The history of the creation of Solzhenitsyn's work "Matryonin Dvor"

In 1962, the magazine "New World" published the story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich," which made Solzhenitsyn's name known throughout the country and far beyond its borders. A year later, in the same magazine, Solzhenitsyn published several stories, including “Matrenin's Dvor”. At this point, the publication stopped. None of the writer's works were allowed to be published in the USSR anymore. And in 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Initially, the story "Matrenin's yard" was called "A village is not worth it without the righteous." But, on the advice of A. Tvardovsky, in order to avoid censorship obstacles, the name was changed. For the same reasons, the year of action in the story from 1956 was changed by the author to 1953. "Matrenin's Dvor", as the author himself noted, "is completely autobiographical and reliable." In all the notes to the story, the prototype of the heroine is reported - Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova from the village of Miltsovo, Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region. The narrator, like the author himself, teaches in the Ryazan village, living with the heroine of the story, and the very middle name of the narrator - Ignatich - is consonant with the patronymic of A. Solzhenitsyn - Isaevich. The story, written in 1956, tells about the life of the Russian countryside in the fifties.
Critics praised the story. The essence of Solzhenitsyn's work was noted by A. Tvardovsky: “Why is the fate of an old peasant woman, told in a few pages, of such great interest to us? This woman is unread, illiterate, simple toiler. And yet her inner world is endowed with such qualities that we talk to her like we do with Anna Karenina. " After reading these words in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Solzhenitsyn immediately wrote to Tvardovsky: “Needless to say, the paragraph of your speech concerning Matryona means a lot to me. You pointed to the very essence - a loving and suffering woman, while all the criticism was scouring all the time over the top, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and the neighboring ones. "
The first title of the story "A village is not worth the righteous" contained a deep meaning: the Russian village is based on people whose way of life is based on the universal human values \u200b\u200bof goodness, work, sympathy, and help. Since they call a righteous, first, a person who lives in accordance with religious rules; secondly, a person who does not sin in anything against the rules of morality (rules that determine the morals, behavior, spiritual and mental qualities that a person needs in society). The second name - "Matrynin's Dvor" - somewhat changed the angle of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the Matrenin's Dvor. On a wider scale of the village, they are blurred, the people surrounding the heroine often differ from her. Having titled the story "Matrenin Dvor", Solzhenitsyn focused the readers' attention on wonderful world Russian woman.

Genre, genre, creative method of the analyzed work

Solzhenitsyn once remarked that he rarely turned to the genre of the story, for “artistic pleasure”: “You can put a lot in a small form, and it is a great pleasure for an artist to work on a small form. Because in a small form, you can sharpen the edges with great pleasure for yourself. " In the story "Matrenin's Dvor" all facets are brilliantly honed, and meeting with the story becomes, in turn, a great pleasure for the reader. The story is usually based on an incident that reveals the character of the protagonist.
There were two points of view in literary criticism about the story "Matrenin's Dvor". One of them presented the story of Solzhenitsyn as a phenomenon of "village prose". V. Astafiev, calling "Matrenin's Dvor" "the pinnacle of Russian short stories", believed that our " country prose”Came out of this story. Somewhat later, this idea was developed in literary criticism.
At the same time, the story "Matrenin's Dvor" was associated with the original genre of "monumental story" that emerged in the second half of the 1950s. An example of this genre is M. Sholokhov's story "The Fate of a Man".
In the 1960s, the genre features of the “monumental story” are recognized in A. Solzhenitsyn's Matrenin's Dvor, V. Zakrutkin's Human Mother, and In the Light of Day by E. Kazakevich. The main difference between this genre is the image of a common man who is the guardian of universal human values. Moreover, the image of a common man is given in sublime tones, and the story itself is focused on a high genre. So, in the story "The Fate of a Man" features of the epic can be seen. And in "Matryona's Dvor" the bias is made on the lives of the saints. Before us is the life of Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva, a righteous woman and great martyr of the era of “continuous collectivization” and a tragic experiment over an entire country. Matryona was portrayed by the author as a saint (“Only she had fewer sins than a bouncy cat”).

The subject of the work

The theme of the story is a description of the life of a patriarchal Russian village, which reflects how flourishing egoism and predation disfigure Russia and "destroy ties and meaning." The writer raises in a short story the serious problems of the Russian countryside in the early 50s. (her life, customs and mores, the relationship between the authorities and the working person). The author repeatedly emphasizes that the state needs only working hands, and not the person himself: "She was lonely around, and since she began to get sick, she was released from the collective farm." A person, according to the author, should do his own thing. So Matryona finds the meaning of life in work, she is angry at the unfair attitude of others to work.

An analysis of the work shows that the problems raised in it are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the heroine's Christian-Orthodox worldview. Using the fate of a village woman as an example, show that the loss of life and suffering only more clearly manifest the measure of the human in each of the people. But Matryona dies - and this world is crumbling: they drag her house down a log, greedily divide her modest belongings. And there is no one to protect Matryona's yard, no one even thinks that with the departure of Matryona something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, is leaving her life. “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village is not worth it. No city. Not all our land. " The last phrases expand the boundaries of Matryona's yard (as the heroine's personal world) to the scale of humanity.

The main characters of the work

The main heroine of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva. Matryona is a lonely destitute peasant woman with a generous and selfless soul. She lost her husband in the war, buried six of her own and raised other people's children. Matryona gave her pupil the most precious thing in her life - the house: "... she did not feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, no matter how much her labor or her goodness ..."
The heroine has endured many hardships in life, but has not lost the ability to empathize with others, joy and sorrow. She is disinterested: she sincerely rejoices in someone else's good harvest, although she herself never has it on the sand. All the wealth of Matryona is made up of a dirty white goat, a lame cat and large flowers in tubs.
Matryona - the concentration of the best features national character: shy, understands the "education" of the narrator, respects him for it. The author appreciates in Matryona her delicacy, the absence of annoying curiosity about the life of another person, her diligence. For a quarter of a century she worked on a collective farm, but because she was not at a factory - she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only achieve for her husband, that is, for the breadwinner. As a result, she never got her pension. It was extremely difficult to live. She got grass for a goat, peat for warmth, collected old hemp turned up by a tractor, soaked lingonberries for the winter, grew potatoes, helping those who were nearby to survive.
An analysis of the work says that the image of Matryona and individual details in the story are symbolic. Solzhenitsyn's Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of the Russian woman. As noted in critical literature, the appearance of the heroine is like an icon, and life is like the lives of the saints. Her house, as it were, symbolizes the ark of the biblical Noah, in which he is saved from the worldwide flood. The death of Matryona symbolizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world in which she lived.
The heroine lives according to the laws of Christianity, although her actions are not always clear to those around her. Therefore, the attitude towards her is different. Matrona is surrounded by sisters, sister-in-law, adopted daughter Cyrus, the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated her. She lived poorly, miserably, lonely - a "lost old woman", worn out by labor and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, everyone condemned Matryona in chorus that she was funny and stupid, for others she worked for free all her life. Everyone mercilessly used Matryona's kindness and innocence - and amicably judged her for this. Among the people around her, the author treats her heroine with great sympathy; both her son Thaddeus and her pupil Kira love her.
The image of Matryona is contrasted in the story with the image of the cruel and greedy Thaddeus, who seeks to get Matryona's house during her lifetime.
Matryona's yard is one of the key images of the story. The description of the courtyard and the house is detailed, with a lot of details, devoid of bright colors. Matryona lives "in a mess" It is important for the author to emphasize the inseparability of the house and the person: if the house is destroyed, its mistress will also die. This fusion is already stated in the title of the story. The hut for Matryona is filled with a special spirit and light, a woman's life is connected with the “life” of the house. Therefore, for a long time she did not agree to break the hut.

Plot and composition

The story is divided into three parts. The first part deals with how fate threw the hero-storyteller to the station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoprodukt. A former prisoner, and now a schoolteacher, eager to find peace in some remote and quiet corner of Russia, finds shelter and warmth in the house of the elderly and familiar Matryona. “Maybe, to some of the village, some of the richer, Matryona's hut did not seem to be kind, but we were quite good with her that autumn and winter: it did not flow from the rains yet and the chill winds didn’t blow the heat out of it right away, only in the morning , especially when the wind blew from the leaky side. Besides Matryona and me, there were also cats, mice and cockroaches living in the hut. " They immediately find mutual language... Next to Matryona, the hero calms down his soul.
In the second part of the story, Matryona recalls her youth, about the terrible ordeal that befell her. Her fiancé Thaddeus went missing in the First World War. The younger brother of her missing husband, Yefim, who was left alone after death with his younger children in his arms, wooed her. She took pity on Matryona Efim, married the unloved. And here, after three years of absence, Thaddeus himself unexpectedly returned, whom Matryona continued to love. The hard life did not harden Matryona's heart. In caring for her daily bread, she went her way to the end. And even death overtook a woman in labor concerns. Matryona dies, helping Thaddeus and his sons to drag a part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railway on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona's death and decided to take the inheritance for the young during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death.
In the third part, the tenant learns about the death of the mistress of the house. The description of the funeral and commemoration showed the true attitude of those close to her towards Matryona. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of duty than heartily, and think only about the final division of Matryona's property. And Thaddeus does not even come to the commemoration.

Artistic features of the analyzed story

The artistic world in the story is built linearly - in accordance with the story of the heroine's life. In the first part of the work, the whole story about Matryona is given through the perception of the author, a person who has endured a lot in his lifetime, who dreamed of "getting lost and lost in the interior of Russia." The narrator assesses her life from the outside, compares it with the environment, becomes an authoritative witness of righteousness. In the second part, the heroine tells about herself. The combination of lyrical and epic pages, the linking of episodes according to the principle of emotional contrast allows the author to change the rhythm of the narrative, its tonality. This is the way the author goes to recreate a multi-layered picture of life. Already the first pages of the story serve as a convincing example. It opens with an opening telling about the tragedy at the railway junction. We learn the details of this tragedy at the end of the story.
Solzhenitsyn in his work does not give a detailed, specific description of the heroine. Only one portrait detail is constantly emphasized by the author - Matryona's “radiant”, “kind”, “apologetic” smile. Nevertheless, by the end of the story, the reader imagines the appearance of the heroine. Already in the very tonality of the phrase, the selection of "colors", one can feel the author's attitude to Matryona: "From the red frosty sun, the frozen window of the canopy, now shortened, poured a little pink, and this reflection warmed Matryona's face." And then there is a direct author's characteristic: "Those people always have good faces, who are in harmony with their consciences." Even after the terrible death of the heroine, her "face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead."
In Matryona embodied folk character, which is primarily manifested in her speech. Expressiveness, vivid individuality gives its language an abundance of vernacular, dialectal vocabulary (pripeyu, kujotkamu, leto, molonia). The manner of her speech is also deeply popular, the way she pronounces her words: "They began with some kind of low warm purr, like grandmothers in fairy tales." “Matryonin Dvor” minimally includes the landscape, he pays more attention to the interior, which does not appear on its own, but in a lively interweaving with “inhabitants” and with sounds - from the rustle of mice and cockroaches to the state of ficuses and a bent-legged cat. Every detail here characterizes not only the peasant life, Matryonin's yard, but also the storyteller. The voice of the narrator reveals in him a psychologist, a moralist, even a poet - in how he observes Matryona, her neighbors and relatives, how he evaluates them and her. A poetic feeling is manifested in the author's emotions: "Only she had less sins than the cat ..."; "But Matryona rewarded me ...". The lyrical pathos is especially obvious at the very end of the story, where even the syntactic structure changes, including paragraphs, translating speech into blank verse:
“Weems lived in rows with her / and did not understand / that she is the very righteous person / without whom, according to the proverb, / the village is not worth it. / Neither the city. / Not all our land. "
The writer was looking for a new word. An example of this is his convincing articles about language in Literaturnaya Gazeta, his fantastic commitment to Dahl (researchers note that about 40% of the vocabulary in the story, Solzhenitsyn borrowed from Dahl's dictionary), inventive vocabulary. In the story "Matrenin's Dvor", Solzhenitsyn arrived at the language of preaching.

The meaning of the work

“There are such inborn angels,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in his article “Repentance and Self-Restriction,” as if describing Matryona as well, “they seem to be weightless, as if they slide over this slurry, not drowning in it at all, even touching the surface with their feet? Each of us met such, they are not ten and not one hundred in Russia, these are the righteous, we saw them, we were surprised ("eccentrics"), used their good, in good moments they answered them the same, they have, - and immediately plunged again to our doomed depth. "
What is the essence of Matryona's righteousness? Life is not a lie, we will say now in the words of the writer himself, uttered much later. By creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of rural collective farm life in the 1950s. Matryona's righteousness lies in her ability to preserve her humanity even in such inaccessible conditions. As NS Leskov wrote, righteousness is the ability to live "not lying, not deceiving, not condemning a neighbor and not condemning a biased enemy."
The story was called "brilliant", "truly brilliant work." In the reviews about him, it was noted that among the stories of Solzhenitsyn he stands out for his strict artistry, the integrity of the poetic embodiment, and the consistency of artistic taste.
A.I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrenin Dvor" - for all times. It is especially relevant today, when the issues of moral values \u200b\u200band life priorities are acute in modern Russian society.

Point of view

Anna Akhmatova
When his big piece came out (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), I said: all 200 million should read it. And when I read Matrenin's Dvor, I cried, and I rarely cry.
V. Surganov
In the end, after all, it is not so much the appearance of Solzhenitsyn's Matryona that evokes an internal rebuff in us, as an open author's admiration for beggarly disinterestedness and an equally frank desire to uplift and oppose it to the predatory predicament of the owner, nesting in the people around her, close to her.
(From the book "The Word Forces Its Way."
Collection of articles and documents about A.I. Solzhenitsyn.
1962-1974. - M .: Russian way, 1978.)
It is interesting
On August 20, 1956, Solzhenitsyn left for his place of work. There were many such names as "Peatproduct" in the Vladimir region. Peat product (the local youth called it "Tyr-pyr") was a railway station 180 kilometers and four hours from Moscow along the Kazan road. The school was located in the nearby village of Mezinovsky, and Solzhenitsyn happened to live two kilometers from the school - in the Meshchersky village of Miltsevo.
Only three years will pass, and Solzhenitsyn will write a story that will immortalize these places: a station with a clumsy name, a village with a tiny bazaar, the house of the apartment owner Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova and Matryona herself, a righteous woman and a sufferer. A photograph of the corner of the hut, where the guest will put a folding bed and, pushing aside the master's ficuses, arrange a table with a lamp, will go around the whole world.
The teaching staff of Mezinovka numbered about fifty members that year and significantly influenced the life of the village. There were four schools: elementary, seven-year, middle and evening for working youth. Solzhenitsyn received a referral to high school - she was in an old one-story building. The academic year began with the August teachers' conference, so, having arrived at Torfoprodukt, the teacher of mathematics and electrical engineering in grades 8-10 managed to go to the Kurlovskiy district for a traditional meeting. “Isaich,” as his colleagues christened him, could, if desired, refer to a serious illness, but no, he did not speak to anyone about it. We just saw him looking for a birch chaga mushroom and some herbs in the forest, and shortly answered the questions: “I make medicinal drinks”. He was considered shy: after all, a person suffered ... But that was not the point at all: “I came with my purpose, with my past. What could they know, what could they tell them? I sat with Matryona and wrote a novel every free minute. Why am I going to talk to myself? I had no such manner. I was a conspirator to the end. " Then everyone will get used to the fact that this thin, pale, tall man in a suit and tie, who, like all teachers, wore a hat, coat or cloak, keeps his distance and does not get close to anyone. He will keep silent when, six months later, the document on rehabilitation comes - just the school head teacher B.S. Protserov will receive a notification from the village council and send a teacher for help. No talking about when my wife starts to arrive. “Who cares? I live with Matryona and live. " Many were alarmed (wasn’t a spy?) That he was walking everywhere with a Zorky camera and was shooting something completely different from what amateurs usually shoot: instead of relatives and friends - houses, ruined farms, boring landscapes.
Arriving at the school at the beginning of the school year, he proposed his own methodology - giving all classes a control, according to the results he divided the students into strong and mediocre ones, and then worked individually.
In the classroom, everyone received a separate task, so there was no opportunity or desire to cheat. Not only the solution to the problem was appreciated, but also the way of solving it. The introductory part of the lesson was shortened as much as possible: the teacher spared time on "trifles". He knew exactly who and when to call to the board, who to ask more often, who to entrust independent work... The teacher never sat at the teacher's table. I didn't enter the classroom, but burst in. He kindled everyone with his energy, knew how to build a lesson in such a way that there was no time to be bored or doze off. He respected his students. He never shouted, he didn't even raise his voice.
It was only outside the class that Solzhenitsyn was silent and withdrawn. He left home after school, ate the "cardboard" soup prepared by Matryona and sat down to work. Neighbors remembered for a long time how inconspicuously the guest lodged, did not arrange parties, did not participate in the fun, but read and wrote everything. “I loved Matryona Isaich,” said Shura Romanova, Matryona's adopted daughter (in the story she is Kira). - It used to come to me in Cherusti, I persuade her to stay longer. “No,” he says. "I have Isaich - he needs to cook, heat the stove." And back home. "
The tenant also became attached to the lost old woman, cherishing her selflessness, conscientiousness, heartfelt simplicity, a smile, which he tried in vain to catch in the camera lens. “So Matryona got used to me, and I to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening studies, did not annoy me with any questions. " There was absolutely no woman's curiosity in her, and the lodger did not stir her soul either, but it turned out that they opened up to each other.
She learned about the prison, and about the grave illness of the guest, and about his loneliness. And there was no worse loss for him in those days than the ridiculous death of Matryona on February 21, 1957 under the wheels of a freight train at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer crossing from Moscow along the branch that goes to Murom from Kazan, exactly six months after the day he settled in her hut.
(From the book by Lyudmila Saraskina "Alexander Solzhenitsyn")
Matryona's yard is poor as before
Solzhenitsyn's acquaintance with "kondova", "interior" Russia, in which he so wanted to find himself after his exile in Ekibastuz, was embodied in the world-famous story "Matrenin's Dvor" several years later. This year marks 40 years since its creation. As it turned out, in Mezinovsky itself this work of Solzhenitsyn became a second-hand book rarity. This book is not even in Matryona's yard, where Lyuba, the niece of the heroine of Solzhenitsyn's story, now lives. “I had pages from the magazine, the neighbors once asked, when they began to pass it at school, they never returned it,” complains Lyuba, who today brings up her grandson on disability benefits within the “historical” walls. Matryona's hut got her from her mother - Matryona's youngest sister. The hut in Mezinovsky was transported from the neighboring village of Miltsevo (in Solzhenitsyn's story - Talnovo), where the future writer lived with Matryona Zakharova (with Solzhenitsyn - Matryona Grigorieva). In the village of Miltsevo, for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's visit here in 1994, a similar, but much more solid house was hastily erected. Soon after Solzhenitsyn's memorable visit, the countrymen uprooted the window frames and floorboards from this unprotected building of Matrenina, standing on the outskirts of the village.
The "new" Mezinovo school, built in 1957, now has 240 students. In the old building that has not survived, in which Solzhenitsyn taught lessons, about a thousand studied. For half a century, not only the Miltsevskaya river has become shallow and the reserves of peat in the surrounding swamps have become scarce, but neighboring villages have also become empty. And at the same time, Solzhenitsyn's Thaddeans, who call the good of the people "ours" and believe that it is "shameful and stupid" to lose it, did not disappear.
The crumbling house of Matryona, moved to a new place without a foundation, has grown into the ground for two crowns, buckets are placed under the thin roof in the rains. Like Matryona's, cockroaches are hunted here with might and main, but there are no mice: there are four cats in the house, two of their own and two nailed down. A former foundry worker at the local factory, Lyuba, who once spent months correcting Matryona's pension, goes to the authorities to extend her disability benefit. “No one but Solzhenitsyn helps,” she complains. - Once one came in a jeep, introduced himself as Alexei, examined the house and gave money. Behind the house, like Matryona's, there is a 15 hectare garden where Lyuba is planting potatoes. As before, “potato-spearmint”, mushrooms and cabbage are the main products for her life. In addition to cats, she does not even have a goat in the courtyard, which Matryona had.
This is how many Mezin's righteous people lived and live. Local historians compose books about the stay of the great writer in Mezinovsky, local poets compose poems, new pioneers write essays “On the difficult fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, nobel laureate", As they once wrote essays about Brezhnev's" Virgin Land "and" Malaya Zemlya ". They are thinking again to revive Matryona's museum hut on the outskirts of the deserted village of Miltsevo. And the old Matrenin's yard still lives the same life as half a century ago.
Leonid Novikov, Vladimir region.

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