The image of Matryona in the story Matryona's Dvor. "Matrenin's Dvor" main characters

/ / / The image of Matryona in Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor”

A very touching work by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author was a humanist, so it is not surprising that the story features a pure good female image main character.

The narration is told on behalf of the narrator, through the prism of whose worldview we recognize the images of other characters, including the main character.

Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva – central. By the will of fate, former prisoner Ignatich settles in her house. It is he who tells us about Matryona’s life.

The woman did not immediately agree to accept a tenant in her yard; she advised him to find a cleaner and more comfortable place. But Ignatich was not looking for comfort; it was enough for him to have his own corner. He wanted to live quiet life, so I chose the village.

Matryona is a modest resident of the village, simple-minded and friendly. She was already about sixty years old. She lived alone because she was widowed and lost all her children. To some extent, the guest diversified her lonely life. After all, now Matryona had someone to get up early for, cook food, and have someone to talk to in the evenings.

The narrator notes that round face Matryona looked sick because of her yellowness and cloudy eyes. She sometimes had attacks of some kind of illness. And although she was not considered disabled, the illness knocked her off her feet for several days. Having learned about difficult fate woman, Ignatich realized that her illness was quite understandable.

In her youth, Matryona loved Thaddeus and wanted to marry him. However, the war separated the lovers. The news came that he was missing. Matryona was sad for a long time, but at the insistence of her relatives she married her brother ex-lover. After some time, a miracle happened - Thaddeus returned home alive. He was upset when he learned about Matryona's marriage. But later he also marries and has many children. Since Matryona’s children did not live long, she takes one child of Thaddeus and his wife to raise. But also stepdaughter leaves her. After the loss of her husband, Matryona is left completely alone.

The image of Matryona is very bright and at the same time tragic. She always lived more for others than for herself. Despite her illness, Matryona did not shy away from hard work for the good of society. However, the narrator notes that the woman did not receive her pension for a long time.

Matryona never refused to help her neighbors. But her selfless actions and simplicity caused more misunderstanding on the part of her fellow villagers than gratitude.

The woman endured all the trials steadfastly and did not become an embittered person. Such people are said to have an inner core.

The ending of Matryona's life is very tragic. Special role Her beloved Thaddeus played in this. He turned out to be a rotten man and insisted that Matryona give him the inheritance of his daughter Kira. Even then, the old woman did not defend her rights, but even helped dismantle her hut, which led to her sad end.

The image of Matryona is the image of a simple-minded woman misunderstood by others.

Grigorieva Matryona Vasilievna- a peasant woman, a single woman of sixty years old, released from the collective farm due to illness. The story documents the life of Matryona Timofeevna Zakharova, a resident of the village of Miltsevo (near Solzhenitsyn’s Talnovo) in the Kurlovsky district of the Vladimir region. The original title “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” was changed at the suggestion of Tvardovsky, who believed that it revealed the meaning too straightforwardly central image and the whole story. M., according to her fellow villagers, “didn’t chase things,” she dressed haphazardly, “helped strangers for free.”

The house is old, in the corner of the door by the stove is Matryona’s bed, the best part of the hut near the window is lined with stools and benches, on which tubs and pots with her favorite ficus trees are her main wealth. Among the living creatures - a lanky old cat, which M. took pity on and picked up on the street, a dirty white goat with crooked horns, mice and cockroaches.

M. got married even before the revolution, because “their mother died... they didn’t have enough hands.” She married Efim the younger, and loved the eldest, Thaddeus, but he went to war and disappeared. She waited for him for three years - “no news, not a bone.” On Peter's Day they got married to Efim, and Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity to Mikola in the winter and almost chopped them both with an ax. She gave birth to six children, but they “didn’t survive” - they didn’t live to see three months. During World War II, Efim disappeared and M. was left alone. In the eleven post-war years (the action takes place in 1956), M. decided that he was no longer alive. Thaddeus also had six children, all of whom were alive, and M. took in the youngest girl, Kira, and raised her.

M. did not receive a pension. She was ill, but was not considered disabled; she worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century “by the sticks.” True, then they finally began to pay her eighty rubles, and she received more than a hundred more from the school and the resident teacher. She didn’t start anything “good”, didn’t rejoice at the chance to get a lodger, didn’t complain about illness, although she was sick twice a month. But she unquestioningly went to work when the chairman’s wife came running for her, or when a neighbor asked her to help dig potatoes - M. never refused anyone and never took money from anyone, for which they considered her stupid. “She was always interfering in men’s affairs. And a horse once almost knocked her into an ice hole in the lake,” and finally, when they took away her room, they could have done without her - no, “Matryona got carried away between the tractor and the sleigh.” That is, she was always ready to help another, ready to neglect herself, to give her last. So she gave the upper room to her pupil Kira, which means she will have to tear down the house and halve it - an impossible, wild act, from the owner’s point of view. And she even rushed to help transport it.

She got up at four or five o’clock, had plenty of things to do until the evening, had a plan in advance of what to do, but no matter how tired she was, she was always friendly.

M. was characterized by innate delicacy - she was afraid to burden herself and therefore, when she was sick, she did not complain, did not moan, and was embarrassed to call a doctor from the village first-aid post. She believed in God, but not earnestly, although she began every business - “With God!” While rescuing Thaddeus's property, which was stuck on a sleigh at a railway crossing, M. was hit by a train and died. Its absence on this earth affects immediately: who will now go sixth to harness the plow? Who should I contact for help?

Against the backdrop of M.'s death, the characters of her greedy sisters, Thaddeus - her former lover, her friend Masha, and everyone who takes part in the division of her poor belongings - appear. There is a cry over the coffin, which turns into “politics”, into a dialogue between contenders for Matrenino’s “property”, of which there is only a dirty white goat, a lanky cat and ficus trees. Matrenin's guest, observing all this, remembering the living M., suddenly clearly understands that all these people, including him, lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous man without whom “the village would not stand.”

To Central Russia. Thanks to new trends, a recent prisoner is now not refused to become a school teacher in the Vladimir village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). Solzhenitsyn settles in the hut of a local resident, Matryona Vasilievna, a woman of about sixty who is often ill. Matryona has neither a husband nor children. Her loneliness is brightened up only by the ficus trees planted throughout the house and a languid cat picked out of pity. (See Description of Matryona's house.)

With warm, lyrical sympathy, A.I. Solzhenitsyn describes the difficult life of Matryona. For many years she has not earned a single ruble. On the collective farm, Matryona works “for the sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.” The law that came out after Stalin’s death finally gives her the right to seek a pension, but not for herself, but for the loss of her husband who went missing at the front. To do this, you need to collect a bunch of certificates, and then take them many times to social services and the village council, 10-20 kilometers away. Matryona's hut is full of mice and cockroaches that cannot be removed. The only livestock she keeps is a goat, and feeds mainly on “kartovy” (potatoes) no larger than chicken egg: a sandy, unfertilized garden does not produce it larger. But even in such a need, Matryona remains a bright person, with a radiant smile. Her work helps her to maintain her good spirits - hiking into the forest for peat (with a two-pound sack on her shoulder for three kilometers), mowing hay for the goat, and chores around the house. Due to old age and illness, Matryona has already been released from the collective farm, but the formidable wife of the chairman every now and then orders her to help at work for free. Matryona easily agrees to help her neighbors in their gardens without money. Having received a pension of 80 rubles from the state, she buys herself new felt boots and a coat from a worn railway overcoat - and believes that her life has noticeably improved.

« Matrenin Dvor" - the house of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova in the village of Miltsevo, Vladimir region, the setting of the story by A. I. Solzhenitsyn

Soon Solzhenitsyn will learn the story of Matryona’s marriage. In her youth, she was going to marry her neighbor Thaddeus. However, in 1914 he was taken to the German war - and he disappeared into obscurity for three years. Without waiting for news from the groom, in the belief that he was dead, Matryona went to marry Thaddeus’s brother, Efim. But a few months later, Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. In his hearts, he threatened to chop Matryona and Efim with an ax, then he cooled down and took another Matryona, from a neighboring village, as his wife. They lived next door to her. Thaddeus was known in Talnovo as a domineering, stingy man. He constantly beat his wife, although he had six children from her. Matryona and Efim also had six, but none of them lived for more than three months. Efim, having left for another war in 1941, did not return from it. Friendly with Thaddeus’s wife, Matryona begged her youngest daughter, Kira, raised her for ten years as if she were her own, and shortly before Solzhenitsyn arrived in Talnovo, she married her to a locomotive driver in the village of Cherusti. Matryona told Alexander Isaevich the story about her two suitors herself, worrying like a young woman.

Kira and her husband had to get a plot of land in Cherusty, and for this they had to quickly erect some kind of building. Old Thaddeus in winter suggested moving the upper room there, attached to Matryonina's house. Matryona was already going to bequeath this room to Kira (and her three sisters were aiming for the house). Under the persistent persuasion of the greedy Thaddeus Matryon, after two sleepless nights During her lifetime she agreed, having broken part of the roof of the house, to dismantle the upper room and transport it to Cherusti. In front of the hostess and Solzhenitsyn, Thaddeus and his sons and sons-in-law came to Matryona’s yard, clattered with axes, creaked with the boards being torn off, and dismantled the upper room into logs. Matryona's three sisters, having learned how she succumbed to Thaddeus's persuasion, unanimously called her a fool.

Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova - the prototype of the main character of the story

A tractor was brought from Cherusti. The logs from the upper room were loaded onto two sleighs. The fat-faced tractor driver, in order not to make an extra trip, announced that he would pull two sleighs at once - it was better for him in terms of money. The disinterested Matryona herself, fussing, helped load the logs. Already in the dark, the tractor with difficulty pulled the heavy load from the mother’s yard. The restless worker did not stay at home either - she ran away with everyone to help along the way.

She was no longer destined to return alive... At a railway crossing, the cable of an overloaded tractor broke. The tractor driver and Thaddeus’s son rushed to get along with him, and Matryona was carried there with them. At this time, two coupled locomotives approached the crossing, backwards and without turning on the lights. Suddenly flying in, they smashed to death all three who were busy at the cable, mutilated the tractor, and fell off the rails themselves. A fast train with a thousand passengers approaching the crossing almost crashed.

At dawn, from the crossing, everything that was left of Matryona was brought back on a sled under a dirty bag thrown over it. The body had no legs, no half torso, no left arm. But the face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead. One woman crossed herself and said:

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

The village began to gather for the funeral. Female relatives wailed over the coffin, but self-interest was visible in their words. And it was not hidden that Matryona’s sisters and her husband’s relatives were preparing for a fight for the deceased’s inheritance, for her an old house. Only Thaddeus’s wife and pupil Kira wept sincerely. Thaddeus himself, who had lost his once beloved woman and son in that disaster, was clearly only thinking about how to save those scattered in the crash. railway upper room logs. Asking for permission to return them, he kept rushing from the coffins to the station and village authorities.

A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). October 1956

On Sunday Matryona and son Thaddeus were buried. The wake has passed. In the coming days, Thaddeus pulled out a barn and a fence from his mother’s sisters, which he and his sons immediately dismantled and transported on a sled. Alexander Isaevich moved in with one of Matryona’s sisters-in-law, who often and always spoke with contemptuous regret about her cordiality, simplicity, about how “stupid she was, she helped strangers for free,” “she didn’t chase after money and didn’t even keep a pig.” For Solzhenitsyn, it was precisely from these disparaging words that he emerged new image Matryona, as he did not understand her, even living with her side by side. This non-covetous woman, a stranger to her sisters, funny to her sisters-in-law, who did not accumulate property before death, buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, pitied a lanky cat, and once at night during a fire she rushed to save not a hut, but her beloved ficus trees - and there is that very righteous man, without which, according to the proverb, the village cannot stand.

A lot of hardships, labors and worries fell on the shoulders of the heroine of A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s story Matryona [see. full text, summary and analysis of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor”]. Her life in youth and old age was a continuous toil. “Year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilyevna 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 dirty book.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Matrenin Dvor. Read by the author

But, unlike her fellow villagers, Matryona kept living soul, remained forever unselfish, kind, delicate, and preserved her former girlish love until old age.

Not rich in words, her story about her love for Thaddeus is full of poetry, reminiscent of ancient songs and laments. After all, this is a kind of lament for the past, for failed happiness. “For three years I hid, waited. And not a word, not a bone..."; “Oh, oh, oh, poor little head!..” she laments.

The narrator seems to echo her. In his speech, the intonations of folk poetry begin to sound: “And the years passed as the water floated...” In his imagination, folklore images: “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.”

Mourning his heroine, he calls her “tulleless,” unconsciously repeating the lament of Irina Fedosova:

There is no one to take refuge with,
There is no one to lurch to in victory...

Matryona's fate is truly tragic. But not only because she lost a loved one, lived with an unloved person, buried six children in infancy; not because she is tormented by a black illness, that she struggles in poverty, that she is destined to die under a train. Her immense loneliness is tragic. No one understood, loved, or pitied her, because among the black crows she remained white.

She lived her whole life in her native village, “misunderstood and abandoned,” “alien,” “funny.” The neighbors condemn her for what the author seems to be especially valuable about her. They speak about Matryona’s cordiality and simplicity “with contemptuous regret.” They reproach her for being “not careful.” “I didn’t chase after things... I didn’t try to buy things and then cherish them more than my life.” And the author reflects: "...good The language strangely calls our property ours, the people's or mine. And losing it is considered shameful and stupid in front of people.” But Solzhenitsyn’s heroine did not take care good, but kindness. And she was incredibly rich. But no one noticed or appreciated the spiritual values ​​that she possessed.

The description of Matryona’s hut takes on a deep meaning in the story. Lonely among people, she is surrounded at home by close “creatures”. They make up a special, poetic world, in tune with her soul. She is deeply attached to this world, and he lives his independent, simple and mysterious life.

So, about ficuses it is said: “They filled the loneliness of the housewife with a silent but living crowd.” Ficus trees are compared to a forest and seem to constitute a certain part of the natural world. Even insects are spoken of in the spirit of contrasting them with everything that is outside the hut: “Besides Matryona and me, there were also living in the hut: a cat, mice and cockroaches /... / At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was studying 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.”

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. main character- a man 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.

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