Matryona's house is a description of the image of Grigoryeva Matryona Vasilievna. Essay “Characteristics of the image of Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva

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

History of creation

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

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the story to Alexander Tvardovsky, editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine, but he considered that the story should not be published.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

Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, which had big success from 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 creativity for a long time was kept silent, and only in the late 80s of the twentieth century the writer’s texts began to be published again in the USSR. “Matrenin’s Dvor” was Solzhenitsyn’s first story to be published after a long break. The story was published in the Ogonyok magazine in 1989 with a huge circulation of three million copies, but the publication was not agreed upon with the author, so Solzhenitsyn called it “pirated.”

The story "Matrenin's yard"

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

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

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

Thaddeus still has 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. Matryona still has three relatives younger sisters, who were little interested in the fate of the heroine.

The heroine wears “vague dark rags” and “senile faded handkerchiefs” and looks sick and tortured. Matryona has the roundish, wrinkled face of an unhealthy yellow color and dull pale blue eyes. From time to time, the heroine experiences attacks of an unknown illness, when Matryona cannot get out of bed or even move for two or three days. During such periods, the heroine does not eat or drink, does not receive any medical care, but does not complain about serious condition, just 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 livestock 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 the household and is indifferent to her own life, she never regrets either property or her own labor and willingly helps to strangers just like that, without asking for money for it. In the evening, a neighbor could come to the heroine or distant relative and demand that Matryona go in the morning to help dig potatoes - and the woman resignedly went to do what she was told. At the same time, the heroine does not envy other people’s wealth, does not want anything for herself and refuses to take for own work money.

The heroine works hard so as not to think about misfortunes. Matryona gets up at four or five in the morning, walks around with a sack of peat and works in the garden, where she grows exclusively 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 to distant forest picks berries and carries bundles of firewood - in the summer on himself, in the winter on a sled. Despite the difficult and unsettled life, Matryona herself considered herself happy man.

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 tragic death under the wheels of the 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.”

A.I. Solzhenitsyn's story "Matryonin's Dvor" touches on such topics as the moral and spiritual life of the people, the struggle for survival, the contradiction between the individual and society, the relationship between government and man. "Matryonin's Dvor" is written entirely about a simple Russian woman. Despite many unrelated events, Matryona is the main actor. The plot of the story develops around her.

Solzhenitsyn focuses on a simple village woman, Matryona Vasilievna, who lives in poverty and has worked all her life on a state farm. Matryona got married even before the revolution and from the very first day began to take care of household chores. Our heroine is a lonely woman who lost her husband at the front and buried six children. Matryona lived alone in a huge house. "Everything was built long ago and soundly, for big family, and now there lived a lonely woman of about sixty." Central theme in this work - the theme home and hearth.

Matryona, despite all the hardships Everyday life, has not lost the ability to respond to someone else’s misfortune with soul and heart. She is the keeper of the hearth, but this is her only mission, which acquires scale and philosophical depth. Matryona is still not ideal, Soviet ideology penetrates into life, into the heroine’s house (signs of this ideology are a poster on the wall and an ever-incessant radio).

We meet a woman who has experienced a lot in life and was not even awarded a well-deserved pension: “There were a lot of injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; she worked for a quarter of a century on a collective farm, but because she was not at a factory, she was not supposed to she received a pension for herself, but she could have sought it for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner.” Such injustice reigned at that time in all corners of Russia. A person who does good for his country with his own hands is not valued in the state; he is trampled into the dirt. Matryona earned five such pensions throughout her working life. But they don’t give her a pension, because on the collective farm she received chopsticks, not money. And to achieve a pension for your husband, you need to spend a lot of time and effort. She collected papers for a very long time, spent time, but all in vain. Matryona was left without a pension. This absurdity of laws is more likely to drive a person into the grave than to provide for him financial situation.

The main character has no livestock other than a goat: “All her bellies were one dirty white goat.” She ate mostly just potatoes: “She walked around and cooked in three cast irons: one cast iron for me, one for herself, one for the goat. She chose the smallest potatoes from the underground for the goat, small ones for herself, and small ones for me.” egg". A good life is not visible when people are sucked into the swamp of poverty. Life is very unfair to Matryona. The bureaucratic apparatus, which does not work for people, together with the state is not at all interested in how people like Matryona live. The slogan “Everything is for people” has been crossed out ". Wealth no longer belongs to the people, the people are serfs of the state. And, in my opinion, these are the problems that Solzhenitsyn touches on in his story.

The image of Matryona Vasilievna is the embodiment best features Russian peasant woman. She has a difficult time tragic fate. Her “children did not stand: each one died before they were three months old and without any illness.” Everyone in the village decided that there was damage in it. Matryona does not know happiness in her personal life, but she is not all for herself, but for people. For ten years, working for free, the woman raised Kira as her own, instead of her children. Helping her in everything, refusing to help anyone, she is morally much higher than her selfish relatives. Life is not easy, “thick with worries,” Solzhenitsyn does not hide this in any detail.

I believe that Matryona is a victim of events and circumstances. Moral purity, selflessness, hard work are the traits that attract us to the image of a simple Russian woman who has lost everything in her life and has not become bitter. In old age, sick, she treats her mental and physical ailments. Work constitutes happiness, the goal for which she lives. And yet, if you look closely at Matryona’s lifestyle, you can see that Matryona is a slave of labor, and not a mistress. That is why her fellow villagers, and most of all her relatives, shamelessly exploited her, while she meekly bore her heavy cross. Matryona, according to the author's plan, is the ideal of a Russian woman, the fundamental principle of all existence. “All of us,” Solzhenitsyn concludes his story about Matryona’s life, “lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous man without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Not the city. Not our whole land.”

The theme of the righteous in literature is not new, and yet in Solzhenitsyn’s story it is revealed especially truthfully. The main characters of “Matryonin Dvor” are simple peasants, whose lives are not like a fairy tale; the description of village life can shock modern reader. What is worth in the work of the picture of the division of property living and healthy woman: her relatives are hurrying her to part with her earthly goods, as if hinting that she has stayed too long in this world. The main character is a person of enormous spiritual strength: the death of children, a failed marriage, lonely old age - none of this broke the woman. Analysis of the story allows us to see a truthful picture of the life and worldview of simple village people, far from morality and beauty.

Characteristics of the characters “Matryonin Dvor”

Main characters

Minor characters

In the work “Matryonin’s Dvor” the characters reveal their nature in full force exactly at crucial moment when misfortune happens. Even the narrator Ignatyich begins to truly understand Matrona only after her death. Solzhenitsyn's characterization of heroes consists of a mass small parts, actions and accidentally spoken words. This is the peculiarity of the writer, he is a skilled craftsman artistic word. In the list of the author’s works about the Russian soul, this story is perhaps the most piercing and vivid.

Work test

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You have probably met more than once 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.”

It's about 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.

Audio version of the article.

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

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

Matryona's youth

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

Yefim and Matryona remained to live in parental home. Matryona still lives in this yard; all the buildings here were made by her father-in-law.

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

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

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

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

Living alone

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

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

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

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

Matryona worked 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 the plow instead of a horse and plowed the gardens. She didn’t take money for her work: “you just 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, bought sugar and butter, which I didn’t eat myself.” Such was the order here - it was necessary to feed her as best as possible, otherwise she would have been made a laughing stock.

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

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

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

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

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

There are many heroes in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”. Some of them pass by. They are mentioned in passing. For others, the author spared no space and time. They are presented in detail and comprehensively.

The image and characterization of Matryona Korchagina in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is one of these characters. Women's happiness is what the wanderers wanted to find in Matryona.

Biography of the main female character

According to Matryona, she I was happy only in my father's family. They took care of her, protected her sleep, and did not force her to work. The girl appreciated the care of her family and responded to them with affection and work. Songs at a wedding, lamentations over the bride and the crying of the girl herself are folklore, which conveys the reality of life.

Everything has changed in my husband's family. There was so much suffering that not every woman could bear it. At night, Matryona shed tears, during the day she spread out like grass, her head was lowered, anger was hidden in her heart, but it was accumulating. The woman understands that everyone lives this way. Philip treats Matryona well. But to distinguish good life cruelty is difficult: he whips his wife until she bleeds, goes to work, leaves alone with the children in a hated family. The girl does not require much attention: a silk scarf and sledding bring her back to cheerful singing.

The calling of a Russian peasant woman is to raise children.. She becomes a real heroine, courageous and strong. Grief follows closely behind. The first son, Demushka, dies. Grandfather Savely could not save him. The authorities are bullying the mother. They torment the child’s body in front of her eyes, images of horror remain in her memory for the rest of her life. Another son gave a sheep to a hungry wolf. Matryona defended the boy by standing in his place for punishment. Mother's love strong:

“Who can endure it, it’s mothers!”

Korchagina came to her husband’s defense. The pregnant woman went to the governor with a request not to recruit him as a soldier.

Woman's appearance

• “Poganous” figure;
• “wide” back;
• “dense” body;
• Kholmogory cow.

• “written kralechka”;
• "pour berry";
• “good...pretty”;
• "white face"
• The woman is neat in her clothes: a white cotton shirt, a short embroidered sundress.

Character of Matryona

Other features of the Russian beauty:
Frankness: telling the wanderers her fate, she does not embellish or hide anything.

Sincerity: the woman does not cheat, she opens her whole destiny from her youth, shares her experiences and “sinful” deeds.

Love of freedom: The desire to be free and free remains in the soul, but the rules of life change the character and force one to be secretive.

Courage: A woman often has to become a “feisty woman.” She is punished, but “arrogance and insubordination” remain.

Loyalty: the wife is devoted to her husband and strives to be honest and faithful in any situation.

Honesty: Matryona leads herself honest life and teaches his sons to be like that. She asks them not to steal or cheat.

Woman sincerely believes in God. She prays and consoles herself. It becomes easier for her in conversations with the Mother of God.

Matryona's happiness