Essay “Characteristics of the image of Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva. The image of Matryona in Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryona’s Dvor”

Analyze this passage. Think about what character traits and inner world Are the Matryonas revealed in the work Matrenin Dvor?

The given fragment reveals best features the heroine's nature: her patience, kindness, independence, mental fortitude, hard work.

Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona was accustomed to relying only on herself; she worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, however, being sick, she never registered for disability and did not obtain a pension “for her husband.” But, despite all the hardships and adversities, she did not lose her spiritual sensitivity and desire to live according to her conscience. A.I. Solzhenitsyn manages to create this image with the help of various artistic means. The heroine's appearance may be inconspicuous, but an inner light emanates from her soul. The author manages to convey this with the help of the epithets “enlightened”, “with a kind smile”. One gets the impression that Matryona is a holy person who lives exclusively according to the laws of morality.

An important means of creating the image of Matryona is also speech characteristic. The author saturates the heroine's remarks dialect words(for example, “summer”), vernacular (“tepericha”, “skolischa”). In general, these lexical means give Matryona’s speech figurativeness, poetry, and expressiveness. The words “duel”, “kartov”, “lyubota”, sounding from the lips of a simple Russian woman, take on a special meaning. Such word creation testifies to the heroine’s talent, her closeness to folklore traditions, to people's life.

Matryona is a real hard worker. Her whole life is filled with troubles and labors. The heroine does not sit idle for a minute, despite senile infirmity and illness. She finds solace in work: digging potatoes, picking berries. And thereby regains his good mood. The author's description of Matryona includes verbs with the meaning of movement (“walked,” “returned,” “digged”).

The writer in this story denotes the confrontation between the individual and the state: his heroine, trying to defend her rights, faces insurmountable bureaucratic barriers. According to the author, this state is indifferent to the fate common man. Talking about how the heroine achieves her pension, the author uses the technique of syntactic parallelism in the narrative: “go again,” “the third day go again,” “the fourth day go because...” So the writer once again emphasizes the heroine’s perseverance and perseverance in achieving her “ righteous" goal. The peculiarities of Matryona’s speech are also conveyed using incomplete sentences, inversions. These syntactic devices help the author show the emotionality and spontaneity of a village woman.

Matryona reminds us of the heroines N.A. Nekrasova. Let us remember Matryona Timofeevna from the poem “Who Lives Well in Russia.” Heroine A.I. Solzhenitsyn is similar to her with her pure peasant soul. This is an honest, fair, but poor, unhappy woman; a man of a selfless soul, absolutely unrequited, humble; righteous woman, without whom, according to A.I. Solzhenitsyn, “a village is not worth it.” So multifaceted amazing image The writer manages to create a Russian peasant woman using various artistic means.

The original title of the story is “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” In this story, the writer also does not invent anything, reliably reproducing life and death Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova, a resident of the village of Miltsevo, Vladimir region. Under the image of the teacher Ignatyich, on whose behalf the story is told, the author himself is hidden.

The hero of the story, having received his release, is looking for a quiet corner where he can live and work. His search for housing leads him to Matryona’s house, which he likes, despite the neglect, cockroaches and mice. 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.” Unwittingly, Ignatyich finds himself drawn into Matryona’s life, meets her relatives, learns the story of her marriage and develops deep sympathy for this lonely, forgotten old woman.

She lived a difficult life: she did not receive a pension, she worked on the collective farm not for money, “for sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.” She suffered from a black illness, lying for three days without help or food, with great difficulty obtaining fuel for heating, secretly carrying heavy bags of peat from the forest, like all village women. I also had to dig a garden and get hay for the goat. The name Matryona evokes the image of Nekrasov’s Matryona Timofeevna, thereby uniting the two heroines with a common destiny: the hardships of life, the injustice of life, but also the inescapable strength of spirit, the origins of which are in natural morality and folk roots both Matryonas.

In this story, Solzhenitsyn again shows the image of a man who, in physically unbearable conditions, not only survives, but preserves best qualities and souls, yours human dignity. The theme of righteousness brings Solzhenitsyn’s heroes closer to Leskov’s heroes. Solzhenitsyn also finds righteous people among the living people; these are far from heroic people, but people like Ivan Denisovich and Matryona. What is Matryona’s righteousness? The fact is that the heroine has retained her radiant smile, innocence, dependability, and exceptional kindness. Not being a member of the collective farm, she responded to demands to help. The patient, who considers this work pointless, still goes in the morning with her pitchfork to the appointed place. Any distant relative or a neighbor, who never thought of helping a lonely woman, nevertheless considered themselves entitled to demand that Matryona come dig up the potatoes and Matryona could not refuse.

The writer himself, at the end of the story, lists the simple qualities of his heroine: “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 to death. A dirty white goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees... Only the hero of the story, Ignatyich, was able to appreciate the special beauty of Matryona’s soul, her shyness, and inner light. The story contains the dark figure of Thaddeus, Matryona’s former fiancé, who embodies the evil that opposes the heroine’s good nature. He once threatened to hack her to death with an ax because she had not waited for him since the First World War. “For forty years his threat lay in the corner like an old cleaver, and yet it struck...” The image of black Thaddeus with a raised ax is symbolic. Matryona dies under the wheels of the train, which she feared more than anything in the world (<<поезд вылезет, глаза здоровенные свои вылупит, рельсы гудят — аж в жар меня бросает, коленки трясутся»), помогая Фаддею вывезти бревна ее же собственной избы. Матрёна беззащитна перед такими людьми, как Фаддей или ее родственники, которые на поминках устраивают обвинительный плач, сводят счеты между собой, осуждают покойницу, и все под видом обряда.

The story contains many symbolic details that predict the death of Matryona and have a mystical overtones: Matryona’s loss of a pot of holy water, the disappearance of a lanky cat, a blizzard that swirled for two days, the impudent squeak of mice on the fateful night. The ending of the story is symbolic, echoing the original version of the title. It becomes clear why this title was not allowed to go into print. The author concludes: “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.” It turns out that with the death of Matryona the earth should collapse. Does this mean the death of good and the triumph of evil? But Ignatyich himself understood Matryona, brought the news about her to the world... There is another important detail in the story. One of the women who came to wash the deceased crossed herself and said: The Lord left her her right hand. There will be prayer to God. If Matryona during her life thought only about others, then even there she will not pray for herself.

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

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

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

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

Matryona's youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History of creation

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

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

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

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

The story "Matrenin's yard"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes

“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.”

“She didn’t announce what for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unhusked cardboard soup, or cardboard soup (that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley in battle - as the cheapest one, they fattened pigs and took them in bags).”

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

In 1963, one of the stories of the Russian thinker and humanist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was published. It is based on events from the author’s biography. The publication of his books has always caused a huge resonance not only in the Russian-speaking society, but also among Western readers. But the image of Matryona in the story “Matryona’s Dvor” is unique. There was nothing like this before in village prose. And therefore this work took a special place in Russian literature.

Plot

The story is told from the author's perspective. A certain teacher and former camp inmate goes in the summer of 1956 at random, wherever his eyes look. His goal is to get lost somewhere in the dense Russian outback. Despite the ten years he spent in the camp, the hero of the story still hopes to find a job and teach. He succeeds. He settles in the village of Talnovo.

The image of Matryona in the story “Matryona’s Dvor” begins to take shape even before her appearance. A random acquaintance helps the main character find shelter. After a long and unsuccessful search, he offers to go to Matryona, warning that “she lives in a desolate place and is sick.” They are heading towards her.

Matryona's Domain

The house is old and rotten. It had been built many years ago for a large family, but now it was inhabited only by one woman of about sixty. Without a description of the poor life of the village, the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” would not be so insightful. The image of Matryona - the heroine of the story - fully corresponds to the atmosphere of desolation that reigned in the hut. Yellow, sickly face, tired eyes...

The house is full of mice. Among its inhabitants, in addition to the owner herself, are cockroaches and a lanky cat.

The image of Matryona in the story “Matryona’s Dvor” is the basis of the story. Based on it, the author reveals his spiritual world and depicts the characteristic features of other characters.

From the main character the narrator learns about her difficult fate. She lost her husband at the front. She lived her entire life alone. Later, her guest finds out that for many years she has not received a penny: she works not for money, but for sticks.

She was not happy with the tenant and tried to persuade him for some time to find a cleaner and more comfortable house. But the guest’s desire to find a quieter place determined the choice: he stayed with Matryona.

While the teacher was staying with her, the old woman got up before dark and prepared a simple breakfast. And it seemed that some meaning appeared in Matryona’s life.

Peasant image

The image of Matryona in the story “Matryona's Dvor” is an amazingly rare combination of selflessness and hard work. This woman has been working for half a century, not to make a living, but out of habit. Because he cannot imagine any other existence.

It should be said that the fate of the peasantry always attracted Solzhenitsyn, since his ancestors belonged to this class. And he believed that it was precisely the hard work, sincerity and generosity that distinguished the representatives of this social stratum. This is confirmed by the sincere, truthful image of Matryona in the story “Matryona’s Dvor”.

Fate

In intimate conversations in the evenings, the landlady tells the tenant the story of her life. Efim’s husband died in the war, but first his brother wooed her. She agreed and was listed as his fiancée, but during World War II he went missing and she didn’t wait for him. She married Efim. But Thaddeus returned.

Not a single child of Matryona survived. And then she became a widow.

Its end is tragic. She dies due to her naivety and kindness. This event ends the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. The image of the righteous Matryona is sadder because, despite all her good qualities, she remains misunderstood by her fellow villagers.

Loneliness

Matryona lived alone in the big house all her life, except for her short-lived female happiness, which was destroyed by the war. And also those years during which she raised Thaddeus’s daughter. He married her namesake and they had six children. Matryona asked him to raise a girl, which he did not refuse. But her adopted daughter also left her.

The image of Matryona in A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryona’s Dvor” is amazing. Neither eternal poverty, nor insults, nor all kinds of oppression destroy it. The best way for a woman to regain her good spirits was work. And after the work, she became satisfied, enlightened, with a kind smile.

The last righteous woman

She knew how to rejoice in other people's happiness. Having not accumulated goodness throughout her life, she did not become bitter, and retained the ability to sympathize. Not a single hard work in the village could be done without her participation. Despite her illness, she helped other women, harnessed herself to the plow, forgetting about her old age and the illness that had tormented her for more than twenty years.

This woman never refused anything to her relatives, and her inability to preserve her own “goods” led to the fact that she lost her upper room - her only property, apart from the old rotten house. The image of Matryona in the story by A. I. Solzhenitsyn personifies selflessness and virtue, which for some reason did not evoke either respect or response from others.

Thaddeus

The righteous female character is contrasted with her failed husband Thaddeus, without whom the system of images would be incomplete. "Matrenin's Dvor" is a story in which, in addition to the main character, there are other persons. But Thaddeus is a clear contrast to the main character. Returning from the front alive, he did not forgive his fiancee for betrayal. Although, it should be said that she did not love his brother, but only pitied him. Understanding that it is difficult for his family without a mistress. The death of Matryona at the end of the story is a consequence of the stinginess of Thaddeus and his relatives. Avoiding unnecessary expenses, they decided to transport the room faster, but did not have time, as a result of which Matryona was hit by a train. Only the right hand remained intact. But even after the terrible events, Thaddeus looks at her dead body indifferently, indifferently.

There are also many sorrows and disappointments in the fate of Thaddeus, but the difference between the two characters is that Matryona was able to save her soul, but he was not. After her death, the only thing he cares about is Matrenino’s meager property, which he immediately drags into his house. Thaddeus does not come to the wake.

The image of Holy Rus', which poets so often sang, dissipates with her departure. A village cannot stand without a righteous man. The image of Matryona, the heroine in Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryona’s Dvor,” is the remnant of a pure Russian soul, which is still alive, but already on its last legs. Because righteousness and kindness are valued less and less in Russia.

The story, as already mentioned, is based on real events. The only differences are in the name of the locality and some small details. The heroine's name was actually Matryona. She lived in one of the villages of the Vladimir region, where the author spent 1956-1957. It was planned to turn her house into a museum in 2011. But Matrenin's yard burned down. In 2013, the house-museum was restored.

The work was first published in the literary magazine “New World”. Solzhenitsyn's previous story caused a positive reaction. The story of the righteous woman gave rise to many disputes and discussions. And yet, critics had to admit that the story was created by a great and truthful artist, capable of returning the people to their native language and continuing the traditions of Russian classical literature.