did anyone kill whom? Or was it impossible to transport the upper rooms? They really pressed me. But one thing was clear: Matryona could be sentenced for moonshine.

I retreated to the kitchen door and blocked it with myself.

- Really, I didn’t notice. It was not visible.

(I really couldn’t see it, I could only hear it.)

And as if with a bewildered gesture, I held my hand, showing the interior of the hut: a peaceful table light above the books and notebooks; a crowd of frightened ficus trees; the harsh bed of a hermit. No signs of debauchery.

They themselves already noticed with annoyance that there was no drinking party here. And they turned to the exit, saying among themselves that it means that the drinking was not in this hut, but it would be nice to grab what there was. I accompanied them and asked what happened. And only at the gate one muttered to me:

- It turned them all around. You won't collect it.

- Yes, that’s what! The twenty-first ambulance almost went off the rails, that would have happened.

And they quickly left.

Who – them? Who - everyone? Where is Matryona?

I quickly returned to the hut, pulled back the curtains and went into the kitchenette. The stench of moonshine hit me. It was a frozen carnage - loaded stools and benches, empty lying bottles and one unfinished one, glasses, half-eaten herring, onions and shredded lard.

Everything was dead. And only cockroaches calmly crawled across the battlefield.

I rushed to clean everything up. I rinsed the bottles, put away the food, carried the chairs, and hid the rest of the moonshine in the dark underground away.

And only when I had done all this, I stood like a stump in the middle of an empty hut: something was said about the twenty-first ambulance. Why?... Maybe I should have shown all this to them? I already doubted it. But what kind of damned manner is it to not explain anything to an unofficial person?

And suddenly our gate creaked. I quickly went out onto the bridges:

- Matryona Vasilievna?

Her friend Masha staggered into the hut:

- Matryona... Matryona is ours, Ignatich...

I sat her down, and, between tears, she told me.

At the crossing there is a hill, the entrance is steep. There is no barrier. The tractor crossed the first sleigh, but the cable broke, and the second sleigh, homemade, got stuck at the crossing and began to fall apart - Thaddeus did not give the forest any good for them, for the second sleigh. The first ones took it a little - they returned for the second ones, the rope got along well - the tractor driver and Thaddeus's son were lame, and Matryona was carried there too, between the tractor and the sleigh. What could she do to help the men there? She was always interfering in men's affairs. And a horse once almost knocked her into the lake, under an ice hole. And why did the damned one go to move? - she gave the room, and all her debt, paid off... The driver kept watching so that the train would not come from Cherusti, its lights would be far away, and on the other hand, from our station, two coupled locomotives were coming - without lights and backwards. Why there are no lights is unknown, but when the locomotive is going backwards, the tender sprinkles coal dust in the eyes of the driver, it’s hard to watch. They flew in and crushed those three who were between the tractor and the sleigh into meat. The tractor was mutilated, the sleigh was in splinters, the rails were raised, and both locomotives were on their sides.

- How come they didn’t hear that the locomotives were coming?

- Yes, the tractor is screaming when it’s running.

-What about the corpses?

- They don’t let me in. They cordoned off.

- What did I hear about the ambulance... like an ambulance?...

- And the ten o’clock express will leave our station on the move, and also for the crossing. But as the locomotives collapsed, two drivers survived, jumped off and ran back, waving their arms, standing on the rails, and managed to stop the train... My nephew was also crippled by the log. He’s now hiding at Klavka’s so that they won’t know that he was at the crossing. Otherwise, they drag him in as a witness!... Dunno is lying on the stove, and Know-it-all is being led on a string... And her husband Kirkin - not a scratch. I wanted to hang myself, but they took me out of the noose. Because of me, they say, my aunt and brother died. Now he went himself and was arrested. Yes, now he’s not in prison, he’s in a madhouse. Ah, Matryona-Matryonushka!...

No Matryona. A loved one was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for wearing a padded jacket.

The painted red and yellow woman from the book poster smiled joyfully.

Aunt Masha sat and cried some more. And she already got up to go. And suddenly she asked:

- Ignatich! Do you remember... in I Matryona had a gray stash... She gave it to my Tanka after her death, right?

And she looked at me hopefully in the semi-darkness - have I really forgotten?

But I remembered:

– I read it, that’s right.

- So listen, maybe allow me to pick her up now? My relatives will come here in the morning, and then I won’t get it.

And again she looked at me with prayer and hope - her friend of half a century, the only one who sincerely loved Matryona in this village...

That's probably how it should have been.

“Of course... Take it...” I confirmed.

She opened the chest, took out a bundle, put it under the floor and left...

The mice were seized by some kind of madness, they walked along the walls, and the green wallpaper rolled over the mice’s backs in almost visible waves.

I had nowhere to go. They will also come to me and interrogate me. In the morning school was waiting for me. It was three o'clock in the morning. And there was a way out: lock yourself up and go to bed.

Lock yourself because Matryona won't come.

I lay down, leaving the light on. The mice squeaked, almost moaned, and everyone ran and ran. With a tired, incoherent head, it was impossible to escape the involuntary trembling - as if Matryona was invisibly rushing about and saying goodbye here, to her hut.

And suddenly, in the darkness at the entrance doors, on the threshold, I imagined black young Thaddeus with a raised ax: “If it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both down!”

For forty years his threat lay in the corner like an old cleaver, but it finally struck...

3

At dawn, the women were brought from the crossing on a sled under a dirty bag thrown over - all that was left of Matryona. They took off the bag to wash it. Everything was a mess - no legs, no half of the torso, no left arm. One woman crossed herself and said:

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

And so the whole crowd of ficuses, which Matryona loved so much that, having woken up one night in the smoke, she did not rush to save the hut, but to throw the ficuses onto the floor (they would not be suffocated by the smoke) - the ficuses were taken out of the hut. Swept the floors clean. Matrenino's dim mirror was hung with a wide towel from an old home sewing line. Idle posters were taken down from the wall. They moved my table. And by the windows, under the icon, they placed a coffin, knocked together without any fuss, on stools.

And Matryona lay in the coffin. A clean sheet covered her missing, mutilated body, and her head was covered with a white scarf, but her face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.

The villagers came to stand and watch. Women brought small children to look at the dead body. And if crying began, all the women, even if they entered the hut out of empty curiosity, all would definitely cry from the door and from the walls, as if they were accompanying in chorus. And the men stood silently at attention, taking off their hats.

The actual crying was left to the relatives. In the crying I noticed a coldly thoughtful, primordially established order. Those who filed away approached the coffin for a short time and wailed quietly at the coffin itself. Those who considered themselves closer to the deceased began crying from the threshold, and upon reaching the coffin, they bent down to cry over the very face of the deceased. Each mourner had an amateur melody. And they expressed their own thoughts and feelings.

Then I learned that crying over the deceased is not just crying, but a kind of politics. Matryona's three sisters flew in, seized the hut, the goat and the stove, locked her chest, gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat, and explained to everyone who came that they were the only ones close to Matryona. And over the coffin they cried like this:

- Oh, nanny-nanny! Oh, lyolka-lyolka! And you are our only one! And you would live quietly and peacefully! And we would always caress you! And your upper room destroyed you! And I finished you off, cursed one! And why did you break it? And why didn't you listen to us?

So the sisters’ cries were accusatory cries against their husband’s relatives: there was no need to force Matryona to destroy the upper room. (And the hidden meaning was: you took that upper room, but we won’t give you the hut!)

The husband's relatives - Matryona's sisters-in-law, the sisters of Efim and Thaddeus, and various other nieces came and cried like this:

- Oh, auntie-auntie! And why didn’t you take care of yourself! And, probably, now they are offended by us! And you are our darling, and the fault is all yours! And the upper room has nothing to do with it. And why did you go to where death was guarding you? And no one invited you there! And I didn’t think about how you died! And why didn’t you listen to us?...

(And from all these lamentations the answer stuck out: we are not to blame for her death, but we’ll talk about the hut later!)

But the broad-faced, rude “second” Matryona - that dummy Matryona whom Thaddeus once took on just one name - strayed from this policy and simply screamed, straining over the coffin:

- Yes, you are my little sister! Are you really going to be offended by me? Oh-ma!... Yes, we used to talk and talk with you! And forgive me, wretched one! Oh-ma!... And you went to your mother, and, probably, you’ll come pick me up! Oh-ma-ah!...

At this “oh-ma-ah” she seemed to give up all her spirit - and beat and beat her chest against the wall of the coffin. And when her crying exceeded the ritual norms, the women, as if recognizing that the crying was completely successful, all said in unison:

- Leave me alone! Leave me alone!

Matryona lagged behind, but then came again and sobbed even more furiously. Then an ancient old woman came out of the corner and, putting her hand on Matryona’s shoulder, said sternly:

– There are two mysteries in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember; how I will die - I don’t know.

And Matryona fell silent immediately, and everyone fell silent to complete silence.

But this old woman herself, much older than all the old women here and as if she was a complete stranger even to Matryona, after a while also cried:

- Oh, my sick one! Oh, my Vasilievna! Oh, I'm tired of seeing you off!

And not at all ritually - with the simple sob of our century, which is not poor in them, the ill-fated adopted daughter of Matryonina sobbed - that Kira from Cherusti, for whom this upper room was taken and destroyed. Her curled locks were pathetically disheveled. The eyes were red, as if filled with blood. She didn’t notice how her scarf bunched up in the cold, or she put her coat on past the sleeve. She walked insanely from the coffin of her adoptive mother in one house to the coffin of her brother in another - and they still feared for her mind, because they had to judge her husband.

It turned out that her husband was doubly guilty: he was not only transporting the room, but he was a railway driver, he knew well the rules of unguarded crossings - and should have gone to the station and warned about the tractor. That night, in the Ural ambulance, a thousand lives of people sleeping peacefully on the first and second shelves in the half-light of train lamps were about to end. Because of the greed of a few people: to seize a piece of land or not to make a second trip with a tractor.

Because of the upper room, which had been under a curse since the hands of Thaddeus set out to break it.

However, the tractor driver has already left the human court. And the road management itself was guilty of the fact that the busy crossing was not guarded, and that the locomotive raft was running without lights. That’s why they first tried to blame it all on drinking, and now they hush up the trial itself.

The rails and the canvas were so distorted that for three days, while the coffins were in the houses, the trains did not go - they were wrapped in another branch. All Friday, Saturday and Sunday - from the end of the investigation until the funeral - the track was being repaired day and night at the crossing. The repairmen were freezing for warmth, and at night, and for light, they made fires from donated boards and logs from the second sleigh, scattered near the crossing.

And the first sleigh, loaded and intact, stood not far behind the crossing.

And it was precisely this - that one sleigh was teasing, waiting with a ready-made cable, and the second could still be snatched from the fire - this is what tormented the soul of black-bearded Thaddeus all Friday and all Saturday. His daughter was losing her mind, his son-in-law was on trial, in his own house lay the son he had killed, on the same street - the woman he had killed, whom he had once loved - Thaddeus only came for a short time to stand at the coffins, holding his beard. His high forehead was overshadowed by a heavy thought, but this thought was to save the logs of the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of Matryona’s sisters.

Having sorted through the Talnovskys, I realized that Thaddeus was not the only one in the village.

That our language strangely calls our property our property, the people's or mine. And losing it is considered shameful and stupid in front of people.

Thaddeus, without sitting down, rushed first to the village, then to the station, from superior to superior, and with an unbending back, leaning on his staff, asked everyone to condescend to his old age and give permission to return the upper room.

And someone gave such permission. And Thaddeus gathered his surviving sons, sons-in-law and nephews, and got horses from the collective farm - and from the other side of the torn up crossing, in a roundabout way through three villages, transported the remains of the upper room to his yard. He finished it on the night from Saturday to Sunday.

And on Sunday afternoon they buried him. Two coffins came together in the middle of the village, the relatives argued which coffin came first. Then they put them on the same sledge side by side, aunt and nephew, and on the newly dampened February crust under a cloudy sky they took the dead to the church cemetery two villages away from us. The weather was windy and unpleasant, and the priest and the deacon waited in the church and did not go out to Talnovo to meet them.

People walked slowly to the outskirts and sang in chorus. Then he fell behind.

Even before Sunday, the woman’s bustle in our hut did not subside: the old woman at the coffin was humming a psalter, Matryona’s sisters were scurrying around the Russian stove with a grip, from the forehead of the stove there was a glow of heat from hot peats - from those that Matryona carried in a sack from a distant swamp. Tasteless pies were baked from bad flour.

On Sunday, when we returned from the funeral, and it was already in the evening, we gathered for the wake. The tables, arranged in one long one, also covered the place where the coffin stood in the morning. First, everyone stood around the table, and the old man, my sister-in-law’s husband, read the “Our Father.” Then they poured it to the very bottom of the bowl for everyone - they were full of honey. To save our souls, we swallowed it with spoons, without anything. Then they ate something and drank vodka, and the conversations became livelier. Everyone stood up in front of the jelly and sang “Eternal Memory” (they explained to me that they must sing it before the jelly). They drank again. And they talked even louder, no longer about Matryona. Sister-in-law's husband boasted:

– Have you, Orthodox Christians, noticed that the funeral service was slow today? This is because Father Mikhail noticed me. He knows that I know the service. Otherwise, help with the saints, around the leg - and that’s all.

Finally dinner was over. Everyone stood up again. They sang “It is Worthy to Eat.” And again, with triple repetition: eternal memory! everlasting memory! everlasting memory! But the voices were hoarse, discordant, the faces were drunk, and no one put feelings into this eternal memory.

Then the main guests left, the closest ones remained, pulled out cigarettes, lit a cigarette, jokes and laughter were heard. It touched Matryona’s missing husband, and my sister-in-law’s husband, beating his chest, proved to me and the shoemaker, the husband of one of Matryona’s sisters:

– He’s dead, Yefim, he’s dead! How could he not return? Yes, if I had known that they would even hang me in my homeland, I would still have returned!

The shoemaker nodded in agreement. He was a deserter and never parted with his homeland: he hid underground with his mother throughout the war.

High on the stove sat that stern, silent old woman who had stayed overnight, older than all the ancients. She looked down silently, condemningly at the indecently animated fifty- and sixty-year-old youth.

And only the unfortunate adopted daughter, who grew up within these walls, went behind the partition and cried there.

Thaddeus did not come to Matryona’s wake, perhaps because he was commemorating his son. But in the coming days, he came to this hut twice in hostility to negotiate with Matryona’s sisters and with the deserter shoemaker.

The dispute was about the hut: who should it belong to - a sister or an adopted daughter. The matter was about to go to court, but they reconciled, deciding that the court would give the hut not to one or the other, but to the village council. The deal was completed. One sister took the goat, a shoemaker and his wife took the hut, and to offset Thaddeus’s share that he “took over every log here with his own hands,” the upper room that had already been brought was taken, and they also gave him the barn where the goat lived, and the entire inner fence between the yard and a vegetable garden.

And again, overcoming weakness and aches, the insatiable old man became revived and rejuvenated. Again he gathered his surviving sons and sons-in-law, they dismantled the barn and the fence, and he himself carried the logs on sleds, on sleds, in the end only with his Antoshka from the 8th "G", who was not lazy here.

Matryona's hut was closed until spring, and I moved to one of her sisters-in-law, not far away. This sister-in-law then, on various occasions, remembered something about Matryona and somehow shed light on the deceased for me from a new perspective.

“Efim didn’t love her.” He said: I like to dress culturally, but she – somehow, everything is in a country style. And one day we went to the city with him to earn money, so he got himself a girlfriend there and didn’t want to return to Matryona.

All her reviews about Matryona were disapproving: and she was unclean; and I didn’t chase the factory; and not careful; and she didn’t even keep a pig, for some reason she didn’t like to feed it; and, stupid, she helped strangers for free (and the very occasion to remember Matryona came - there was no one to call the garden to plow with a plow).

And even about Matryona’s cordiality and simplicity, which her sister-in-law recognized in her, she spoke with contemptuous regret.

And only then - from these disapproving reviews of my sister-in-law - did the image of Matryona emerge before me, as I did not understand her, even living side by side with her.

Indeed! - after all, there’s a pig in every hut! But she didn't. What could be easier - to feed a greedy piglet who recognizes nothing in the world except food! Cook for him three times a day, live for him - and then slaughter and have lard.

But she didn't have...

I didn’t chase after acquisitions... I didn’t struggle to buy things and then cherish them more than my life.

I didn’t bother with outfits. Behind clothes that embellish freaks and villains.

Misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband, who buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, a stranger to her sisters and sisters-in-law, funny, foolishly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property for death. A dirty white goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees...

We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand.

Neither the city.

Not all the land is ours.

1959-60 Ak-Mosque – Ryazan

Analysis of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” includes characteristics of its characters, a summary, the history of 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 belongings got stuck on the railway, 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 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. Having returned, 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 was Thaddeus who was to blame for the death of Matryona, who was hit by a train while helping her relatives tear 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.

Solzhenitsyn "Matryonin's yard"

1. Option 1

The story "Matryonin's Dvor":

B) based on fiction;

2. C) is based on eyewitness accounts and contains elements of fiction.

The narration in the story is:

A) in the first person;

B) from a third party;

3. B) two narrators.

Function of exposition in a story:

A) introduce the reader to the main characters;

B) intrigue the reader with a mystery that explains the slow movement of a train along a section of railway track;

C) introduce the scene of action and indicate the narrator’s involvement in the events

4. events.

The narrator settled in Talnovo, hoping to find patriarchal Russia:

A) and was upset when he saw that the residents were unfriendly towards each other;

B) and did not regret anything, because I recognized the folk wisdom and sincerity of the inhabitants of Talnovo;

5. B) and stayed to live there forever.

The narrator, paying attention to everyday life, talking about an elderly cat, a goat, mice and cockroaches living freely in Matryona’s house:

A) did not approve of the housewife’s carelessness, although he did not tell her about it so as not to offend her;

B) emphasized that Matryona’s kind heart pitied all living things, and she sheltered in the house those

who needed her compassion;

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.

B) showed details of village life.

1. Option 2

“Tied with an old faded handkerchief, Matryona’s round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp...” This allows:

B) indicate that she belongs to the villagers;

C) see the deep subtext in the description of Matryona: her essence is revealed not by the portrait, but by the way she lives and communicates with people.

2. The technique of arranging images with a gradual increase in significance, which the author uses at the end of the story ( ), called:

3. What the author says: “But it must have come to our ancestors from the very Stone Age because, once heated before daylight, it stores warm feed and swill for livestock, food and water for humans all day long. And sleep warmly."

5. How does the fate of the narrator of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” resemble the fate of the author A. Solzhenitsyn?

5. When was the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” written?

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.

Option 3

1. Matryona told the narrator Ignatich the story of her bitter life:

A) because she had no one to talk to;

B) because he also had to go through difficult times, and he learned to understand and sympathize;

B) because she wanted to be pitied.

2. A short acquaintance with Matryona allowed the author to understand her character. He was:

A) kind, delicate, sympathetic;

B) closed, taciturn;

B) cunning, mercantile.

3. Why was it difficult for Matryona to give up the upper room during her lifetime??

4. What did the narrator want to do in the village?

5. Indicate on whose behalf the narration is told in Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor”

B) objective narration

D) an outside observer

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.

Option 4

A) went for holy water at Epiphany;

B) cried when she heard Glinka’s romances on the radio, taking this music to her heart;

B) agreed to give up the room for scrapping.

2. Main theme of the story:

A) Thaddeus’s revenge on Matryona;

B) the alienation of Matryona, who lived secluded and lonely;

C) the destruction of Matryona’s courtyard as a haven of kindness, love and forgiveness.

3. Waking up one night in the smoke that Matryona rushed to save?

4. After Matryona’s death, her sister-in-law said about her: “...stupid, she helped strangers for free.” Were people strangers to Matryona? What is the name of this feeling, on which Rus' still rests, according to Solzhenitsyn?

5. Indicate the second title of Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor”

A) “The incident at Krechetovka station”

B) "Fire"

C) “A village is not worthwhile without the righteous”

D) “business as usual”

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.

Option 5

A) highlight the hero’s solidity, dignity, and strength.

B) show the resilience of the once “resin hero” who did not waste his kindness and generosity;

C) more clearly reveal the hero’s anger, hatred, and greed.

2. The narrator is:

A) an artistically generalized character showing the full picture of events;

B) the character of the story, with his own life story, self-characterization and speech;

B) neutral narrator.

3. What did Matryona feed her tenant??

4. Continue.“But Matryona was by no means fearless. She was afraid of fire, she was afraid of lightning, and most of all for some reason....”

a) “Torfoprodukt Village”

b) “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous person”

c) “Tulleless Matryona”

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.

Option 6

1. Depicting the crying of relatives for the deceased Matryona,

A) shows the closeness of the heroes to the Russian national epic;

B) shows the tragedy of events;

C) reveals the essence of the heroine’s sisters, who are crying over Matryona’s inheritance.

2. A tragic omen of events can be considered:

A) the loss of a lame cat;

B) loss of home and everything connected with it;

C) discord in relations with sisters.

3. Matryona's clock was 27 years old and it was in a hurry all the time, why didn't this bother the owner??

4. Who is Kira?

5. What is the tragedy of the ending? What does the author want to tell us? What worries him?

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.

Option 7

1. Solzhenitsyn calls Matryona a righteous woman, without whom the village does not stand, according to the proverb. He came to this conclusion:

A) since Matryona always spoke the right words, they listened to her opinion;

B) because Matryona observed Christian customs;

C) when the image of Matryona became clear to him, close, like her life without the race for goodness, for clothes.

2. What words do the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” begin with?

3. What connects the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” and?

4. What was the original title of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor”?

5. What was hanging “on the wall for beauty” in Matryona’s house?

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.

Option 8

1. Matryona cooked food in three cast iron pots. In one - for himself, in the other - for Ignatich, and in the third -...?

3. What was the surest way for Matryona to regain her good mood?

4. What event or omen happened to Matryona at Epiphany?

5. Say Matryona’s full name .

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.

Option 9

1. What part of the house did Matryona bequeath to her pupil Kira??

2. What historical period is the story about?

a) after the revolution

b) after World War II

3. What music heard on the radio did Matryona like??

4. What kind of weather did Matryona call duel?

5. " From the red frosty sun, the frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, glowed slightly pink, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection. Those people always have good faces, who....” Continue.

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.

Option 10

1. What was Thaddeus thinking as he stood at the tombs of his son and the woman he had once loved?

2. What is the main idea of ​​the story?

a) depiction of the hardship of life of the peasantry of collective farm villages

b) the tragic fate of a village woman

c) loss of spiritual and moral foundations by society

d) displaying the type of eccentric in Russian society

3. Continue: “Misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband, who buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, a stranger to her sisters and sisters-in-law, funny, stupidly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property for death. A dirty white goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees...
We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the one....”

4.

5. What artistic details help the author create the image of the main character?

a) lumpy cat

b) potato soup

c) a large Russian stove

d) silent but lively crowd of ficus trees

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.

Option 11

1. What is the meaning of the namestory?

a) the story is named after the place of action

b) Matrenin’s yard is a symbol of a special structure of life, a special world

c) a symbol of the destruction of the world of spirituality, goodness and mercy in the Russian village

2. What is the main idea of ​​this story? What Solzhenitsyn puts into the image of the old woman Matryona?

3. What is the peculiarity of the image systemstory?

a) built on the principle of pairing characters

b) the heroes surrounding Matryona are selfish, callous, they took advantage of the kindness of the main character

c) emphasizes the loneliness of the main character

d) designed to highlight the character of the main character

4. Write what Matryona's fate was.

5. How did Matryona live? Was she happy in life??

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.

Option 12

1. Why didn't Matryona have children?

2. What was Thaddeus worried about after the death of his son and his former beloved woman?

3. What did Matryona bequeath?

4. How can you characterize the image of the main character?

a) a naive, funny and stupid woman who has worked for others for free all her life

b) an absurd, poor, wretched old woman abandoned by everyone

c) a righteous woman who has not sinned in any way against the laws of morality

a) in artistic details

b) in a portrait

c) the nature of the description of the event underlying the story

e) the heroine’s internal monologues

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.

Option 13

1. Which type of traditional thematic classification does this story belong to?

1) Village 2) military prose 3) intellectual prose 4) urban prose

2. What type of literary heroes can Matryona be classified as?

1) an extra person, 2) a small person, 3) a premature person 4) a righteous person

3. The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” was written in the traditions of:

4. The house destruction episode is:

1) plot 2) exposition 3) climax 4) denouement

5. Traditions of what ancient genre can be found in the story “Matryonin’s Dvor”?

1) parables 2) epics 3) epics 4) lives

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.

Option 14

1. What is the original title of the story?

1) “Life is not based on lies” 2) “A village is not worth it without a righteous person” 3) “Be kind!” 4) “The Death of Matryona”

2. The specific subject of the narrative, designated by the pronoun “I” and the first person of the verb, the protagonist of the work, the mediator between the image of the author and the reader is called:

3. Words found in the story "problem", “to the terrible”, “upper room” are called:

1) professional 2) dialectal 3) words with figurative meaning

4. Name the technique that the author uses when depicting the characters of Matryona and Thaddeus:

1) antithesis 2) mirror composition 3) comparison

5. The technique of arranging images with a gradual increase in significance, which the author uses at the end of the story ( village - city - all the land is ours), called:

1) hyperbole 2) gradation 3) antithesis 4) comparison

Answers:

Solzhenitsyn "Matryonin's yard"

1 – a

3 – in

4 – a

5 B

B) showed details of village life.

2-gradation

3 - About the Russian stove.

Option 3

3. “I didn’t feel sorry for the upper room itself, which stood idle, just as Matryona never felt sorry for her work or her goods. And this room was still bequeathed to Kira. But it was scary for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years.”

4. teacher

Option 4

3. She began to throw ficus trees on the floor so that they would not suffocate from the smoke.

4. Righteous

Option 5

1. V

2. 2.

3. “Unhulled cardboard soup”, “cardboard soup” or barley porridge.

4. Trains.

5. b

Option 6

3. If only they didn’t lag behind, so as not to be late in the morning.”

4. Kindergarten

5. Matryona perishes - Matryonin’s yard perishes - Matryonin’s world is the special world of the righteous. The world of spirituality, kindness, mercy, which was also written about. No one even thinks that with the departure of Matryona, something valuable and important leaves life. Righteous Matryona is the writer’s moral ideal, on which the life of society should be based. All of Matryona’s actions and thoughts were consecrated with a special holiness, not always understandable to those around her. The fate of Matryona is firmly connected with the fate of the Russian village. There are fewer and fewer Matryons in Rus', and without them “ don't stand the village" The final words of the story return to the original title - “ A village is not worth it without a righteous man"and fill the story about the peasant woman Matryona with a deep generalizing, philosophical meaning. Village- a symbol of moral life, the national roots of man, the village - all of Russia.

Option 7

1. IN

2. “At one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down, as if to the touch.”

3. It was he who gave it this name.

4. A village cannot stand without a righteous man.”

5. Ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest.

Option 8

1. Kose.

2. About electricity.

3. Job.

4. The pot with holy water has disappeared.

5. Grigorieva Matryona Vasilievna.

Option 9

1. Upper room.

2. d) 1956

2. Romances by Glinka.

3. Blizzard.

4. “At peace with your conscience.”

Option 10

1. “His high forehead was darkened by a heavy thought, but this thought was to save the logs of the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of the Matryona sisters.”

2. V)

3. “...a righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand.”

4. What are Matryona's strengths and weaknesses? What did Ignatich understand for himself?

5. e) “radiant”, “kind”, “apologetic” smile

Option 11

1. V

2. the moral ideal of the writer on which the life of society should be based. All of Matryona’s actions and thoughts were consecrated with a special holiness, not always understandable to those around her. The fate of Matryona is firmly connected with the fate of the Russian village. There are fewer and fewer Matryons in Rus', and without them “ don't stand the village»

Option 12

1. They died

2. save the logs of the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of the Matryon sisters.”

3. The true meaning of life, humble

4. IN

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 into the righteous man, without whom “the village is not worth it.”

“Matryonin’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 dwelling was poor, the roof sometimes leaked, but this did not mean at all that there was no comfort in it: “Perhaps to someone from the village, who was richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem friendly, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good."
2. The second part tells about Matryona’s youth, when she had to go through a lot. The war took her fiancé Fadey away from her, and she had to marry his brother, who still had children in his arms. Taking pity on him, she became his wife, although she did not love him at all. But three years later, Fadey, whom the woman still loved, suddenly returned. The returning warrior hated her and her brother for their betrayal. But hard life could not kill her kindness and hard work, because it was in work and caring for others that she found solace. Matryona even died while doing business - she helped her lover and her sons drag part of her house across the railroad tracks, which was bequeathed to Kira (his daughter). And this death was caused by the greed, greed and callousness of Fadey: 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 the 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 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 and not 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 are 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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