Social problems in the story Matrenin Dvor. “Matryonin’s Dvor”, analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s story

A. N. Solzhenitsyn, having returned from exile, worked as a teacher at the Miltsevo school. He lived in the apartment of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova. All the events described by the author were real. In Solzhenitsyn's story " Matrenin Dvor"describes the difficult life of a Russian collective farm village. We offer for your information an analysis of the story according to plan; this information can be used for work in literature lessons in the 9th grade, as well as in preparation for the Unified State Exam.

Brief Analysis

Year of writing– 1959

History of creation– The writer began working on his work, dedicated to the problems of the Russian village, in the summer of 1959 on the coast of Crimea, where he was visiting his friends in exile. Beware of censorship, it was recommended to change the title “A village is not worth it without a righteous man,” and on the advice of Tvardovsky, the writer’s story was called “Matrenin’s Dvor.”

Subject– The main theme of this work is the life and everyday life of the Russian hinterland, the problems of relationships common man with power moral problems.

Composition– The narration is told on behalf of the narrator, as if through the eyes of an outside observer. The features of the composition allow us to understand the very essence of the story, where the heroes will come to the realization that the meaning of life is not only (and not so much) in enrichment, material values, but in moral values, and this problem is universal, and not a single village.

Genre– The genre of the work is defined as “monumental story.”

Direction– Realism.

History of creation

The writer’s story is autobiographical; after exile, he actually taught in the village of Miltsevo, which is named Talnovo in the story, and rented a room from Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova. In his a short story the writer reflected not only the fate of one hero, but also the entire epoch-making idea of ​​​​the formation of the country, all its problems and moral principles.

Myself meaning of the name“Matrenin’s yard” is a reflection of the main idea of ​​the work, where the boundaries of her yard are expanded to the scale of the whole country, and the idea of ​​morality turns into universal human problems. From this we can conclude that the history of the creation of “Matryona’s Yard” does not include a separate village, but the history of the creation of a new outlook on life and on the power that governs the people.

Subject

Having carried out an analysis of the work in Matryona's Dvor, it is necessary to determine main topic story, to find out what the autobiographical essay teaches not only the author himself, but, by and large, the whole country.

The life and work of the Russian people, their relationship with the authorities are deeply covered. A person works all his life, losing his personal life and interests in his work. Your health, in the end, without getting anything. Using the example of Matryona, it is shown that she worked all her life without any official documents about her work, and did not even earn a pension.

All the last months of its existence were spent collecting various pieces of paper, and the red tape and bureaucracy of the authorities also led to the fact that one had to go and get the same piece of paper more than once. Indifferent people sitting at desks in offices can easily put the wrong seal, signature, stamp; they do not care about people’s problems. So Matryona, in order to achieve a pension, goes through all the authorities more than once, somehow achieving a result.

Villagers think only about their own enrichment; for them there is no moral values. Thaddeus Mironovich, her husband's brother, forced Matryona to give up the promised part of her house during her lifetime adopted daughter, Kire. Matryona agreed, and when, out of greed, two sleighs were hooked up to one tractor, the cart was hit by a train, and Matryona died along with her nephew and the tractor driver. Human greed is above all, that same evening, her only friend, Aunt Masha, came to her house to pick up the thing promised to her before Matryona’s sisters stole it.

And Thaddeus Mironovich, who also had a coffin with his late son in his house, still managed to transport the logs abandoned at the crossing before the funeral, and did not even come to pay tribute to the memory of the woman who died terrible death because of his insatiable greed. Matryona’s sisters, first of all, took her funeral money and began to divide the remains of the house, crying over their sister’s coffin not out of grief and sympathy, but because that’s how it was supposed to be.

In fact, humanly speaking, no one felt sorry for Matryona. Greed and greed blinded the eyes of fellow villagers, and people will never understand Matryona that with her spiritual development the woman stands at an unattainable height from them. She is a true righteous woman.

Composition

The events of that time are described from the perspective of stranger, a tenant who lived in Matryona's house.

Narrator starts his story from the time he was looking for a job as a teacher, trying to find a remote village to live in. As fate would have it, he ended up in the village where Matryona lived and settled down with her.

In the second part, the narrator describes the difficult fate of Matryona, who has not seen happiness since his youth. Her life was hard, with daily labors and worries. She had to bury all of her six children who were born. Matryona endured a lot of torment and grief, but did not become embittered, and her soul did not harden. She is still hardworking and selfless, friendly and peaceful. She never judges anyone, treats everyone evenly and kindly, and still works in her yard. She died trying to help her relatives move their own part of the house.

In the third part, the narrator describes the events after Matryona’s death, the same callousness of people, the woman’s relatives and friends, who, after the woman’s death, flew like crows into the remains of her yard, trying to quickly steal and plunder everything, condemning Matryona for her righteous life.

Main characters

Genre

The publication of Matryona's Court caused a lot of controversy among Soviet critics. Tvardovsky wrote in his notes that Solzhenitsyn is the only writer who expresses his opinion without regard to the authorities and the opinions of critics.

Everyone clearly came to the conclusion that the writer’s work belongs to "monumental story", so in high spiritual genre a description is given of a simple Russian woman who personifies universal human values.

Topic: “The beauty of the human soul”

Problem moral beauty person.

What true beauty person? Which moral qualities make a person beautiful?

Matryona is outwardly a very simple, undistinguished peasant woman who has been engaged in hard village labor all her life. Life was difficult for Matryona, like all the residents of the village: they had nothing to buy in the store, and their food was very meager and modest - only potatoes. And Matryona’s house is so dilapidated that it looks like it will crumble into pieces. Mice and cockroaches coexist with the heroine. And she has already gotten used to them.

But how beautiful is the heroine’s soul! Kindness, hard work, responsiveness, the desire to help, to understand others - all this makes her wonderful.

There was no need to ask her for help; it was enough to say that she would come tomorrow to help collect potatoes. And Matryona dropped everything she was doing and went to help, and she was sincerely happy for her neighbors if the potatoes turned out big.

Having lived hard life, she was not angry with people, she was not even offended by the fact that, after working on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, she did not receive a pension, since only factory workers were entitled to a pension. She was sick - but was considered disabled. As if the state simply forgot that such a woman lives, no one cares about her. At the end of her life, Matryona was barely able to obtain a pension for herself for her husband, but her fellow villagers and relatives immediately began to feel so much envy: where did she get so much money?

And Matryona never stopped giving warmth to people. How comfortable and good the narrator felt in her house. It was easy with Matryona, calm at home.

“A village cannot live without a righteous man”– this was the first title of the story. And indeed, it is people like Matryona, the righteous, that is, those who live in truth, who make life purer, kinder, showing with their lives what is valuable on this earth: not material things, but human relations, mutual understanding and respect, There is no need to stoop to transporting Matryona’s dismantled house during her lifetime, as the man Thaddeus once did. The death of the heroine under the wheels of a train while transporting logs across the rails - dire warning people about what they should value in life. With the death of the heroine, the village seemed to be empty, such a kind and sympathetic Matryona was no longer there.

But the terrible thing is that people didn’t even notice that such a beautiful woman had passed away. The wake became just an excuse to get drunk. And at the end they even started singing songs. This is the moral degradation of people. Even relatives are indifferent to Matryona’s death.

And only the narrator sincerely feels sorry for her. " We all 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 .Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.”

A person is beautiful with his soul, his actions, his attitude towards people. This is precisely the conclusion that can be drawn after reading the story of A.I. Solzhenitsyn.

In December 1961, A.I. Solzhenitsyn presented to the editor-in-chief of the magazine “ New world"Tvardovsky's second story (for your reference). It was called “A village does not stand without a righteous man,” but almost immediately it was renamed “Matrenin’s Dvor.” The problem was not only the content of the work, but also the title, which contained a “religious term.” The story was published only a year later - in the January 1963 issue of the most widely read literary magazine in the USSR.

Plot plot

That time is usually called the thaw. There were certain reasons for this: many millions of recent prisoners Stalin's camps and the exiles left places with severe frosty or desert climates and recovered in European part Union - not in big cities(they were not allowed there), but to the villages and towns of the middle zone. Here, among the softly rustling forests, near the flowing quiet rivers, everything seemed sweet and cozy to the long-suffering people. Nevertheless, life even in these parts was not easy. Getting a job turned out to be difficult, although it was easier than just recently, when a former prisoner wouldn’t even be trusted with a car. These circumstances did not bother the narrator, on whose behalf the story is told. He felt an urgent need for quite simple things, namely: to get a job in a rural school as a mathematics teacher, to find a place to live. These were his “primary tasks and problems raised.” He was brought to Matrenin's yard by a casual acquaintance who was selling milk at the railway station. There were no other options; only an elderly woman had a free seat. Her name was Matryona. This is how they met.

Pension

So, it was 1956, a lot was changing in the country, but life on the collective farm remained miserable. Many aspects peasant life The post-Stalin era was illuminated, as it were, in passing by Alexander Isaevich in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor.” His landlady's problem to the modern reader may seem trivial, but in the first Khrushchev years it stood before many villagers of the vast country. The collective farm pension - a beggarly one, eighty rubles (8 rubles new, post-reform) - even that was not due to a woman who had worked honestly all her life. She went through the authorities, collected some information about the income of her late husband, faced with constant dull callousness and unfriendly bureaucratic indifference, and, in the end, achieved her goal. She was given a pension, and taking into account the additional payment for housing the teacher (Ignatyich, on whose behalf the story is told), her income acquired, by rural standards, colossal proportions - as much as one hundred and eighty rubles (after 1961, 18 rubles) - “there is no need to die "

And also a peat machine...

Peat

Yes, this type of fuel is often used for heating in areas with swampy climates. It seems that there should be enough of it for everyone, but in the harsh Soviet reality of the fifties there was a shortage of everything that people needed. This situation remained largely the same throughout Soviet era. In Vysokoye Polye they did not bake bread, they did not sell food, all this had to be carried in bags from the regional center. But, in addition to supplying the population with food, A.I. Solzhenitsyn talks about another important aspect of peasant life in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor.” The management of the collective farm completely transferred the heating problem to the village residents, and they solved it independently and as best they could: they stole peat. Ignatyich naively believed that a truckload of fuel was a lot of fuel, that it would last the whole winter, but in reality three times as much was required. All the women of the village carried the peat on themselves - with the risk of being caught, hiding the stolen goods from the chairman, who, of course, took care of the warmth in his house.

Personal life

Matryona owned a spacious house, once good, but due to time and lack of male hands fallen into disrepair. The history of this real estate goes back to pre-revolutionary times. The owner was married, lived here for a long time, gave birth to six children, none of whom survived. Matryona raised her niece as my own daughter, taking it from large family her husband's brother. There was also a backstory: as a bride, she was going to marry Thaddeus, her current “divir,” but it didn’t work out. He disappeared in Germanskaya without a trace, but she didn’t wait and married his brother. Thaddeus showed up later and was very angry, but Matryona was left with Yefim.

Real estate rights became the cause of a conflict that arose between relatives who were already deciding how they would divide Matrenin’s yard. The problems and arguments raised by the future heirs became the cause of many contradictions and mystically led to the death of the woman.

Life and loneliness

The village is a special world, governed by its own unwritten laws. Many consider Matryona stupid. She does not run the household in the same way as almost everyone else does. Hostesses financial problems in the work “Matrenin’s Dvor” are illustrated by the absence of a cow and a pig, which villagers usually cannot do without. She is criticized for this, although, it would seem, who cares how a lonely elderly woman lives? She herself quite clearly explains the reason for such negligence. She gets milk from a goat, which has much less trouble feeding her (she is not at all happy about the prospect of feeding a shepherd, and her health leaves much to be desired). Among the living creatures she has are mice, a lame cat and cockroaches, of which there are many - that’s the whole “Matrenin’s yard”. The problem of senile loneliness has been, is and will be.

Righteousness

Now we should remember the original version of the title of the story. What does a righteous man have to do with it, and why is this Orthodox concept applicable to the most ordinary peasant woman, living in poverty, loneliness and little different from many millions of women like her in total? Soviet Union? How is it different from others? It’s not for nothing that Alexander Isaevich wanted to call his work that? What problems does he raise in the story “Matryonin’s Dvor”?

The fact is that Matryona has an important human quality. She never refuses to help others, without making any distinction between “good” and “bad.” The chairman’s wife, an important lady, came and with aplomb demands (not asks) to go to work, “to help the collective farm.” She doesn’t even say hello, she just tells you what you need to take with you. The sick elderly woman seems to want to refuse, but immediately asks what time to come. As for the neighbors, there is no need to ask Matryona - she is always ready to harness herself, not even considering it a service on her part and refusing any material reward, although it would in no way harm her. Ignatyich never heard her say a word of condemnation of anyone’s actions; his mistress never gossips.

Death of Matryona

The notorious " housing problem"really spoils ours, in general, good people. And the characters in the work also suffer from this problem. In Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matrenin’s Dvor,” the old man Thaddeus became an exponent of fussy greed and excessive thriftiness. He can't wait to receive part of the bequeathed inheritance, and right now. There are problems with the scaffolding: the old woman doesn’t need the extension, he wants to dismantle it and move it to his place. In itself, it does not express anything bad, but it is important to note here that Thaddeus knows that Matryona will not be able to refuse. The problems raised in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” exist in society regardless of the level of income. Stinginess and haste ultimately lead to a tragic accident. An overloaded coupling of a sleigh with building materials breaks off at a crossing; the drivers do not notice it and collide with a tractor. People are dying, including Matryona, who, as always, decided to help.

Funeral and commemoration

Subtle psychologism, irony and even gloomy humor are present in the scene of farewell to the main character of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. Problems and arguments encrypted in funeral lamentations and laments different characters, are deciphered by explaining their true background. The reader involuntarily becomes offended that such sophisticated and intriguing streams of information rush over the roughly hewn coffin of Matryona, a kind and simple-minded woman during her life. There are, however, people who loved the deceased; they cry sincerely. Thaddeus, meanwhile, is busy: he urgently needs to remove the property before it is lost, and he “resolves this issue” by rushing to the wake, which, as often happens, ends almost a cheerful feast. All this primarily exposes moral problems.

In the story “Matrenin's Dvor”, as in other works of A. I. Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s annoyance at a vain and selfish attitude towards life and faith in a good, righteous beginning merge together.

The story by A. I. Solzhenitsyn “Matrenin’s Dvor” (1959) had autobiographical basis. What the writer saw in the Russian village after his liberation was typical and therefore especially painful. The plight of the village, which experienced terrible years collectivization, which fed the country during the war, which raised the destroyed economy after hard times, was not so truthfully represented on the pages of works. Working on a collective farm for workdays instead of money, the lack of a pension and any kind of gratitude (“The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, but tomorrow it will be taken away”) - all this is the reality of peasant life, which had to be loudly declared. The original title was “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man” final version was proposed by A. T. Tvardovsky.

The plot basis of the story and its problems. At the center of the story is a simple Russian peasant woman who has drunk to the brim the misfortunes of her country, her small homeland. But no amount of life's difficulties can change this sincere person, make him callous and heartless. Matryona couldn’t refuse anyone, she helped everyone. The loss of six children did not embitter the heroine: she gave all her mother’s love and care to her adopted daughter Kira. Matryona's life itself - moral lesson, she did not fit into the traditional village scheme: “I didn’t chase after acquisitions... I didn’t try 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, sisters-in-law, funny, foolishly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property for death ... "

The story of A. I. Solzhenitsyn is written in the realistic tradition. And there is no excessive embellishment in it. The righteous image of the main character, for whom home is a spiritual category, is contrasted with ordinary people who strive not to miss theirs and do not notice how cruelty hurts them. “Matryona didn’t 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. But for Matryona this was the end of her entire life.” Symbolic tragic end story: when the upper room is dismantled, Matryona dies. And life quickly takes its toll - Thaddeus, brother-in-law

Matryona, “overcoming weakness and aches, became revived and rejuvenated”: he began to dismantle the barn and fence that were left without a mistress.

The inner light of the soul of such people illuminates the lives of those around them. That is why the author says at the end of the story: “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.”

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Written simply and about the simple, ordinary. The main character is Matryona, she has an unusual fate. Her beloved Fadey was captured during the war. She married his younger brother, and after some time Fadey returned. He was homesick and married only when he found a girl named Matryona and similar to Matryona. The heroine's children died in infancy, and she was left alone. She worked hard not for money, but for workdays (sticks). She helped her sisters and neighbors with housework. She didn't take any money for it. I took in my niece Kira. Hard life didn’t embitter her. She is always friendly, ready to give her last.

Matryona died when she was hit by a train while they were transporting part of the house to the regional center for Kira. Matryona’s fate is in no way exceptional; there were many such workers in the post-war years. But on different people perceive what is given to them as fate. Her life highlights the moral problems that always concern people, what kind of problems they are:

1. Is it necessary to do good unselfishly, as Matryona did. If it was necessary to dig potatoes or plow the land, or fellow villagers turned to her for help, she did not refuse anyone and did not take payment. She cooked the largest potatoes by hand for the guest, while she lived from hand to mouth, in a miserable house with cockroaches. Solzhenitsyn believes that the Russian land rests on such people.

2. The problem of loneliness. The idea emerges from the story that loneliness is a relative concept. There are ways not to feel unnecessary, they are in Matryona’s life, this is work. Matryona's whole life is in work. Both for the state, and for relatives, neighbors and a little for herself, this attracts people to her. Relieves loneliness.

3. The relationship between the individual citizen and the state. The author showed that the state is hostile to people like Matryona. But they are the majority; they use their labor without paying them. Unwittingly, people are deceiving the state, fellow villagers and Matryona, stealing peat. But the state itself put them in this position. According to Solzhenitsyn, Matryona and her fellow villagers do not attract condemnation for this; they remain righteous, as they defend their right to life in inhuman conditions.

4. The problem of love. Matryona is faithful to popular ideas about love, family life. She loves Thaddeus, but does not leave her husband - his brother. She is faithful to him, and she got married because she needed female hands, that is, out of pity. She felt that she had to help the house where the person she loved used to live. The author respects this understanding of love. Love is loyalty, pity, fulfillment of duty. And this is stronger than ardent passion. The story is the answer to the question: how to live correctly? Life is given to sow good, not to spread evil, not to rise above people, but simply to bear the cross that has befallen you in a Christian way. This is how Matryona lives.