Ideological concept, problems, genre of A. Solzhenitsyn's story “Matrenin's yard
Check the answer What is the term modern literary criticism calls a number of works of the ies, telling about the problems of the Russian countryside, about the villagers? "Rural prose"
Check your answer What is the name of the compositional component describing the settlement: "Between the peat lowlands the settlement was randomly scattered - monotonous poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties ..."? Landscape
Check your answer. What is the literary criticism called the artistic technique that Solzhenitsyn repeatedly used in this fragment of the story to contrast the image of the homeland that arose in his dreams with the Russia that the writer saw in reality? Antithesis
Where are you from? -I enlightened. And I learned that not everything is around peat extraction, that there is a hillock behind the railroad track, but beyond the hillock there is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it is here, even when there was a lady-"gypsy" and there was a dashing forest around. And further the whole region goes the villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo - everything is muffled, from the railroad to the lakes. A wind of calm pulled me from these names. They promised me a perfect Russia.
С 2. What, in your opinion, is the main idea of Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin's Courtyard" and what works of Russian literature have a similar theme?
From 5.3. What, in your opinion, is the essence of the relationship between man and power? (based on the story of A. I. Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin's yard").
From 5.3. What is Matryona's righteousness and why was it not appreciated and noticed during the life of the heroine? (Based on the story of A.I.Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin's yard".)
From 5.3. How do Russian writers of the twentieth century see the "little man" (based on the works of A. Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin's yard", "One day in Ivan Denisovich", etc.)?
The history of the creation of the work of Solzhenitsyn "Matryonin Dvor"
In 1962, the magazine "New World" published the story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich", which made the name of Solzhenitsyn 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 Dvor" 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." All the notes to the story tell about the prototype of the heroine - 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 patronymic 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 relating to 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 values of 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 in any way sin against the rules of morality (rules that determine morals, behavior, spiritual and mental qualities that a person needs in society). The second name - "Matrynin Dvor" - somewhat changed the angle of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the Matrenin 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's Dvor", Solzhenitsyn focused the readers' attention on the wonderful world of the 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 “Matrynin's Dvor”. One of them presented Solzhenitsyn's story as a phenomenon of “village prose”. V. Astafyev, calling "Matrenin's Dvor" "the pinnacle of Russian short stories", believed that our "village 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 the story of M. Sholokhov "The Fate of a Man".
In the 1960s, the genre features of the “monumental story” are recognized in A. Solzhenitsyn's Matryona'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 custodian of universal 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 selfishness 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 person-worker). 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 life's losses and suffering only more clearly manifest the measure of the human in each of the people. But Matryona dies - and this world collapses: they drag her house down a log, greedily share 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 same 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, disadvantaged peasant woman with a generous and disinterested 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 didn’t feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, no matter how much her labor or her goodness was ...”.
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 enjoys 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 is the concentration of the best traits of the national character: she is shy, understands the "education" of the narrator, respects him for this. 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 it 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.
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 work and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, everyone condemned Matryona in chorus that she was funny and stupid, she worked for others 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. In the first part, we are talking about how fate threw the hero-storyteller to the station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoproduct. 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 an elderly and learned life 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 was blowing from the leaky side. Besides Matryona and me, there were also cats, mice and cockroaches living in the hut. " They immediately find a common language. Next to Matryona, the hero calms down his soul.
In the second part of the story, Matryona recalls her youth, the terrible ordeal that befell her. Her fiancé Thaddeus went missing in the First World War. The younger brother of the missing husband, Yefim, who was left alone after death with the younger children in his arms, wooed her. She took pity on Matryona Yefim and married the unloved one. 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 the 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 people 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 entire 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 in the interior of Russia”. The narrator evaluates 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 siding. 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 - the "radiant", "kind", "apologetic" smile of Matryona. 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, the folk character is embodied, 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 bouncy 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 same righteous person / without whom, according to the proverb, / the village is not worth it. / Neither the city. / Not our whole land. "
The writer was looking for a new word. An example of this is his convincing articles about language in Literaturnaya Gazeta, his fantastic adherence to Dahl (researchers note that about 40% of the vocabulary in the story, Solzhenitsyn borrowed from Dahl's dictionary), and ingenuity in vocabulary. In the story "Matrenin's Dvor," Solzhenitsyn arrived at the language of preaching.
The meaning of the work
“There are such born angels,” wrote Solzhenitsyn in his article “Repentance and Self-Restriction,” as if describing Matryona as well, “they seem to be weightless, they seem to 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"), we 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 mundane 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 even 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 and 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 in us an internal rebuff, as the author's frank admiration for beggarly disinterestedness and an equally frank desire to uplift and oppose it to the predation 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 away and a four-hour drive 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 here: elementary, seven-year, middle and evening for working youth. Solzhenitsyn received a referral to a secondary school - it 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 Kurlovsky 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 replies to the questions: "I am making 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 did not have such a 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 remain 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 more talking about when my wife starts arriving. “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 quite different from what amateurs usually shoot: instead of relatives and friends - houses, ruined farms, boring landscapes.
Arriving at school at the beginning of the school year, he proposed his own methodology - giving all classes a control, based on the results, he divided the students into strong and mediocre ones, and then worked individually.
In the classroom, everyone received a separate assignment, 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, whom to ask more often, to whom to entrust independent work. The teacher never sat at the teacher's table. I did not 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.
And only outside the class was Solzhenitsyn 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,” used to say 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 disinterestedness, 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 tenant also did not disturb her soul, but it turned out that they opened up to each other.
She learned about the prison, and about the serious 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 end up 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 on 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 did not return it,” complains Lyuba, who today brings up her grandson in the “historical” walls on disability benefits. Matryona's hut came from her mother - Matryona's youngest sister. The hut to 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 the visit of Alexander Solzhenitsyn 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 Matrenin's, which is 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 the neighboring villages have also been deserted. And at the same time, Solzhenitsyn's Thaddeans, who call the good of the people "ours" and believe that losing it "is shameful and stupid", have not been extinct.
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 a 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, called himself Alexei, looked around 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 write 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.
Y. Gang Service of Solzhenitsyn // New time. - 1995. No. 24.
Zapevalov V. A. Solzhenitsyn. To the 30th anniversary of the publication of the story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich" // Russian Literature. - 1993. No. 2.
Litvinova V.I. Don't live a lie. Methodical recommendations for the study of A.I. Solzhenitsyn. - Abakan: publishing house of KSU, 1997.
Murind. One hour, one day, one human life in the stories of A.I. Solzhenitsyn // Literature at school. - 1995. No. 5.
Palamarchuk P. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Guide. - M.,
1991.
Saraskina L. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. ZhZL series. - M .: Young
guard, 2009.
The word makes its way. Collection of articles and documents about A.I. Solzhenitsyn. 1962-1974. - M .: Russian way, 1978.
ChalmaevV. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Life and Work. - M., 1994.
Urmanov A.V. Creativity of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. - M., 2003.
"Matrenin Dvor" analysis of the work - theme, idea, genre, plot, composition, heroes, problems and other issues are disclosed in this article.
"A village is not worth it without a righteous man" - this is the original title of the story. The story has something in common with many works of Russian classical literature. Solzhenitsyn seems to transfer one of Leskov's heroes to the historical era of the 20th century, the post-war period. And the more dramatic, tragic is Matryona's fate in the midst of this situation.
Matryona Vasilievna's life seems to be ordinary. She devoted all of her to work, selfless and hard work of the Cross-Yang. When the construction of collective farms began, she went there too, but due to illness she was released from there and now they were attracted when others refused. And she did not work for money, she never took money. Only later, after her death, her sister-in-law, with whom the narrator settled, will remember evil, or rather, remind her of this oddity of her.
But is Matryona's fate so simple? And who knows what it is like to fall in love with a person and, without waiting for him, to marry another, unloved, and then see your betrothed a few months after the wedding? And then what is it like to live with him side by side, to see him every day, to feel guilty for his and his life that did not work out? The husband did not love her. She bore him six children, but none of them survived. And she had to take on the education of the daughter of her beloved, but already a stranger. How much warmth and kindness accumulated in her, so much she invested in her adopted daughter Kira. Matryona experienced so much, but she did not lose that inner light that shone in her eyes, and a smile cast off her. She held no grudge against anyone and was only upset when she was offended. She is not angry with her sisters, who appeared only when everything in her life has already become happy. She lives as she is. That is why I have not saved up anything in my life except two hundred rubles for the funeral.
The turning point in her life was that they wanted to take away the room from her. She did not feel sorry for the good, she never regretted it. It was scary for her to think that they would destroy her house, in which her whole life flew by like an instant. She spent forty years here, endured two wars, a revolution that flew by in echoes. And for her to break and take her upper room is to break and destroy her life. It was the end for her. The real ending of the novel is not accidental either. Human greed destroys Matryona. It hurts to hear the words of the author that Thaddeus, because of whose greed the business began, on the day of death and then Matryona's funeral, only thinks about the abandoned frame. He does not pity her, does not cry for the one whom he once loved so dearly.
Solzhenitsyn shows the era when the foundations of life were turned upside down, when property became the object and purpose of life. The author not in vain asks the question why things are called "good", because it is, in fact, evil, and terrible. Matryona understood this. She did not chase outfits, she dressed in a country style. Matryona is the embodiment of true national morality, universal morality, on which the whole world rests.
So Matryona remained not understood by anyone, not truly mourned by anyone. Only Kira alone cried not according to custom, but from the heart. They feared for her sanity.
The story is masterfully written. Solzhenitsyn is a master of subject detailing. From small and seemingly insignificant details, he builds up a special volumetric world. This world is visible and tangible. This world is Russia. We can say with precision where the village of Talnovo is located, but we perfectly understand that all of Russia is in this village. Solzhenitsyn combines the general and the particular and encloses this in a single artistic image.
Plan
- The narrator gets a job as a teacher in Talnovo. Lives with Matryona Vasilievna.
- Gradually, the narrator learns about her past.
- Thaddeus comes to Matryona. He is busy with the upper room, which Matryona promised Kira, his daughter, brought up by Matryona.
- When the log house is being transported across the railway tracks of Matrona, her nephew and husband Kira die.
- There are long disputes over Matryona's hut and property. And the story-teller moves to her sister-in-law.
The author's title of the story is "A village is not worth a righteous man," however, the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, where the work was published in 1963 (No. 1), A. Tvardovsky insisted on the title "Matrenin Dvor" the author's position is incomparably weaker, since for Solzhenitsyn the main thing was the assertion of the impossibility of the existence of life devoid of a moral principle, the personification of which among the people was for him the main heroine of the story.
The story "Matryona's Dvor", which we will analyze, in terms of reproducing the events of reality, retains complete accuracy: both the life and death of Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova are presented in the work with documentary accuracy; in real life the action took place in the village of Miltsevo, Vladimir region. Thus, the plot of the story and the images of the heroes are not invented, one of the characteristic features of Solzhenitsyn's work manifested itself here: the writer gravitates towards real facts, the artistic interpretation of which in his works is carried out in the direction of identifying the philosophical foundations of life, transforming everyday life into being, revealing characters in a new way heroes explaining their actions from the standpoint of not momentary, vain, but eternal ones.
The image of the railway in Russian literature has long-standing traditions, and Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin's Dvor" continues these traditions. The beginning of it seems to interest the reader: why, at the crossing, "since a good six months after that, all the trains have slowed down, as it were, to the touch"? Then"? However, the further narration removes some mystery from the events that almost caused the trains to stop, and it turns out that here, at this crossing, the same Matryona died a terrible death, whom during her life she was little appreciated by those around her, considering her as "funny" and "stupid" , and after death, they began to condemn at all for the fact that she was so "wrong".
The image of the main heroine of the story "Matryona's Dvor" is drawn by the author in a highly realistic manner, his Matryona is not embellished at all, she is depicted as the most ordinary Russian woman - but the way she "contains" her hut reveals an unusual mental disposition of this woman: "Spacious The hut and especially the best part of it near the window was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs of figs. They filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent, but living crowd ", - says the author, and the reader sees this living world - for the hostess - nature, in which she good and calm. She carefully created this world of her own, in which she found peace of mind, because her life was unusually difficult: "Not understood and abandoned even by her husband, she buried six children," disabled, she worked for a quarter of a century on a collective farm, but because she was not at the factory - she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only achieve for her husband ... "- this is what this woman's life was like.
However, as the author emphasizes, all these life trials did not turn Matryona Vasilievna into an embittered person, she remained light, able to enjoy life, looking at the world openly and joyfully, she retained a "radiant smile", she learned in any situation to find the opportunity to enjoy life , and, as the author writes, "I noticed that she had a sure way to regain her good spirits - work." Any injustice that spoiled her life was forgotten in the work that transformed her: "And not bowing to office tables, but to the forest bushes, but having broken her back with a burden, Matryona returned to the hut, already enlightened, satisfied with everything, with her kind smile." Maybe that is why she could not refuse anyone who asked (almost demanded ...) her help in her work, that she felt the joy of work? And the neighbors and relatives took advantage of this, and it turned out that Matryona's hands did not reach her garden - she needed to help others, who almost openly despised her for this help: "And even about Matryona's cordiality and simplicity, who she recognized, she spoke with contemptuous regret. "
The author also shows Matryona as a person in whom the true, not exposed, spiritual values of the Russian people are concentrated: kindness, true love for people, faith in them (despite the unfair attitude towards oneself), some even holiness - only the holiness of everyday life, in which is extremely difficult for a person to maintain a moral principle in himself. It is noteworthy that the author mentions this, speaking of the place of religion in the life of the heroine: “Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, being ashamed of me or afraid of oppressing me ... in the morning on holidays Matryona lit a lamp. less than her nibbled cat. That - strangled mice ... "The spiritual beauty of the heroine is also indicated by the following detail, noted by the author:" Those people always have good faces, who are in harmony with their conscience ... and this glow warmed their faces Matryona. "
The heroine of Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin's Yard" dies under the wheels of a train because of someone else's greed, because of her desire to help others, seemingly relatives. However, these "relatives and friends" like vultures swoop down on a poor (if not to say beggarly) "inheritance", make "accusatory laments against" each other out of crying over the body of the murdered, trying to show that they were the ones who loved the deceased more than anyone else and more than anyone else for her. grieve, and at the same time their crying passes over "ritual norms", "coldly thought out, from time immemorial routine." And at the commemoration, for which "bad flour was baked out of bad taste," they argued about who would get what of the deceased's belongings, and "the case rested against writing to the court" - the "relatives" were so uncompromising. And after the funeral, Matryona's sister-in-law remembers her for a long time, and “all her comments about Matryona were disapproving: she was unclean; she didn’t chase after the stock; stupid, helped strangers for free ... "But this is precisely what, in the eyes of the author Matryon, is opposed to all the rest of the heroes of the story, who have lost their human appearance in pursuit of the" acquisition "and other life benefits, who appreciated only these notorious benefits in life, who do not understand, that the main thing in a person is the soul, which is the only one worth bothering about in this life. It is no coincidence that, upon learning of Matryona's death, the author says: "A loved one was killed." Dear - because he understood life in the same way as he himself, although he never spoke about it, maybe simply because he did not know such words ...
At the end of the story, the author admits that while Matryona was alive, he did not manage to fully understand her. Tormented by his guilt for the fact that “on the last day I reproached her for her quilted jacket,” he tries to understand what Matryona was attractive as a person, and her relatives' comments about her reveal to him the true meaning of this person in his own life and the lives of those , who, like himself, did not manage to understand her during her lifetime: “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 does not exist. Neither the city. all the land is ours. " This recognition characterizes the author as a person capable of admitting his mistakes, which speaks of his spiritual strength and honesty - in contrast to those who used the kindness of Matryona's soul during life, and after death despised her for the same kindness ...
On the way to publication, Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin's Dvor" underwent changes not only in its title. The date of the events described was changed - at the request of the editorial board of the magazine, 1953 was indicated, that is, the Stalin era. And the appearance of the story caused a wave of criticism, the author was reproached that he one-sidedly shows the life of the collective farm village, does not take into account the experience of the leading collective farm neighboring the village where Matryona lives, although the writer at the very beginning says about its chairman: "His chairman, Gorshkov, brought under the root of a fair amount of hectares of forest and profitably sold to the Odessa region, on that he raised his collective farm, and got himself a Hero of Socialist Labor "... Probably the pathos of Solzhenitsyn's work, who showed that the" righteous man "left this land, and did not suit those who determined the "meaning" of the story, but its author has nothing to do with it: he would be glad to show a different life, but what if it is as it is? The writer's deep concern for the fate of the people, whose "righteous" live incomprehensible and die such a terrible death, is the essence of his moral position, and Solzhenitsyn's story "Matryonin's yard", which we analyzed, is one of his most significant works, in which this anxiety is felt especially acutely.
The story “Matryonin's Dvor” was written by Solzhenitsyn in 1959. The first title of the story is “A village is not worth a righteous man” (Russian proverb). The final version of the name was invented by Tvardovsky, who was at that time the editor of the Novy Mir magazine, where the story was published in No. 1 for 1963. At the insistence of the editors, the beginning of the story was changed and the events were attributed not to 1956, but to 1953. that is, to the pre-Khrushchev era. This is a bow to Khrushchev, thanks to whose permission Solzhenitsyn's first story "One Day in Ivan Denisovich" (1962) was published.
The image of the narrator in "Matryonin's Dvor" is autobiographical. After Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated, actually lived in the village of Miltsevo (Talnovo in the story) and rented a corner from Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova (Grigorieva in the story). Solzhenitsyn very accurately conveyed not only the details of the life of the prototype of Marena, but also the peculiarities of everyday life and even the local dialect of the village.
Literary direction and genre
Solzhenitsyn developed the Tolstoyan tradition of Russian prose in a realistic direction. The story combines the features of an artistic sketch, the story itself, and elements of a life. The life of the Russian countryside is reflected so objectively and diversely that the work comes close to the genre of a "novel-type story". In this genre, the character of the hero is shown not only at a turning point in his development, but also the history of the character, the stages of his formation, is highlighted. The fate of the hero reflects the fate of the entire era and the country (as Solzhenitsyn says, the land).
Problematic
In the center of the story are moral issues. Are many human lives worth the seized plot or the human greedy decision not to make a second trip with a tractor? Material values are valued by the people higher than the person himself. Thaddeus lost a son and a once beloved woman, his son-in-law is threatened with prison, and his daughter is inconsolable. But the hero thinks about how to save the logs that the workers did not manage to burn at the crossing.
Mystical motives are at the center of the story. This is the motive of the unrecognized righteous man and the problem of cursing on things that are touched by people with unclean hands who pursue selfish goals. So Thaddeus undertook to bring down Matryona's room, thereby making her cursed.
Plot and composition
The story "Matryonin's yard" has a time frame. In one paragraph, the author says that at one of the crossings and 25 years after a certain event, trains slow down. That is, the frame refers to the early 80s, the rest of the narration is an explanation of what happened at the move in 1956, in the year of the Khrushchev thaw, when "something has moved."
The hero-storyteller finds the place of his teaching in an almost mystical way, having heard a special Russian dialect at the bazaar and settled in "kondova Russia", in the village of Talnovo.
In the center of the plot is the life of Matryona. The narrator learns about her fate from herself (she talks about how Thaddeus, who disappeared in the first war, wooed her, and how she married his brother, who disappeared in the second). But the hero learns more about the silent Matryona from his own observations and from others.
The story describes in detail Matryona's hut, standing in a picturesque place by the lake. Izba plays an important role in Matryona's life and death. To understand the meaning of the story, you need to imagine a traditional Russian hut. Matryona's hut was divided into two halves: a living hut with a Russian stove and an upper room (it was built for the eldest son to separate him when he gets married). It is this room that Thaddeus dismantles in order to build a hut for Matryona's niece and his own daughter Kira. The hut in the story is animated. Wallpaper that has lagged behind the wall is called its inner skin.
Ficuses in tubs are also endowed with lively features, reminding the narrator of a silent, but lively crowd.
The development of an action in a story is a static state of harmonious coexistence of the narrator and Matryona, who “do not find the meaning of everyday existence in food”. The culmination of the story is the moment of the destruction of the upper room, and the work ends with the main idea and a bitter omen.
Heroes of the story
The hero-storyteller, whom Matryona calls Ignatic, makes it clear from the first lines that he has arrived from places of detention. He is looking for a job as a teacher in the wilderness, in the Russian outback. Only the third village satisfies him. Both the first and the second turn out to be corrupted by civilization. Solzhenitsyn makes it clear to the reader that he condemns the attitude of Soviet bureaucrats towards man. The narrator despises the authorities that do not appoint Matryona a pension, forcing her to work on the collective farm for sticks, not only not providing peat for the furnace, but also forbidding her to ask about it. He instantly decides not to extradite Matryona, who brewed moonshine, hides her crime, for which she faces prison.
Having experienced and seen a lot, the narrator, embodying the author's point of view, acquires the right to judge everything that he observes in the village of Talnovo - a miniature incarnation of Russia.
Matryona is the main character of the story. The author says about her: "Those people have good faces who are in harmony with their consciences." At the moment of meeting, Matryona's face is yellow, and her eyes are clouded with disease.
To survive, Matryona grows small potatoes, secretly brings forbidden peat from the forest (up to 6 bags a day) and secretly mows hay for her goat.
In Matryona there was no woman's curiosity, she was delicate, she did not annoy with questions. Matryona today is a lost old woman. The author knows about her that she got married even before the revolution, that she had 6 children, but everyone quickly died, "so two did not live right away." Matryona's husband did not return from the war, but disappeared without a trace. The hero suspected that he had a new family somewhere abroad.
Matryona had a quality that distinguished her from the rest of the village: she disinterestedly helped everyone, even the collective farm, from which she was kicked out due to illness. There is a lot of mystical in her image. In her youth, she could lift bags of any weight, stopped a horse at a gallop, had a presentiment of her death, fearing steam locomotives. Another omen of her death is a bowler hat with holy water that disappeared out of nowhere for Epiphany.
Matryona's death seems to be an accident. But why, on the night of her death, the mice rush about like mad? The narrator assumes that it was 30 years later that Matryona's brother-in-law Thaddeus threatened to chop Matryona and his own brother who married her.
After death, Matryona's holiness is revealed. The mourners notice that she, completely crushed by the tractor, has only her right hand left to pray to God. And the narrator pays attention to her face, rather alive than dead.
The villagers speak of Matryona with disdain, not understanding her disinterestedness. The sister-in-law considers her unscrupulous, not careful, not inclined to accumulate good, Matryona did not seek her own benefit and helped others for free. Even Matryonin's cordiality and simplicity were despised by her fellow villagers.
Only after his death, the narrator realized that Matryona, “not chasing a plant,” indifferent to food and clothing, is the basis, the core of all Russia. On such a righteous man stands a village, a city and a country ("all our land"). For the sake of one righteous man, as in the Bible, God can spare the earth, keep it from fire.
Artistic identity
Matryona appears before the hero as a fabulous creature, like Baba Yaga, who reluctantly gets off the stove to feed the passing prince. She, like a fairy-tale grandmother, has animal helpers. Shortly before Matryona's death, the bumpy cat leaves the house, the mice, anticipating the death of the old woman, rustle especially. But cockroaches are indifferent to the fate of the mistress. Following Matryona, her favorite ficuses, similar to a crowd, die: they are of no practical value and are taken out into the cold after Matryona's death.
