Analysis of A.I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrenin's yard"
A.I.Solzhenitsyn's view of the village of the 1950s-1960s is distinguished by a harsh and cruel truth. Therefore, the editor of the magazine "Novy Mir" AT Tvardovsky insisted on changing the time of action of the story "Matrenin's yard" (1959) from 1956 to 1953. It was an editorial move in the hope of pushing for publication a new work by Solzhenitsyn: the events in the story were postponed to the times before the Khrushchev thaw. The picture depicted leaves too painful impression. “Leaves flew around, snow fell - and then melted. They plowed again, sowed again, reaped again. And again leaves flew around, and again snow fell. And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned over. "
The story is usually based on a case that reveals the character of the protagonist. Solzhenitsyn also builds his story on this traditional principle. Fate threw the hero-storyteller to the station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoproduct. Here "dense, impenetrable forests stood before and survived the revolution." But then they were cut down, brought to the root. In the village, they no longer baked bread, did not sell anything edible - the table became scarce and poor. Collective farmers “all the way to the whitest flies on the collective farm, all on the collective farm”, and they had to collect hay for their cows from under the snow.
The author reveals the character of the main heroine of the story, Matryona, through a tragic event - her death. It was only after death that “an image of Matryona floated out before me, which I did not understand, even living side by side with her”. Throughout the story, the author 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. But by the end of the story, the reader imagines the character of the heroine. The author's attitude to Matryona is felt in the tonality of the phrase, in the selection of colors: "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." The flowing, melodious, primordially Russian speech of Matryona is remembered, which begins with "some low warm purr, like grandmothers in fairy tales."
The world around Matryona in her darkish hut with a large Russian stove is, as it were, a continuation of herself, a part of her life. Everything here is organic and natural: the cockroaches rustling behind the partition, the rustle of which resembled the “distant sound of the ocean,” and the bent-legged cat picked up by Matryona out of pity, and the mice, which on the tragic night of Matryona’s death darted around behind the wallpaper, as if Matryona herself was “invisible she rushed about and said goodbye here to her hut. " Favorite ficuses "flooded the loneliness of the hostess with a silent, but lively crowd." The same ficuses that Matryona once saved in a fire, not thinking about the meager wealth she had acquired. The "frightened crowd" froze the ficuses on that terrible night, and then they were forever taken out of the hut ...
The author-narrator unfolds the story of Matryona's life not immediately, but gradually. She had to sip a lot of grief and injustice in her lifetime: broken love, the death of six children, the loss of her husband in the war, hellish labor in the village, a serious illness-illness, a bitter resentment against the collective farm, which squeezed all her strength out of her, and then wrote it off as unnecessary leaving without a pension and support. In the fate of Matryona, the tragedy of a village Russian woman is concentrated - the most expressive, outrageous.
But she was not angry with this world, she retained a good mood, a feeling of joy and pity for others, her radiant smile still illuminates her face. "She had a sure way to regain her good spirits - work." And in her old age, Matryona did not know rest: she grabbed a shovel, then she went with a sack to the swamp to mow grass for her dirty white goat, then she went with other women to steal peat from the collective farm for winter kindling.
“Matryona was angry with someone invisible,” but she did not hold any grudge against the collective farm. Moreover, according to the first decree, she went to help the collective farm, without receiving, as before, anything for the work. Yes, and any distant relative or neighbor did not refuse help, without a shadow of envy later telling the guest about the neighbor's rich potato harvest. Work was never a burden to her, “Matryona never spared neither work nor her good”. And everyone around Matrenin's disinterestedness was shamelessly used.
She lived poorly, miserably, lonely - a "lost old woman", exhausted by labor and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, fearing, apparently, that Matryona would ask them for help. All in unison condemned her that she was funny and stupid, working for others for free, always getting into peasant affairs (after all, she got under the train, because she wanted to knock the peasants to drag the sleds through the crossing). True, after Matryona's death, the sisters immediately flew in, "seized the hut, the goat and the stove, locked her chest, and gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat." Yes, and a half-century friend, "the only one who sincerely loved Matryona in this village," who came running in tears with the tragic news, nevertheless, leaving, took Matryona's knitted blouse with her so that the sisters would not get it. The sister-in-law, who recognized Matryona's simplicity and cordiality, spoke of this "with contemptuous regret." Mercilessly everyone used Matryona's kindness and innocence - and amicably condemned for this.
The writer devotes a significant place in the story to the scene of the funeral. And this is no coincidence. For the last time, all relatives and friends gathered in Matryona's house, in whose environment she lived her life. And it turned out that Matryona was leaving life, never understood by anyone, not humanly mourned by anyone. At the memorial supper they drank a lot, they spoke loudly, "not at all about Matryona." According to custom, they sang "Eternal Memory", but "the voices were hoarse, rosy, their faces were drunk, and no one already put feelings into this eternal memory."
The death of the heroine is the beginning of decay, the death of the moral foundations that Matryona strengthened with her life. She was the only one in the village who lived in her own world: she arranged her life with work, honesty, kindness and patience, preserving her soul and inner freedom. In a popular way, wise, judicious, able to appreciate goodness and beauty, smiling and sociable in her disposition, Matryona managed to resist evil and violence, preserving her “court”, her world, the special world of the righteous. But Matryona dies - and this world is crumbling: they drag her house down a log, greedily share her modest belongings. And there is no one to defend 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 passing away.
“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. Not a city. Not all of our land. "
The bitter ending of the story. The author admits that he, having become related to Matryona, does not pursue any selfish interests, nevertheless he did not fully understand her. And only death revealed before him the majestic and tragic image of Matryona. The story is a kind of author's repentance, bitter repentance for the moral blindness of everyone around him, including himself. He bows his head before a man of a disinterested soul, absolutely unrequited, defenseless.
Despite the tragedy of events, the story is sustained on a very warm, light, piercing note. It sets the reader up for good feelings and serious thoughts.
To Central Russia. Thanks to new trends, the recent prisoner is not refused now to become school teachers in the Vladimir village of Miltsevo (in the story - Talnovo). Solzhenitsyn settles in the hut of a local resident, Matryona Vasilyevna, a woman of about sixty who is often ill. Matryona has neither a husband nor children. Her loneliness is brightened up only by ficuses placed everywhere in the house, and a pity-legged cat picked up out of pity. (See Description of Matryona's house.)
With warm, lyrical sympathy AI Solzhenitsyn describes Matryona's difficult life. For many years she has not earned a single ruble. On the collective farm, Matryona works "for the sticks of workdays in the contaminated book of the accountant." The law that came out after Stalin's death finally gives her the right to seek a pension, but even then not for herself, but for the loss of her husband missing in action at the front. To do this, you need to collect a bunch of certificates, and then take them many times to the social security and the village council, 10-20 kilometers away. Matryona's hut is full of mice and cockroaches that cannot be removed. She keeps only a goat of living creatures, and feeds mainly on "kartyu" (potatoes) no larger than a chicken egg: a sandy, unfertilized vegetable garden does not produce a larger one. But even with such a need, Matryona remains a bright person, with a radiant smile. Her work helps her to maintain her good spirits - trips to the forest for peat (with a two-pound sack three kilometers behind her shoulders), mowing hay for a goat, and household chores. Due to her old age and illness, Matryona has already been released from the collective farm, but the formidable wife of the chairman now and then orders her to help her at work for free. Matryona easily agrees to help her neighbors in the gardens without money. Having received 80 rubles of pension from the state, she makes herself new felt boots, a coat from a worn railway overcoat - and believes that her life has noticeably improved.
"Matryona Dvor" - the house of Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova in the village of Miltsevo, Vladimir region, the scene of the story of A. I. Solzhenitsyn
Soon Solzhenitsyn learns the history of Matryona's marriage. In her youth, she was going to marry her neighbor Thaddeus. However, he was taken to the German war in 1914 - and he disappeared into the unknown for three years. Without waiting for news from the groom, convinced that he was dead, Matryona married Thaddeus's brother, Efim. But a few months later Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. In his hearts, he threatened to chop Matryona and Yefim with an ax, then cooled down and took another Matryona from a neighboring village. 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 Yefim also had six, but none of them lived more than three months. Yefim, leaving in 1941 for another war, did not return from it. Faddey's wife, Matryona, begged her youngest daughter, Kira, for ten years she raised her as her own, and shortly before Solzhenitsyn's appearance in Talnovo, she married her to a locomotive driver in the village of Cherusti. Matryona told the story of her two suitors to Alexander Isaevich herself, worrying at the same time as a young woman.
Kira and her husband in Cherusty had to get a piece of land, and for this they had to quickly erect some kind of structure. Old Thaddeus in the winter proposed to move there the upper room, attached to Matren's house. Matryona was going to bequeath this upper room to Kira anyway (and her three sisters marked the house). Under the persistent persuasion of the greedy Thaddeus, Matryona, after two sleepless nights, agreed during her lifetime, breaking part of the roof of the house, dismantling the upper room and transporting it to Cherusti. Before the eyes of the hostess and Solzhenitsyn, Faddey with his sons and sons-in-law came to the matryon's yard, rattled 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 Vasilievna Zakharova is the prototype of the main character of the story
A tractor was driven from Cherustia. The logs of the 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 sledges at once - so it was more profitable for him and for the money. Selfless 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 toiler did not stay at home even here - 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 burst. The tractor driver with the son of Thaddeus 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, they smashed to death all three who were bustling about the cable, mutilated the tractor, and fell off the rails themselves. A fast train approaching the crossing with a thousand passengers almost got into the wreck.
At dawn, from the move on a sled, under a draped dirty sack, they brought everything that was left of Matryona. The body had no legs, no half of the body, no left arm. And the face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead. One woman crossed herself and said:
- The right handle was left to her by the Lord. There will be God to pray ...
The village began to gather for the funeral. Women-relatives lamented over the coffin, but their words showed self-interest. And it was not hidden that Matryona's sisters and her husband's relatives were preparing for a battle for the inheritance of the deceased, for her old house. Only Thaddeus' wife and Cyrus's pupil cried sincerely. Thaddeus himself, who lost his once beloved woman and son in that catastrophe, obviously thought only about how to save the logs of the upper room that were scattered during the crash near the railway. Asking permission to return them, he now and then rushed 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 her son Thaddeus were buried. The commemoration has passed. In the next few days Thaddeus pulled a barn and a fence from the matryon's sisters, which he and his sons dismantled and transported on a sled. Aleksandr Isaevich moved to one of Matryona's sister-in-law, who often and always spoke with contemptuous regret of her cordiality, simplicity, how she was “stupid, helped strangers for free,” “she didn’t chase after the acquisition and didn’t even keep a piglet.” For Solzhenitsyn, it was precisely from these scornful words that a new image of Matryona emerged, which he did not understand, even living side by side with her. This stranger to her sisters, a funny sister-in-law, a non-acquisitive woman who did not save up property to death, buried six children, but did not have her sociable disposition, felt sorry for the nimble cat and once at night in a fire rushed to save not a hut, but her beloved ficuses - and there is that righteous man, without which, according to the proverb, the village is not worth it.
Solzhenitsyn's Matrynin's Dvor is a story about the tragic fate of the open woman Matryona, who is not like her fellow villagers. Published for the first time in the Novy Mir magazine in 1963.
The story is told in the first person. The main character becomes Matryona's lodger and talks about her amazing fate. The first title of the story "A village is not worth a righteous man" well conveyed the idea of \u200b\u200ba work about a pure, unselfish soul, but was replaced in order to avoid problems with censorship.
main characters
The narrator - a middle-aged man who served lines in prison and wants a quiet, calm life in the Russian outback. He settled with Matryona and tells about the fate of the heroine.
Matryona Is a single woman in her sixties. She lives alone in her hut, is often ill.
Other characters
Thaddeus - Matryona's former lover, a tenacious, greedy old man.
Sisters Matryona - women who are looking for their benefit in everything, treat Matryona as a consumer.
One hundred and eighty four kilometers from Moscow, on the road to Kazan and Murom, train passengers were always surprised by a serious decrease in speed. People rushed to the windows and talked about the possible repair of the tracks. Passing this section, the train picked up the previous speed again. And the reason for the slowdown was known only to the machinists and the author.
Chapter 1
In the summer of 1956, the author returned from the "blazing desert just at random to Russia." His return "dragged on for ten years," and he had no place to rush to anyone. The narrator wanted to go somewhere in the Russian outback with forests and fields.
He dreamed of "teaching" away from the bustle of the city, and he was sent to a town with the poetic name of High Field. The author did not like it there, and he asked to be redirected to a place with the eerie name "Peatproduct". Upon arrival in the village, the narrator realizes that it is "easier to come here than to leave later."
In addition to the hostess, the hut was inhabited by mice, cockroaches and out of pity a lame cat that was picked up.
Every morning the hostess woke up at 5 in the morning, fearing to oversleep, as she did not really trust her watch, which had been going on for 27 years. She fed her "dirty white crooked goat" and cooked a simple breakfast for the guest.
Somehow Matryona learned from rural women that "a new pension law has been issued." And Matryona began to seek a pension, but it was very difficult to get it, the different offices to which the woman was sent were tens of kilometers from each other, and the day had to be spent because of one signature.
People in the village lived poorly, despite the fact that peat bogs spread for hundreds of kilometers around Talnovo, the peat from them "belonged to the trust." Rural women had to carry sacks of peat for the winter, hiding from the raids of the guards. The land here was sandy, and the harvest was poor.
People in the village often called Matryona to their garden, and she, leaving her business, went to help them. The Talnovsk women almost lined up to take Matryona to their garden, because she worked for pleasure, rejoicing in someone else's good harvest.
Once every month and a half, the hostess had a turn to feed the shepherds. This dinner “drove Matryona into a big expense,” because she had to buy sugar, canned food, and butter. The grandmother herself did not allow herself such a luxury even on holidays, living only by what she gave her a miserable vegetable garden.
Matryona once told about the horse Volchok, which got scared and "carried the sleigh into the lake." "The peasants jumped away, and she grabbed the bridle and stopped." At the same time, despite the seeming fearlessness, the hostess was afraid of a fire and, to the point of trembling in her knees, of a train.
By the winter, Matryona was retired. The neighbors began to envy her. And grandmother finally ordered new felt boots, a coat from an old overcoat, and hid two hundred rubles for the funeral.
Once, three of her younger sisters came to Matryona's Epiphany evenings. The author was surprised because he had not seen them before. I thought maybe they were afraid that Matryona would ask them for help, so they did not come.
With the receipt of the pension, my grandmother seemed to come to life, and her work was easier, and her illness worried less often. Only one event darkened my grandmother's mood: for Epiphany in church, someone took her pot of holy water, and she was left without water and without a pot.
Chapter 2
The Talnovsk women asked Matryona about her guest. And she passed the questions to him. The author told the hostess only that he was in prison. He himself did not ask about the old woman's past, did not think that there was anything interesting there. I only knew that she was married and came to this hut as a mistress. She had six children, but they all died. Later, she had a pupil, Kira. And Matryona's husband did not return from the war.
Once, having come home, the narrator saw an old man - Faddey Mironovich. He came to ask for his son - Antoshka Grigoriev. The author recalls that for this insanely lazy and arrogant boy, who was transferred from class to class only so as not to "spoil the statistics of progress," sometimes Matryona herself asked for some reason. After the petitioner left, the narrator learned from the hostess that this was the brother of her missing husband. On the same evening she told that she was supposed to marry him. As a nineteen-year-old girl, Matryona loved Thaddeus. But he was taken to the war, where he went missing. Three years later, Thaddeus's mother died, the house was left without a mistress, and the youngest brother of Thaddeus, Efim, came to woo the girl. No longer hoping to see her beloved, Matryona got married in the hot summer and became the mistress of this house, and in winter Thaddeus returned from “Hungarian captivity”. Matryona threw herself at his feet, and he said that "if it were not for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both."
He later married "another Matryona" - a girl from a neighboring village, whom he chose as a wife only because of her name.
The author recalled how she came to the hostess and often complained that her husband beats and offends her. She gave birth to six children to Thaddeus. And Matryona's children were born and almost immediately died. It was all the fault of the "spoilage," she thought.
Soon the war began, and Yefim was taken away from where he never returned. Lonely Matryona took little Kira from the Second Matryona and raised her for 10 years, until the girl married a machinist and left. Since Matryona was very ill, she early took care of the will, in which she ordered to give the pupil part of her hut - a wooden extension room.
Kira came to visit and said that in Cherusty (where she lives), in order to get land for the young, it is necessary to build some kind of building. For this purpose, the room bequeathed to Matryona was very suitable. Thaddeus often began to come and persuade the woman to give her away now, during her lifetime. Matryona was not sorry for the upper room, but it was terrible to break the roof of the house. And so, on a cold February day, Thaddeus came with his sons and began to separate the upper room, which he had once built with his father.
For two weeks the room was lying near the house, because a blizzard covered all the roads. And Matryona was not herself, besides, her three sisters came and scolded, for allowing them to give up the upper room. On the same days, "a cat with a bent legged from the yard and disappeared", which greatly upset the hostess.
Once, returning from work, the narrator saw how old Thaddeus drove a tractor and loaded the disassembled room on two makeshift sledges. After that we drank moonshine and, in the dark, took the hut to Cherusti. Matryona went to see them off, but she never returned. At 1 am, the author heard voices in the village. It turned out that the second sleigh, which Thaddeus had attached to the first out of greed, got stuck on flights and crumbled. At that time a steam locomotive was going, because of the hillock it was not visible, because of the tractor engine it was not audible. He ran into a sleigh, killed one of the machinists, the son of Thaddeus and Matryona. In the middle of the night, Matryona's friend Masha came, told about it, grieved, and then told the author that Matryona bequeathed her "bundle" to her, and she wanted to take it back in memory of her friend.
Chapter 3
In the morning they were going to bury Matryona. The narrator describes how the sisters came to say goodbye to her, crying "for the show" and blaming Thaddeus and his family for her death. Only Kira grieved sincerely for the deceased adoptive mother, and "Second Matryona", the wife of Thaddeus. The old man himself was not at the commemoration. When they were transporting the ill-fated room, the first sledges with boards and armor remained standing at the crossing. And, at a time when one of his son died, his son-in-law is under investigation, and his daughter Kira almost loses her mind with grief, he worried only about how to bring the sleigh home, and begged all his friends to help him.
After Matryona's funeral, her hut was “beaten until spring”, and the author moved to “one of her sister-in-law”. The woman often recalled Matryona, but all with condemnation. And in these memories a completely new image of a woman appeared, which was so strikingly different about the people around. Matryona lived with an open heart, she always helped others, she did not refuse help to anyone, although her health was weak.
AI Solzhenitsyn ends his work with the words: “We all lived next to her, and did not understand that she was the very righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, not a village is worth. Not a city. Not all our land. "
Conclusion
The work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells about the fate of a sincere Russian woman, who "had fewer sins than a bent-legged cat." The image of the main character is the image of the very righteous person without whom the village does not stand. Matryona devotes her whole life to others, there is not a drop of anger or falsehood in her. The people around take advantage of her kindness, and do not realize how holy and pure this woman's soul is.
Since the short retelling of "Matryona's Dvor" does not convey the original author's speech and the atmosphere of the story, it is worth reading it in full.
Short story test
Retelling rating
Average rating: 4.5. Total ratings received: 10118.
Shot from the film "Matryonin Dvor" (2008)
In the summer of 1956, one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometers from Moscow, a passenger disembarks along the railway line to Murom and Kazan. This is a storyteller, whose fate resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front "he was delayed with the return of ten years," that is, he served in the camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the documents "groped"). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it didn't work out to live in the village with the wonderful name Vysokoe Pole, because they didn't bake bread and sell anything edible there. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his hearing Peatproduct. However, it turns out that "not everything is around peat mining" and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudnya, Shevertnya, Shestimirovo ...
This reconciles the narrator with his share, for it promises him a "perfect Russia." He settled in one of the villages called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which the narrator lives is called Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva or simply Matryona.
The fate of Matryona, about which she did not immediately, not considering it interesting for a "cultured" person, sometimes tells the guest in the evenings, fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees in her fate a special meaning, which Matryona's fellow villagers and relatives do not notice. The husband went missing at the beginning of the war. He loved Matryona and did not beat her like the village husbands of their wives. But Matryona herself hardly loved him. She was to marry her husband's older brother, Thaddeus. However, he went to the front in the First World War and disappeared. Matryona was waiting for him, but in the end, at the insistence of the Thaddeus family, she married her younger brother, Efim. And now Thaddeus, who was in Hungarian captivity, suddenly returned. According to him, he did not cut Matryona and her husband with an ax only because Yefim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride with the same name. The "second Matryona" gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, but the "first Matryona" had all the children from Efim (also six) dying before they even lived three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was "spoiled," and she herself believed it. Then she took up the daughter of the "second Matryona" - Kira, raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.
Matryona lived her whole life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing "muzhik" work, and never asks for money for her. Matryona has tremendous inner strength. For example, she is able to stop a rushing horse on the run, which cannot be stopped by men.
Gradually, the narrator realizes that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without a trace, that the whole village and the entire Russian land still rests. But this discovery hardly pleases him. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to her next?
Hence the absurd and tragic end of the story. 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. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry, rather out of duty than heartily, and think only about the final division of Matryona's property.
Thaddeus doesn't even come to the commemoration.
Retold
What is the story "Matrenin's yard" about?
Matrnin dvor Solzhenitsyn is an autobiographical story. This story really happened to the writer himself. Indeed, there was such a Matrna Vasilyevna, with whom Solzhenitsyn lived during his teaching in the village of Miltsevo (in the story she is named Talnovo).
Solzhenitsyn called his story A village is not worth a righteous man (when publishing, the name was changed for censorship reasons), and the nm tells about a simple Russian peasant woman, about her joyless hard life and ridiculous death.
Matrna lived alone. All six children died in infancy, and her husband went missing in the war. The girl, the daughter of her brother-in-law, whom she brought up, grew up, married and moved in with her husband. Only a bumpy cat, mice and cockroaches lived with Matrna.
All her life Matrna worked on a collective farm, but she did not receive money, she worked for sticks - workdays. And when she got old, with great difficulty she formalized a pension for the loss of her breadwinner - her missing husband. But even in her sixty years, Matrna did not sit idle: she dug potatoes, carried sacks of peat for kindling and ... helped all the villagers for free, who every now and then unceremoniously invited her to help plow the garden, or dig up potatoes. Everyone is accustomed to using the help of the kind and reliable Matrna.
She died helping the brother-in-law and husband of her pupil Kira to drag the brvna across the railway tracks.
And already after Matrna's death, listening to the stories of neighbors who thought she was stupid, for helping people for free, for not accumulating any good, the author comes to the conclusion that our village is supported by such simple, patient, disinterested people. our land.
At the end of the story, Solzhenitsyn calls Matrna a righteous man. He bluntly says that our land is supported by such righteous people. So this is a story about how you need to live so that your life has meaning. Our wealth is not in the material, but in the spiritual.
About Russian righteous - Once upon a time there was a grandmother, she helped everyone, without asking for anything in return, the people, of course, used the kindness of the grandmother. As a result, the grandmother, helping to drag a stuck trailer over the rails, in which there was a part of her house, dismantled by relatives, either for firewood, or for some other reason, I don't remember already, was hit by a train. This is the end of the fairy tale. By the way, it's worth reading, the work is quite short - and the school curriculum, after all, although it's hard, however, like everything in Solzhenitsyn
The story describes the life of a Russian woman who does not consider someone else's good, who gives others warmth, but with a difficult unhappy female share. After the war, almost everyone lived like this, in cold and hunger, alone, believing in compassion. In the story Matrenin dvor the fate of one woman who wanted to be loved and needed. Time passed, the war was forgotten, material wealth was given priority. Matryona dies at the end, her story is told from beginning to end, the death of her close relatives did not worry much, they thought about the good that Matryona had acquired. Solzhenitsyn has works with deep meaning, despite the light syllable.
Story Matrenin's yard tells about the village life in which the main character, the teacher, falls. He stops to live with an elderly Russian woman Matryona, whom everyone calls for help and who does not refuse anyone, despite the years, her illness and the fact that no one helps her with the housework. She does not look abandoned, her adopted daughter helps her, sending either salts or sugar, girlfriends and sisters run to her, but meanwhile there is no one in her house except a lame cat and ficuses. Gradually, the narrator finds out that Matryona's fate was very difficult - her lover disappeared without a trace and Matryona had to marry her ex-groom's unloved brother. And then the groom was found. Matryona's children died in infancy, so they had to take on the education of the girl Thaddeus, whom she never married. She dragged peat, worked on a collective farm for sticks;, with difficulty secured a pension for her husband who disappeared in the war. And at the end she gave the upper room to Kira, who had returned to the village, which was dismantled in her presence, loaded onto a tractor, and the tractor got stuck at the crossing. It was here that this simple Russian woman found her destiny, when a steam locomotive ran into a tractor.