The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” was written by Solzhenitsyn in 1959. The first title of the story is “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man” (Russian proverb). The final version of the title was invented by Tvardovsky, who at that time was the editor of the magazine “New World”, 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 the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962) was published.

The image of the narrator in the work “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 Marena, but also the features of life and even the local dialect of the village.

Literary direction and genre

Solzhenitsyn developed Tolstoy's tradition of Russian prose in a realistic direction. The story combines the features of an artistic essay, the story itself and elements of life. The life of the Russian village is reflected so objectively and diversely that the work approaches the genre of “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 and the stages of his formation are illuminated. The fate of the hero reflects the fate of the entire era and country (as Solzhenitsyn says, the earth).

Issues

At the center of the story moral issues. Are many worth it? human lives a captured plot or a decision dictated by human greed not to make a second trip with a tractor? Material values ​​among the people are valued higher than the person himself. Thaddeus's son and his once beloved woman died, his son-in-law is threatened with prison, and his daughter is inconsolable. But the hero is thinking about how to save the logs that the workers did not have time 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 curse on things touched by people with unclean hands pursuing selfish goals. So Thaddeus undertook to demolish Matryonin’s upper room, thereby making it cursed.

Plot and composition

The story "Matryonin's Dvor" has a time frame. In one paragraph, the author talks about how at one of the crossings and 25 years after a certain event, trains slow down. That is, the frame dates back to the early 80s, the rest of the story is an explanation of what happened at the crossing in 1956, the year of the Khrushchev Thaw, when “something began to move.”

The hero-narrator finds the place of his teaching in an almost mystical way, having heard a special Russian dialect at the bazaar and settling in “kondovaya Russia”, in the village of Talnovo.

The plot centers on 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 finds out more about the silent Matryona from his own observations and from others.

The story describes in detail Matryona's hut, located in a picturesque place near the lake. The hut plays an important role in the life and death of Matryona. To understand the meaning of the story, you need to imagine a traditional Russian hut. Matryona's hut was divided into two halves: the actual living hut with a Russian stove and the upper room (it was built for the eldest son in order to separate him when he got married). It is this upper 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. The wallpaper that has fallen off the wall is called its inner skin.

The ficus trees in the tubs are also endowed with living features, reminding the narrator of a silent but living crowd.

The development of action in the story is a static state of harmonious coexistence between the narrator and Matryona, who “do not find the meaning of everyday existence in food.” The climax of the story is the moment of destruction of the upper room, and the work ends with the main idea and bitter omen.

Heroes of the story

The hero-narrator, whom Matryona calls Ignatich, makes it clear from the first lines that he came from prison. He is looking for a teaching job 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 people. The narrator despises the authorities who do not grant Matryona a pension, who force her to work on the collective farm for sticks, who not only do not provide peat for the fire, but also forbid asking about it. He instantly decides not to extradite Matryona, who brewed moonshine, and 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 embodiment of Russia.

Matryona is the main character of the story. The author says about her: “Those people have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.” At the moment of meeting, Matryona’s face is yellow, and her eyes are clouded with illness.

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.

Matryona lacked womanly curiosity, she was delicate, and did not annoy her with questions. Today's Matryona is a lost old woman. The author knows about her that she got married before the revolution, that she had 6 children, but they all died quickly, “so two didn’t live at once.” 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 residents: she selflessly helped everyone, even the collective farm, from which she was expelled due to illness. There is a lot of mysticism in her image. In her youth, she could lift bags of any weight, stopped a galloping horse, had a presentiment of her death, being afraid of steam locomotives. Another omen of her death is a cauldron with holy water that disappeared to God knows where at Epiphany.

Matryona's death seems to be an accident. But why are the mice running around like crazy on the night of her death? The narrator suggests that 30 years later the threat of Matryona’s brother-in-law Thaddeus struck, who 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 draws attention to her face, which is more alive than dead.

Fellow villagers speak of Matryona with disdain, not understanding her selflessness. Her sister-in-law considers her unscrupulous, not careful, not inclined to accumulate goods; Matryona did not seek her own benefit and helped others for free. Even Matryonina’s warmth and simplicity were despised by her fellow villagers.

Only after her death did the narrator understand that Matryona, “not chasing after things”, indifferent to food and clothing, is the basis, the core of all of Russia. On such a righteous person stands the village, the city and the country (“the whole land is ours”). For the sake of one righteous person, as in the Bible, God can spare the earth and save it from fire.

Artistic originality

Matryona appears before the hero as a fairy-tale creature, like Baba Yaga, who reluctantly gets off the stove to feed the passing prince. She, like a fairytale grandmother, has animal helpers. Shortly before Matryona’s death, the lanky cat leaves the house; the mice, anticipating the death of the old woman, make a particularly rustling noise. But cockroaches are indifferent to the fate of the hostess. Following Matryona, her favorite ficus trees, like a crowd, die: they are of no practical value and are taken out into the cold after Matryona’s death.

Analysis of the story " Matrenin Dvor"includes characteristics of its characters, summary, history of creation, disclosure main idea and the problems raised by the author of the work.

According to Solzhenitsyn, the story is based on real events and is “completely autobiographical.”

At the center of the story is a picture of life in a Russian village in the 50s. 20th century, the problem of the village, discussions on the main human values, issues of goodness, justice and compassion, the problem of labor, the ability to help a neighbor who finds himself in a difficult situation. The righteous man possesses all these qualities, without whom “the village does not stand.”

The history of the creation of “Matryonin’s Dvor”

Initially, the title of the story was: “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” The final version was proposed at an editorial discussion in 1962 by Alexander Tvardovsky. The writer noted that the meaning of the title should not be moralizing. In response, Solzhenitsyn good-naturedly concluded that he had no luck with names.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008)

Work on the story took place over several months, from July to December 1959. Solzhenitsyn wrote it in 1961.

In January 1962, during the first editorial discussion, Tvardovsky convinced the author, and at the same time himself, that the work was not worth publishing. And yet he asked to leave the manuscript with the editor. As a result, the story was published in 1963 in the New World.

It is noteworthy that the life and death of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova are reflected in this work as truthfully as possible - exactly as it really happened. The real name of the village is Miltsevo, it is located in the Kuplovsky district of the Vladimir region.

Critics warmly greeted the author's work, praising it artistic value. The essence of Solzhenitsyn’s work was very accurately described by A. Tvardovsky: an uneducated, simple woman, an ordinary worker, an old peasant woman... how can such a person attract so much attention and curiosity?

Maybe because she inner world very rich and exalted, endowed with the best human qualities, and against its background everything worldly, material, empty fades. Solzhenitsyn was very grateful to Tvardovsky for these words. In a letter to him, the author noted the importance of his words for himself, and also pointed out the depth of his writer’s vision, from which the main idea of ​​​​the work was not hidden - a story about a loving and suffering woman.

Genre and idea of ​​the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn

"Matrenin's Dvor" belongs to the short story genre. This is a narrative epic genre, the main features of which are the small volume and unity of the event.

Solzhenitsyn’s work tells about the unfairly cruel fate of the common man, about the life of villagers, about the Soviet order of the 50s of the last century, when after the death of Stalin, the orphaned Russian people did not understand how to live on.

The narration is told on behalf of Ignatyich, who throughout the entire plot, as it seems to us, acts only as an abstract observer.

Description and characteristics of the main characters

List characters The story is not numerous, it boils down to a few characters.

Matryona Grigorieva- an elderly woman, a peasant who worked all her life on a collective farm and who was released from heavy manual labor due to a serious illness.

She always tried to help people, even strangers. When the narrator comes to her to rent a house, the author notes the modesty and selflessness of this woman.

Matryona never intentionally looked for a tenant and did not seek to profit from this. All her property consisted of flowers, an old cat and a goat. Matryona's dedication knows no bounds. Even her marital union with the groom's brother is explained by her desire to help. Since their mother died, there was no one to do housework, then Matryona took on this burden.

The peasant woman had six children, but they all died at an early age. Therefore, the woman began raising Kira, Thaddeus’s youngest daughter. Matryona worked with early morning Yes, late in the evening, but she never showed her dissatisfaction to anyone, did not complain about fatigue, did not grumble about fate.

She was kind and sympathetic to everyone. She never complained and didn't want to be a burden to anyone. Matryona decided to give her room to the grown-up Kira, but to do this it was necessary to divide the house. During the move, Thaddeus' things got stuck on railway, and the woman died under the wheels of the train. From that moment on, there was no longer a person capable of selfless help.

Meanwhile, Matryona's relatives thought only about profit, about how to divide the things left from her. The peasant woman was very different from the rest of the villagers. This was the same righteous man - the only one, irreplaceable and so invisible to the people around him.

Ignatyich is the prototype of the writer. At one time, the hero served exile, then he was acquitted. Since then, the man set out to find a quiet corner where he could spend the rest of his life in peace and serenity, working as a simple school teacher. Ignatyich found his refuge with Matryona.

The narrator is a private person who does not like excessive attention and long conversations. He prefers peace and quiet to all this. Meanwhile, with Matryona he managed to find mutual language, however, due to the fact that he had a poor understanding of people, he was able to comprehend the meaning of the peasant woman’s life only after her death.

Thaddeus- Matryona’s former fiancé, Efim’s brother. In his youth, he was going to marry her, but he went into the army, and there was no news of him for three years. Then Matryona was given in marriage to Efim. Returning, Thaddeus almost hacked to death his brother and Matryona with an ax, but came to his senses in time.

The hero is distinguished by cruelty and intemperance. Without waiting for Matryona’s death, he began to demand part of the house from her for her daughter and her husband. Thus, it is Thaddeus who is to blame for the death of Matryona, who was hit by a train while helping her relatives take apart their house piece by piece. He was not at the funeral.

The story is divided into three parts. The first talks about the fate of Ignatyich, that he is a former prisoner and now works as a school teacher. Now he needs a quiet refuge, which the kind Matryona gladly provides him with.

The second part tells about the difficult events in the fate of the peasant woman, about her youth main character and that the war took her lover away from her and she had to throw in her lot with an unloved person, the brother of her fiancé.

In the third episode, Ignatyich learns about the death of a poor peasant woman and talks about the funeral and wake. Relatives squeeze out tears because circumstances require it. There is no sincerity in them, their thoughts are occupied only with how best to divide the property of the deceased.

Problems and arguments of the work

Matryona is a person who does not demand rewards for her good deeds; she is ready to sacrifice herself for the good of another person. They don’t notice her, don’t appreciate her, and don’t try to understand her. Matryona's whole life is full of suffering, starting from her youth, when she had to unite her fate with an unloved person, experiencing the pain of loss, ending with maturity and old age with their frequent illnesses and hard manual labor.

The meaning of the heroine’s life is in hard work, in which she forgets about all the sorrows and problems. Her joy is caring for others, helping, compassion and love for people. This is the main theme of the story.

The problem of the work comes down to issues of morality. The fact is that in the village material values ​​are placed above spiritual ones, they prevail over humanity.

The complexity of Matryona's character and the sublimity of her soul are inaccessible to the understanding of the greedy people surrounding the heroine.

They are driven by the thirst for accumulation and profit, which obscures their vision and does not allow them to see the kindness, sincerity and dedication of the peasant woman. Matryona serves as an example that the difficulties and hardships of life temper a strong-willed person; they are unable to break him. After the death of the main character, everything that she built begins to collapse: the house is taken away into pieces, the remains of the pitiful property are divided, the yard is left to the mercy of fate. No one sees what a terrible loss has occurred, what wonderful person

left this world. The author shows the frailty of material things, teaches not to judge people by money and regalia. The true meaning lies in moral character

. It remains in our memory even after the death of the person from whom this amazing light of sincerity, love and mercy emanated.

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

“Matryona Dvor” - the house of Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova in the village of Miltsevo, Vladimir region, the setting of the story by A. I. Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solzhenitsyn Alexander Isaevich (1918 – 2008) Born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk. Parents came from peasant backgrounds. This did not prevent them from getting a good education. The mother was widowed six months before the birth of her son. To support him, she went to work as a typist. In 1938, Solzhenitsyn entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Rostov University, and in 1941, having received a diploma in mathematics, he graduated from the correspondence department of the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (IFLI) in Moscow. After the start of the Great Patriotic War he was drafted into the army (artillery). On February 9, 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by front-line counterintelligence: when examining (opening) his letter to a friend, NKVD officers discovered critical remarks addressed to I.V. Stalin. The tribunal sentenced Alexander Isaevich to 8 years in prison followed by exile to Siberia.

In 1957, after the start of the fight against the personality cult of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated. N. S. Khrushchev personally authorized the publication of his story about Stalin’s camps, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962). In 1967, after Solzhenitsyn sent an open letter to the Congress of the USSR Writers' Union, calling for an end to censorship, his works were banned. Nevertheless, the novels “In the First Circle” (1968) and “Cancer Ward” (1969) were distributed in samizdat and were published without the consent of the author in the West. In 1970, Alexander Isaevich was awarded Nobel Prize on literature.

In 1973, the KGB confiscated the manuscript's activities. Died on August 3, 2008, a new work of the writer of the year in Moscow. "The Gulag Archipelago". The “GULAG Archipelago” meant prisons, forced labor camps, and exile settlements scattered throughout the USSR. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, accused of treason and deported to Germany. In 1976 he moved to the USA and lived in Vermont, studying literary creativity. Only in 1994 was the writer able to return to Russia. Until recently, Solzhenitsyn continued his literary and social activities.

The main theme of this writer’s work is not the criticism of communism or the curse of the Gulag, but the struggle of good against evil - eternal theme world art. Solzhenitsyn’s work grew not only on the traditions of Russian literature of the 20th century. As a rule, his works are considered against the backdrop of an extremely limited range of socio-political and literary phenomena of the 19th and 20th centuries. The artistic space of Solzhenitsyn's prose is a combination of three worlds - ideal (Divine), real (earthly) and hellish (devilish).

The structure of the Russian soul also corresponds to this structure of the world. It is also three-part and is a combination of several principles: holy, human and animal. At different periods, one of these principles is suppressed, the other begins to dominate, and this explains the high rises and deep falls of the Russian people. The time that Solzhenitsyn writes about in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”, in his opinion, is one of the most terrible failures in Russian history, the time of the triumph of the Antichrist. For Solzhenitsyn, the devilish anti-world is the kingdom of egoism and primitive rationalism, the triumph of self-interest and the denial of absolute values; the cult of earthly well-being dominates in it, and man is proclaimed the measure of all values.

Elements of oral folk art in the story “Matryonin’s Dvor”, it is traditional to reveal the inner world of the heroine on the basis of song style. So, Matryona has a “singing” speech: “She didn’t speak, she hummed touchingly,” “benevolent words ... began with some kind of low torment, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” The impression was strengthened by the inclusion of “singing” dialectisms in the text. The dialectical words used in the story very vividly convey the speech of the heroine’s native area: kartovo, cardboard soup, kuzhotkom (in the evening), upper room, duel (blizzard), etc. Matryona has firm ideas about how to sing “in our way” “, and her memories of her youth evoke in the narrator an association with “a song under the sky, which has long been left behind and cannot be sung with the mechanisms.” The story uses proverbs that reflect the bitter experience of people's life: “Dunno lies on the stove, Know-nothing is led on a string”, “There are two riddles in the world: how I was born - I don’t remember, how I die - I don’t know.”

At the end of the story folk wisdom becomes the basis for evaluating the heroine: “...she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb (meaning the proverb “A city is not worth without a saint, a village is not worth a righteous person”), a village is not worth.” In the story “Matrenin's Dvor” there are repeatedly signs that promise something unkind. It should be recalled that signs are common to many folklore works: songs, epics, fairy tales, etc. Tragic events are foreshadowed by Matryona’s fear of moving (“I was afraid...most of all for some reason...”), and the loss of her kitten at the blessing of water (“... like an unclean spirit took him away”), and that “on those same days a lanky cat wandered out of the yard...”. Nature itself protects the heroine from evil. A blizzard swirling around for two days interferes with transportation, and immediately after it a thaw begins. Thus, folklore and Christian motifs occupy a significant place in this story. Solzhenitsyn uses them because they are directly connected with the Russian people. And the fate of the people during the turmoil of the 20th century is the central theme of Solzhenitsyn’s entire work. . .

Year of first publication - 1963 Genre: short story Genus: epic Type of fiction: prose Type of plot: social, psychological

History of creation The story “Matrenin's Dvor” was written in 1959 and published in 1964. This is Solzhenitsyn's story about the situation in which he found himself after returning from the camp. He “wanted to worm his way in and get lost in the very interior of Russia,” to find “a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways.” After his rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn lived in the village of Maltsevo, Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region, with the peasant woman Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova. The former camp inmate could only get hired for hard work, but he wanted to teach.

Initially, the author called his work “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” It is known that in 1963, in order to avoid friction with censorship, the publisher A.T. Tvardovsky changed the name; the idea of ​​righteousness referred to Christianity and was not welcomed in any way in the early 60s of the twentieth century.

Brief story In the summer of 1956, at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow, a passenger gets off along the railway line to Murom and Kazan. This is the narrator, whose fate resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front he was “delayed in returning for ten years,” that is, he served in a camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents were “groped”). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it was not possible to live in a village with the wonderful name Vysokoye Polye, because they did not bake bread there and did not sell anything edible. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his ears, Torfoprodukt. However, it turns out that “not everything is about peat mining” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo. . . This reconciles the narrator with his lot, for it promises him “a bad Russia.” He settles 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.

Matryona's fate, about which she does 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 a special meaning in her fate, which Matryona’s fellow villagers and relatives do not notice. My 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 it’s unlikely that Matryona herself loved him. She was supposed to marry her husband's older brother, Thaddeus. However, he went to the front first world war and disappeared. Matryona was waiting for him, but in the end, at the insistence of Thaddeus’s family, she married her younger brother, Efim. And then Thaddeus, who was in Hungarian captivity, suddenly returned. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband to death with an ax only because Efim 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 all the children from Efim (also six) of the “first Matryona” died without even living for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “corrupted,” and she herself believed it. Then she took in the daughter of the “second Matryona”, Kira, and raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.

Matryona lived all her life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for the collective farm, for her neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. In Matryona there is a huge inner strength. For example, she is able to stop a running horse, which men cannot stop. Gradually, the narrator understands that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without reserve, that the entire village and the entire Russian land still hold together. But he is hardly pleased with this discovery. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to it next? Hence the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies while helping Thaddeus and his sons drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry out of obligation rather than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property. Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.

Plot The story is absolutely documentary, there is practically no fiction in it, the events that happened are described in the story with chronological accuracy. The story begins in August 1956 and ends in June 1957. Climax The climax is the episode of cutting off the upper room, and the denouement is the moment of Matryona’s death at the crossing while transporting the log frame of her upper room: “At the crossing there is a hill, the entrance is steep. There is no barrier. The tractor went over with the first sleigh, but the cable broke, and the second sleigh... got stuck... there... Matryona was carried too.”

Composition The work consists of three chapters. 1. Image of a Russian village in the early 50s. Includes a detailed exposition: the story of finding shelter and meeting the mistress of the house, when the hero is only watching Matryona. 2. The life and fate of the heroine of the story. We learn the story of Matryona, her biography, conveyed in memories. 3. Moral lessons. The third chapter follows after the denouement and is an epilogue.

Main characters The narrator (Ignatyich) is an autobiographical character. Matryona calls R. Ignatyich. He served exile “in the dusty, hot desert” and was rehabilitated. R. wanted to live in some village in central Russia. Once in Talnov, he began renting a room from Matryona and teaching mathematics at a local school. R. is closed, avoids people, does not like noise. He worries when Matryona accidentally puts on his padded jacket and is tormented by the noise of the loudspeaker. But the hero got along with Matryona herself immediately, despite the fact that they lived in the same room: she was very quiet and helpful. But R., an intelligent and experienced person, did not immediately appreciate Matryona. He understood the essence of M. only after the death of the heroine, equating her with the righteous (“A village is not worth it without a righteous man,” R. recalled).

Is there a detailed portrait of the heroine in the story? What portrait details does the writer focus on? Matryona is endowed with a discreet appearance. It is important for the author to depict not so much the external beauty of a simple Russian peasant woman, but rather the inner light flowing from her eyes, and to emphasize his thought all the more clearly: “Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.”

What artistic details create a picture of Matryona’s life? All her “wealth” is ficus trees, a lanky cat, a goat, mice and cockroaches. All the world Matryona in her darkish hut with a large Russian stove is a continuation of herself, a part of her life. Everything here is natural and organic: the beloved ficus trees “filled the owner’s loneliness with a silent but living crowd.”

How does the theme of the heroine’s past unfold in the story? Not easy life path heroines. She had to endure 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 work in the village, severe illness and illness, a bitter resentment towards the collective farm, which squeezed all the strength out of her and then wrote her off as unnecessary. . The tragedy of a rural Russian woman is concentrated in the fate of one Matryona.

How does Matryona appear in the system of other images in the story, what is the attitude of those around her? The heroes of the story fall into two unequal parts: Matryona and the author-narrator who understands and loves her, and those who can be called “Nematryona,” her relatives. The boundary between them is indicated by the fact that the main thing in the consciousness and behavior of each of them is interest in common life, the desire to participate in it, an open, sincere attitude towards people, or a focus only on one’s own interests, one’s own home, one’s own wealth.

The image of the righteous woman Matryona in the story is contrasted with Thaddeus. Fierce hatred is felt in his words about Matryona’s marriage to his brother. The return of Thaddeus reminded Matryona of their wonderful past. Nothing wavered in Thaddeus after the misfortune with Matryona; he even looked at her dead body with some indifference. The train crash, under which both the room and the people transporting it ended up, was predetermined by the petty desire of Thaddeus and his relatives to save money on little things, not to drive the tractor twice, but to make do with one flight. After her death, many began to reproach Matryona. So, my sister-in-law said about her: “. . . and she was unscrupulous, and did not pursue the acquisition, and was not careful; . . . and stupid, she helped strangers for free." Even Ignatyich admits with pain and remorse: “There is no Matryona. A loved one was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for wearing a padded jacket.”

The conflict between Matryona and the village is not developed in the story; there is rather indifference and neglect, a lack of understanding of her worldview. We see only one unrighteous Thaddeus, who forced Matryona to give up part of the house. After Matryona's death, the village will become morally poorer. Describing her funeral, Solzhenitsyn does not hide his dissatisfaction with his fellow villagers: they buried Matryona in a poor, unpainted coffin, they sang “eternal memory” in drunken, hoarse voices, and hastily divided up her things. Why are they so heartless? The author explains the bitterness of people social problems. Social poverty led the village to spiritual poverty. Solzhenitsyn's view of the village of the 60s is distinguished by its harsh, cruel truthfulness. But this truth is imbued with pain, and torment, and love, and hope. Love is the desire to change the social order that has led Russia to the brink of the abyss. The hope is that if in every village there is at least one righteous woman, and he hopes that there is.

The theme of righteousness To the theme of righteousness, a favorite in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century century, Solzhenitsyn approaches delicately, unobtrusively and even with humor. Speaking about Matryona, his hero remarks: “Only she had fewer sins than her lame-legged cat. She was strangling mice! . “The writer rethinks the images of the righteous in Russian literature and portrays the righteous not as a person who went through many sins, repented and began to live like a god. He makes righteousness a natural way of life for the heroine. At the same time, Matryona is not a typical image, she is not like other “Talnovsky women” who live by material interests. She is one of those “three righteous people” who are so difficult to find.

Idea: Using the example of revealing the fate of a village woman, show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly reveal the measure of humanity in each person. The idea of ​​“Matryona’s Court” and its problematics are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the heroine’s Christian-Orthodox worldview.

Art space Interesting art space story. It begins with its name, then expands to the railway station, which is located “one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes from Murom to Kazan,” and to the villages “over the hill,” and then covers the entire country hosting foreign delegations, and extends even into the Universe, which should be filled by artificial satellites of the Earth. The category of space is associated with images of a house and a road, symbolizing the life path of the characters.

Issues: üRussian village of the early 50s, its life, customs, morals ü The relationship between the authorities and the working man üThe punitive power of love üThe special holiness of the heroine’s thoughts.

The values ​​of the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn affirm universal human moral values. The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” calls for not repeating the mistakes of the last generation, so that people become more humane and moral. After all, these are the basic values ​​of humanity!

Anna Akhmatova about A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor” “An amazing thing... This is worse than “Ivan Denisovich”... There you can blame everything on the cult of personality, but here... After all, it’s not Matryona, but the entire Russian village that fell under the locomotive and to pieces..."

Statements by A.I. Solzhenitsyn about the heroine of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” are the same “She is a keeper, without her great-grandmother, the village would not exist. Not a hundred city. Neither the whole land is ours." “Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.”

“There are such born angels, they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide on top of this slurry (violence, lies, myths about happiness and legality), without drowning in it at all.” A. I. Solzhenitsyn A true person reveals himself almost only in moments of farewell and suffering - he is this, remember him... V. Rasputin

ANALYSIS OF A.I. SOLZHENITSYN’S STORY “MATRENIN’S Dvor”

The purpose of the lesson: to try to understand how the writer sees the phenomenon of a “common man”, to understand the philosophical meaning of the story.

Methodological techniques: analytical conversation, comparison of texts.

DURING THE CLASSES

1.Teacher's word

The story "Matrenin's Dvor", like "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", was written in 1959 and published in 1964. “Matrenin’s Dvor” is an autobiographical work. This is Solzhenitsyn’s story about the situation in which he found himself after returning “from the dusty hot desert,” that is, from the camp. He “wanted to worm his way in and get lost in the very interior of Russia,” to find “a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways.” The former camp inmate could only get hired for hard work, but he wanted to teach. After his rehabilitation in 1957, Solzhenitsyn worked for some time as a physics teacher in the Vladimir region, living in the village of Miltsevo with the peasant woman Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova (there he completed the first edition of “In the First Circle”). The story “Matrenin’s Dvor” goes beyond ordinary memories, but acquires deep meaning and is recognized as a classic. It was called “brilliant,” “a truly brilliant work.” Let's try to understand the phenomenon of this story.

P. Check homework.

Let's compare the stories "Matrenin's Dvor" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

Both stories are stages in the writer’s understanding of the phenomenon of the “common man,” the bearer of mass consciousness. The heroes of both stories are “ simple people", victims of a despiriting world. But the attitude towards the heroes is different. The first was called “A village does not stand without a righteous person,” and the second was called Shch-854 (One day of one prisoner).” “Righteous” and “convict” are different assessments. What appears to Matryona as “high” (her apologetic smile in front of the formidable chairwoman, her compliance in the face of the insolent pressure of her relatives), in Ivan Denisovich’s behavior is indicated by “working extra money,” “serving a rich brigadier with dry felt boots right on his bed,” “running through the quarters, where someone needs to be served, sweep or offer something.” Matryona is depicted as a saint: “Only she had fewer sins than her lame cat. She was strangling mice...” Ivan Denisovich is an ordinary person with sins and shortcomings. Matryona is not of this world. Shukhov belongs to the world of the Gulag, he has almost settled down in it, studied its laws, and developed a lot of devices for survival. During the 8 years of his imprisonment, he became accustomed to the camp: “He himself didn’t know whether he wanted it or not,” he adapted: “It’s as it should be - one works, one watches”; “Work is like a stick, it has two ends: if you do it for people, give it quality; if you do it for a fool, give it show.” True, he managed not to lose his human dignity, do not stoop to the position of a “wick” that licks the bowls.

Ivan Denisovich himself is not aware of the surrounding absurdity, is not aware of the horror of his existence. He humbly and patiently bears his cross, just like Matryona Vasilievna.

But the heroine’s patience is akin to the patience of a saint.

In “Matryona’s Dvor” the image of the heroine is given in the perception of the narrator; he evaluates her as a righteous woman. In “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” the world is seen only through the eyes of the hero and is assessed by him himself. The reader also evaluates what is happening and cannot help but be horrified and shocked by the description of the “almost happy” day.

How is the character of the heroine revealed in the story?

What is the theme of the story?

Matryona is not of this world; the world, those around her condemn her: “and she was unclean; and I didn’t chase the factory; and not careful; and she didn’t even keep a pig, for some reason she didn’t like to feed it; and, stupid, helped strangers for free...”

In general, he lives “in desolation.” Look at Matryona’s poverty from all angles: “For many years, Matryona Vasilyevna did not earn a ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid a pension. Her family didn't help her much. And on the collective farm she did not work for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in a littered accountant’s book.”

But the story is not only about the suffering, troubles, and injustice that befell the Russian woman. A.T. Tvardovsky wrote about it this way: “Why is the fate of the old peasant woman, told on a few pages, of such great interest to us? This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. And yet, her spiritual world is endowed with such a quality that we talk to her as if we were talking to Anna Karenina.” Solzhenitsyn responded to Tvardovsky: “You pointed out the very essence - a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism was always scouring the top, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and the neighboring ones.” Writers come out main topic story - “how people live.” To survive what Matryona Vasilievna had to go through and remain a selfless, open, delicate, sympathetic person, not to become embittered at fate and people, to preserve her “radiant smile” until old age - what mental strength is needed for this!

The movement of the plot is aimed at understanding the secrets of the character of the main character. Matryona reveals herself not so much in the everyday present as in the past. Remembering her youth, she says: “It’s you who haven’t seen me before, Ignatich. All my bags were five pounds, I didn’t consider them heavy. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona, you’ll break your back!” The Divir didn’t come near me to put my end of the log on the front.” It turns out that Matryona was once young, strong, beautiful, one of those Nekrasov peasant women who “stopped a galloping horse”: “Once the horse was frightened and carried the sleigh to the lake, the men jumped away, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped...” And at the last moment of her life, she rushed to “help the men” at the crossing - and died.

And Matryona reveals herself from a completely unexpected side when she talks about her love: “for the first time I saw Matryona in a completely new way,” “That summer... we went with him to sit in the grove,” she whispered. - There was a grove here... I didn’t get out without a little, Ignatich. The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war... He went to war and disappeared... For three years I hid, waited. And no news, and not a bone...

Tied with an old faded handkerchief, it looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp. round face Matryona – as if freed from wrinkles, from everyday careless attire – frightened, girlish, faced with a terrible choice.”

These lyrical, bright lines reveal the charm, spiritual beauty, and depth of Matryona’s experiences. Outwardly unremarkable, reserved, undemanding, Matryona turns out to be extraordinary, sincere, pure, an open person. Them sharper feeling the guilt that the narrator experiences: “There is no Matryona. A loved one was killed. And on the last day I reproached her padded jacket.” “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.” The final words of the story return to the original title - “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man” and fill the story about the peasant woman Matryona with a deeply generalizing, philosophical meaning.

What symbolic meaning story "Matrenin's Dvor"?

Many of Solzhenitsyn’s symbols are associated with Christian symbolism, images-symbols of the way of the cross, a righteous man, a martyr. The first title “Matryonina Dvora2” directly points to this. And the name “Matrenin’s Dvor” itself is general in nature. The courtyard, Matryona’s house, is the refuge that the narrator finally finds in search of “interior Russia” after for long years camps and homelessness: “I didn’t like this place in the whole village.” The symbolic likening of the House to Russia is traditional, because the structure of the house is likened to the structure of the world. In the fate of the house, the fate of its owner is, as it were, repeated, predicted. Forty years have passed here. In this house she survived two wars - German and World War II, the death of six children who died in infancy, the loss of her husband, who went missing during the war. The house is deteriorating - the owner is getting old. The house is being dismantled like a person - “rib by ribs”, and “everything showed that the breakers are not builders and do not expect Matryona to have to live here for a long time.”

It’s as if nature itself resists the destruction of the house - first a long snowstorm, enormous snowdrifts, then a thaw, damp fogs, streams. And the fact that Matryona’s holy water inexplicably disappeared seems like a bad omen. Matryona dies along with the upper room, with part of her house. The owner dies and the house is completely destroyed. Until spring, Matryona's hut was stuffed like a coffin - buried.

Matryona’s fear of the railway is also symbolic in nature, because it is the train, a symbol of a world and civilization hostile to peasant life, that will flatten both the upper room and Matryona herself.

Sh. TEACHER'S WORD.

Righteous Matryona - moral ideal a writer on whom, in his opinion, the life of society should be based. According to Solzhenitsyn, the meaning of earthly existence is not prosperity, but the development of the soul.” Connected with this idea is the writer’s understanding of the role of literature and its connection with the Christian tradition. Solzhenitsyn continues one of the main traditions of Russian literature, according to which the writer sees his purpose in preaching truth, spirituality, and is convinced of the need to pose “eternal” questions and seek answers to them. He spoke about this in his Nobel lecture: “In Russian literature, we have long been ingrained in the idea that a writer can do a lot among his people - and should... Once he has taken up his word, he can never evade: a writer is not an outside judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is a co-author of all the evil committed in his homeland or by his people."

“The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, 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.” The publications stopped there. None of the writer’s works were allowed to be published in the USSR. 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 replaced by the author with 1953. “Matrenin’s Dvor,” as the author himself noted, “is completely autobiographical and reliable.” All notes to the story report 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 a 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 a Russian village 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 on a few pages, of such great interest to us? This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. And yet her spiritual world is endowed with such qualities that we talk to her as if we were talking to Anna Karenina.” Having read 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 - to a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism was always scouring the surface, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and the neighboring ones.”

The first title of the story, “It does not stand without the righteous,” contained a deep meaning: the Russian village rests on people whose way of life is based on the universal values ​​of goodness, labor, sympathy, and help. Because they call him righteous, Firstly, a person who lives according to religious rules; secondly, a person who does not sin in any way against the rules of morality (rules that determine morals, behavior, spiritual and mental qualities necessary for a person in society). The second name - "Matrenin's Dvor" - somewhat changed the point of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the boundaries of Matryonin's Dvor. On a larger scale of the village, they are blurred; the people surrounding the heroine are often different from her. By titling the story “Matrenin’s Dvor,” Solzhenitsyn focused readers’ attention on amazing world Russian woman.

Genre, genre, creative method

Solzhenitsyn once noted that he rarely turned to the short story genre, for “artistic pleasure”: “You can put a lot into 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 hone the edges with great pleasure for yourself.” In the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” all facets are honed with brilliance, and encountering 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 main character.

There were two points of view in literary criticism regarding the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. One of them presented Solzhenitsyn’s story as a phenomenon of “village prose.” V. Astafiev, 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 “Matryonin’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 “Matryona’s Court” by A. Solzhenitsyn, “Mother of Man” by V. Zakrutkin, “In the Light of Day” by E. Kazakevich. The main difference of this genre is the depiction of a simple person who is the custodian of universal human values. Moreover, the image of an ordinary person is given in sublime tones, and the story itself is focused on a high genre. Thus, in the story “The Fate of Man” the features of an epic are visible. And in “Matryona’s Dvor” the focus is on the lives of saints. Before us is the life of Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva, a righteous woman and great martyr of the era of “total 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 lame-legged cat”).

Topics

The theme of the story is a description of the life of a patriarchal Russian village, which reflects how thriving selfishness and rapacity are disfiguring Russia and “destroying connections and meaning.” The writer raises in a short story the serious problems of the Russian village of the early 50s. (her life, customs and morals, the relationship between power and the human worker). The author repeatedly emphasizes that the state only needs working hands, and not the person himself: “She was lonely all around, and since she began to get sick, she was released from the collective farm.” A person, according to the author, should mind his own business. So Matryona finds the meaning of life in work, she is angry at the unscrupulous attitude of others to the work.

Idea

The problems raised in the story are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the heroine’s Christian-Orthodox worldview. Using the example of the fate of a village woman, show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly reveal the measure of humanity in each person. But Matryona dies - and this world collapses: her house is torn apart log by log, her modest belongings are greedily divided. And there is no one to protect Matryona’s yard, no one even thinks that with Matryona’s departure something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, is leaving life.

“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Not a city. Neither the whole land is ours.” The last phrases expand the boundaries of Matryona’s yard (as the heroine’s personal world) to the scale of humanity.

Main characters

The main character of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matryona Vasilyevna 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 - a house: “... she didn’t feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, like neither her labor nor her goods...”.

The heroine suffered many hardships in life, but did not lose the ability to empathize with others' joy and sorrow. She is selfless: she sincerely rejoices at someone else’s good harvest, although she herself never has one in the sand. Matryona’s entire wealth consists of a dirty white goat, a lame cat and large ones in tubs.

Matryona is the concentration of the best traits of the national character: she is shy, understands the “education” of the narrator, and respects him for this. The author appreciates in Matryona her delicacy, lack of annoying curiosity about the life of another person, and hard work. She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get it for her husband, that is, for the breadwinner. As a result, she never achieved a pension. Life was extremely difficult. She obtained grass for the goat, peat for warmth, collected old stumps torn up by a tractor, soaked lingonberries for the winter, grew potatoes, helping those around her to survive.

The image of Matryona and certain details in the story are symbolic. Solzhenitsyn's Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of a Russian woman. As noted in critical literature, the appearance of the heroine is like an icon, and her life is like the lives of saints. Her house symbolizes the ark of the biblical Noah, in which he is saved from the global flood. Matryona's death 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 others. Therefore, the attitude towards it is different. Matryona is surrounded by her sisters, sister-in-law, adopted daughter Kira, and the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated it. She lived poorly, wretchedly, alone - a “lost old woman”, exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost never showed up at her house; they all condemned Matryona in unison, saying that she was funny and stupid, that she had been working for others for free all her life. Everyone mercilessly took advantage of Matryona’s kindness and simplicity - and unanimously judged her for it. Among the people around her, the author treats her heroine with great sympathy; both her son Fadceya 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 courtyard is one of the key images of the story. The description of the yard and house is detailed, with a lot of details, devoid of bright colors. Matryona lives “in desolation.” It is important for the author to emphasize the inseparability of a house and a person: if the house is destroyed, its owner will also die. This unity is already stated in the title of the story. For Matryona, the hut 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 demolish the hut.

Plot and composition

The story consists of three parts. In the first part we're talking about about how fate threw the hero-narrator to a station with a strange name for Russian places - Torfoprodukt. A former prisoner, and now a school teacher, eager to find peace in some remote and quiet corner of Russia, finds shelter and warmth in the house of the elderly Matryona, who has experienced life. “Maybe to some from the village, who are richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem good, but for us that winter it was quite good: it had not yet leaked from the rains and the cold winds did not blow the stove heat out of it right away, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side. Besides Matryona and me, the other people who lived in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.” 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, Efim, who was left alone after death with his youngest children in his arms, wooed her. Matryona felt sorry for Efim and married someone she didn’t love. And here, after three years of absence, Thaddeus himself unexpectedly returned, whom Matryona continued to love. Hard life did not harden Matryona's heart. Caring for her daily bread, she walked her way to the end. And even death overtook a woman in labor worries. Matryona dies while helping Thaddeus and his sons drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona’s death and decided to take away the inheritance for the young people during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death.

In the third part, the tenant learns about the death of the owner of the house. The descriptions of the funeral and wake showed the true attitude of the people close to her towards Matryona. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of obligation than from the heart, and think only about the final division of Matryona’s property. And Thaddeus doesn’t even come to the wake.

Artistic Features

The artistic world in the story is built linearly - in accordance with the heroine’s life story. In the first part of the work, the entire narrative about Matryona is given through the perception of the author, a man who has endured a lot in his life, who dreamed of “getting lost and lost in the very interior of Russia.” The narrator evaluates her life from the outside, compares it with her surroundings, and becomes an authoritative witness of righteousness. In the second part, the heroine talks about herself. The combination of lyrical and epic pages, the coupling of episodes according to the principle of emotional contrast allows the author to change the rhythm of the narrative and its tone. 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 story about a tragedy at a railway siding. We will 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 tone of the phrase, the selection of “colors” one can feel author's attitude to Matryona: “The frozen window of the entryway, now shortened, glowed slightly pink from the red frosty sun, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection.” And then it’s straight author's description: “Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.” Even after the terrible death of the heroine, her “face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.”

Incarnated in Matryona folk character, which primarily manifests itself in her speech. Expressiveness and bright individuality are given to her language by the abundance of colloquial, dialect vocabulary (prispeyu, kuzhotkomu, letota, mologna). Her manner of speech, the way she pronounces her words, is also deeply folkish: “They began with some kind of low, warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” “Matrenin’s Dvor” minimally includes the landscape; he pays more attention to the interior, which appears not on its own, but in a lively interweaving with the “residents” and with sounds - from the rustling of mice and cockroaches to the state of ficus trees and a languid cat. Every detail here characterizes not only peasant life, Matryonin’s yard, but also the narrator. The narrator's voice reveals a psychologist, a moralist, even a poet in him - in the way he observes Matryona, her neighbors and relatives, and how he evaluates them and her. The poetic feeling is manifested in the author’s emotions: “Only she had fewer sins than a 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, turning the speech into blank verse:

“We all lived next to her / and did not understand / that she was the one

the most righteous man, / without whom, according to the proverb, / the village does not stand.

/Neither the city./Nor our whole land.”

The writer was looking for something new. An example of this is his convincing articles on language in Literaturnaya Gazeta, his fantastic commitment to Dahl (researchers note that Solzhenitsyn borrowed approximately 40% of the vocabulary in the story from Dahl’s dictionary), and his inventiveness in vocabulary. In the story "Matrenin's Dvor" Solzhenitsyn came to the language of preaching.

Meaning of the work

“There are such born angels,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in the article “Repentance and Self-Restraint,” as if characterizing Matryona, “they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry, without drowning in it at all, even if their feet touch its surface? Each of us has met such people, there are not ten of them or a hundred of them in Russia, these are righteous people, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), took advantage of their goodness, in good moments answered them in kind, they disposed - and immediately immersed again to our doomed depths.”

What is the essence of Matryona's righteousness? In life, not by lies, we will now say in the words of the writer himself, spoken much later. In creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of rural collective farm life in the 50s. Matryona's righteousness lies in her ability to preserve her humanity even in such inaccessible conditions. As N.S. Leskov wrote, righteousness is the ability to live “without lying, without being deceitful, without condemning one’s neighbor and without condemning a biased enemy.”

The story was called “brilliant,” “a truly brilliant work.” Reviews about it noted that among Solzhenitsyn’s stories it stands out for its strict artistry, integrity of poetic expression, and consistency of artistic taste.

Story by A.I. Solzhenitsyn's "Matrenin's Dvor" - for all times. It is especially relevant today, when issues of moral values ​​and life priorities are acute in modern Russian society.

Solzhenitsyn's surname these days is associated exclusively with his novel “The Gulag Archipelago” and its scandalous fame. However, he began his journey as a writer as a talented short story writer, who in his stories depicted the fate of ordinary Russian people of the mid-twentieth century. The story "Matryonin's Dvor" is the most striking example early creativity Solzhenitsyn, which reflected his best writing talents. The many-wise Litrecon offers you its analysis.

The history of writing the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” is a series of interesting facts:

• The story is based on Solzhenitsyn’s memories of his life after returning from a labor camp, when he lived for some time in the village of Maltsevo, in the house of the peasant woman Matryona Zakharova. She became the prototype of the main character.
• Work on the work began in the summer of '59 in Crimea, and was completed in the same year. The publication was supposed to take place in the magazine “New World”, but the work passed the editorial committee only the second time, thanks to the help of editor A.T. Tvardovsky.
• The censors did not want to let a story with the title “A village not stand without a righteous man” (this was the first title of Solzhenitsyn’s work) go into print. They saw in it unacceptable religious overtones. Under pressure from the editors, the author changed the title to a neutral one.
• “Matrenin’s Dvor” became Solzhenitsyn’s second work after the book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It gave rise to many disputes and disagreements, and after the author emigrated, it was completely banned, like all the books of the dissident writer.
• Readers saw the story only in 1989, during the era of Perestroika, when a new principle of USSR policy - glasnost - came into force.

Direction and genre

The story "Matryonin's Dvor" was written within the framework. The writer strives for a reliable depiction of the surrounding reality. The images he created, their words and actions breathe authenticity and naturalism. The reader can believe that the events described in the story could actually happen.

Genre of this work can be defined as a story. The narrative covers a short period of time and includes a minimal number of characters. The problem is local in nature and does not affect the world as a whole. The absence of any specifics only emphasizes the typicality of the events shown.

Meaning of the name

Initially, Solzhenitsyn gave his story the title “A village is not worth without a righteous man,” which emphasized the writer’s main idea about a highly spiritual main character who unselfishly sacrifices herself for the sake of those around her and thereby binds people embittered by poverty together.

However, in the future, in order to avoid Soviet censorship, Tvardovsky advised the writer to replace the title with a less provocative one, which was done. “Matrenin’s Dvor” is both a reflection of the denouement of the work (the death of the heroine and the division of her property), and an indication of the main theme of the book - the life of a righteous woman in a village exhausted by wars and the predatory policies of the authorities.

Composition and Conflict

The story is divided into three chapters.

1. The first chapter is devoted to exposition: the author introduces us to his hero and tells us about Matryona herself.
2. In the second chapter, the beginning occurs, when the main conflict of the work is revealed, as well as the climax, when the conflict reaches its highest point.
3. The third chapter is reserved for the finale, in which everything storylines logically complete.

The conflict in the work is local in nature between the righteous old woman Matryona and those around her, who use her kindness for their own purposes. However artistic features stories create a feeling of typicality of this situation. Thus, Solzhenitsyn gives this conflict an all-Russian philosophical character. People have become embittered due to unbearable living conditions, and only a few are able to retain kindness and responsiveness.

The bottom line: what is it about?

The narrative begins with the fact that the narrator, having spent ten years in exile in a labor camp, settles in the village of Torfoprodukt, in the house of Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva.

Gradually main character learns the whole story of Matryona’s life, about her unsuccessful marriage, about the death of her children and husband, about her conflict with her ex-fiancé, Thaddeus, about all the difficulties that she had to go through. The narrator develops respect for the old woman, seeing in her the support on which not only the local collective farm, but the whole of Russia rests.

At the end of the story, Matryona, under pressure from Thaddeus’s family, gives it to her daughter Kira, whom she raised, as her part of her hut, bequeathed to her. However, while helping to transport the dismantled room, he dies. Matryona's relatives are sad only for show, rejoicing at the opportunity to share the old woman's inheritance.

The main characters and their characteristics

The system of images in the story “Mother’s Court” is presented by the Many-Wise Litrecon in table format.

heroes of the story "Mother's Court"	characteristic
Matryona	an ordinary Russian peasant woman. a kind, sympathetic and submissive old woman who sacrificed herself for others all her life. after her fiancé, Thaddeus, went missing, under family pressure she married his brother, Efim. unfortunately, all her children died before they even lived three months, so many began to consider Matryona “damaged.” Then Matryona took Kira, Thaddeus’s daughter from his second marriage, to raise her, and sincerely fell in love with him, bequeathing to her part of her hut. she worked for nothing and devoted her whole life to people, being content with little.
kira	a simple village girl. Before her marriage, she was raised by Matryona and lived with her. the only person, besides the narrator, who sincerely grieves for the deceased. she is grateful to the old woman for her love and kindness, but she treats her family coldly, because she was simply given away like a puppy to a strange woman.
Thaddeus	sixty-year-old Russian peasant. was Matryona's favorite groom, but was captured during the war, and for a long time nothing was heard from him. After returning, he hated Matryona because she did not wait for him. married a second time to a woman also named Matryona. an authoritarian head of the family who does not hesitate to use brute force. a greedy person who strives to accumulate wealth at any cost.
narrator Ignatyich	a kind and sympathetic person, observant and educated, unlike the villagers. At first, the village does not accept him because of his dubious past, but Matryona helps him join the team and find shelter. It is no coincidence that the author indicates the exact coordinates of the village, emphasizing that he was forbidden to approach the city at a distance of 100 km. this is a reflection of the author himself, even his patronymic is similar to the hero’s patronymic - Isaevich.

Themes

The theme of the story “Mother’s Court” is universal and is food for thought for all generations of people:

1. Soviet village life– Solzhenitsyn portrays the life of Soviet peasants as an ordeal. Village life is difficult, and the peasants themselves are mostly rude and their morals are cruel. A person has to make great efforts to remain himself in such a hostile atmosphere. The narrator emphasizes that people are exhausted by eternal wars and reforms in agriculture. They have a slave position and no prospects.
2. Kindness– the focus of kindness in the story is Matryona. The author sincerely admires the old woman. And, although in the end those around her use the heroine’s kindness for selfish purposes, Solzhenitsyn has no doubt that this is exactly how one should live - to give one’s all for the good of society and the people, and not to fill bags with wealth.
3. Responsiveness– in the Soviet village, according to the writer, there is no place for responsiveness and sincerity. All peasants think only about their survival and do not care about the needs of other people. Only Matryona was able to retain her kindness and desire to help others.
4. Fate– Solzhenitsyn shows that often a person is not able to control his life and must obey circumstances, like Matryona, but only he controls a person’s soul, and he always has a choice: to become embittered at the world and become callous, or to preserve his humanity.
5. Righteousness– Matryona, in the eyes of the writer, looks like the ideal of a righteous Russian person who gives all of himself for the good of other people, on whom the entire Russian people and Russia rest. The theme of righteousness is revealed in the actions and thoughts of a woman, in her difficult fate. No matter what happens, she does not lose heart and does not complain. She only pities others, but not herself, although fate does not spoil her with attention. This is the essence of the righteous - to preserve the moral wealth of the soul, having gone through all life's trials, and to inspire people to moral deeds.

Problems

The problems of the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” are a reflection of the problems of the development and formation of the USSR. The victorious revolution did not make the life of the people easier, but only complicated it:

1. Indifference- the main problem in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”. The villagers are indifferent to each other, they are indifferent to the fate of their fellow villagers. Everyone tries to get their hands on someone else's penny, earn extra and live more satisfyingly. All people’s concerns are only about material success, and the spiritual side of life is as indifferent to them as the fate of their neighbor.
2. Poverty– Solzhenitsyn shows the unbearable conditions in which Russian peasants live, upon whom the difficult trials of collectivization and war fell. People survive, not live. They have neither medicine, nor education, nor the benefits of civilization. Even the morals of people are similar to those of the Middle Ages.
3. Cruelty– peasant life in Solzhenitsyn’s story is subordinated to purely practical interests. In peasant life there is no place for kindness and weakness; it is cruel and rude. The kindness of the main character is perceived by fellow villagers as “eccentricity” or even a lack of intelligence.
4. Greed– the focus of greed in the story is Thaddeus, who is ready, during Matryona’s lifetime, to dismantle her hut in order to increase his wealth. Solzhenitsyn condemns this approach to life.
5. War– the story mentions a war, which becomes another difficult test for the village and indirectly becomes the cause of many years of discord between Matryona and Thaddeus. She cripples people's lives, robs villages and ruins families, taking away the best of the best.
6. Death– Matryona’s death is perceived by Solzhenitsyn as a catastrophe on a national scale, because along with her, that idealistic Christian Rus', which the writer so admired, dies.

main idea

In his story, Solzhenitsyn depicted the life of a Russian village in the mid-twentieth century without any embellishment, with all its lack of spirituality and cruelty. This village is contrasted with Matryona, who lives the life of a true Christian. According to the writer, it is thanks to such selfless individuals as Matryona that the whole country, clogged with poverty, war and political miscalculations, lives. The meaning of the story “Matryona’s Dvor” lies in the priority of eternal Christian values ​​(kindness, responsiveness, mercy, generosity) over the “worldly wisdom” of greedy and mired peasants. Freedom, equality and brotherhood could not replace in the minds of the people simple truths- necessity spiritual development and love for one's neighbor.

The main idea in the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” is the need for righteousness in Everyday life. People cannot live without moral values ​​- kindness, mercy, generosity and mutual assistance. Even if everyone loses them, there must be at least one guardian of the soul's treasury who will remind everyone of the importance of moral qualities.

What does it teach?

The story “Matryona’s Court” promotes Christian humility and self-sacrifice, which Matryona demonstrated. He shows that not everyone can live such a life, but he emphasizes that this is exactly how one should live real man. This is the moral laid down by Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn condemns the greed, rudeness and selfishness that reign in the village, calls on people to be kinder to each other, to live in peace and harmony. This conclusion can be drawn from the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”.

Criticism

Alexander Tvardovsky himself admired Solzhenitsyn’s work, calling him a real writer, and his story a true work of art.

Before Solzhenitsyn’s arrival today, I re-read his “Righteous Woman” since five in the morning. Oh my god, writer. No jokes. A writer who is solely concerned with expressing what lies “at the core” of his mind and heart. Not a shadow of a desire to “hit the bull’s eye”, to please, to make the task of an editor or critic easier - whatever you want, get out of it, but I won’t get out of my way. I can only go further

L. Chukovskaya, who moved in journalistic circles, described the story as follows:

...What if they don’t publish Solzhenitsyn’s second work? I liked her more than the first one. She stuns with her courage, astonishes with her material, and, of course, with her literary skill; and “Matryona”... is already visible here great artist, humane, returning to us our native language, loving Russia, as Blok said, with mortally insulted love.

“Matryonin’s Dvor” caused a real explosion in the literary community and often mirror opposite reviews. Nowadays, the story is considered one of the most outstanding prose works of the second half of the twentieth century and a striking example of the work of early Solzhenitsyn.

Analysis of the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” includes characteristics of its characters, a summary, the history of creation, disclosure of the main idea and problems raised by the author of the work.

According to Solzhenitsyn, the story is based on real events and is “completely autobiographical.”

At the center of the story is a picture of life in a Russian village in the 50s. 20th century, the problem of the village, discussions on the main human values, issues of goodness, justice and compassion, the problem of labor, the ability to help a neighbor who finds himself in a difficult situation. The righteous man possesses all these qualities, without whom “the village does not stand.”

The history of the creation of “Matryonin’s Dvor”

Initially, the title of the story was: “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” The final version was proposed at an editorial discussion in 1962 by Alexander Tvardovsky. The writer noted that the meaning of the title should not be moralizing. In response, Solzhenitsyn good-naturedly concluded that he had no luck with names.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008)

Work on the story took place over several months, from July to December 1959. Solzhenitsyn wrote it in 1961.

In January 1962, during the first editorial discussion, Tvardovsky convinced the author, and at the same time himself, that the work was not worth publishing. And yet he asked to leave the manuscript with the editor. As a result, the story was published in 1963 in the New World.

It is noteworthy that the life and death of Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova are reflected in this work as truthfully as possible - exactly as it really happened. The real name of the village is Miltsevo, it is located in the Kuplovsky district of the Vladimir region.

Critics warmly greeted the author's work, praising its artistic value. The essence of Solzhenitsyn’s work was very accurately described by A. Tvardovsky: an uneducated, simple woman, an ordinary worker, an old peasant woman... how can such a person attract so much attention and curiosity?

Maybe because her inner world is very rich and sublime, endowed with the best human qualities, and against its background everything worldly, material, and empty fades. Solzhenitsyn was very grateful to Tvardovsky for these words. In a letter to him, the author noted the importance of his words for himself, and also pointed out the depth of his writer’s vision, from which the main idea of ​​​​the work was not hidden - a story about a loving and suffering woman.

Genre and idea of ​​the work of A. I. Solzhenitsyn

"Matrenin's Dvor" belongs to the short story genre. This is a narrative epic genre, the main features of which are the small volume and unity of the event.

Solzhenitsyn’s work tells about the unfairly cruel fate of the common man, about the life of villagers, about the Soviet order of the 50s of the last century, when after the death of Stalin, the orphaned Russian people did not understand how to live on.

The narration is told on behalf of Ignatyich, who throughout the entire plot, as it seems to us, acts only as an abstract observer.

Description and characteristics of the main characters

The list of characters in the story is small; it comes down to a few characters.

Matryona Grigorieva- an elderly woman, a peasant who worked all her life on a collective farm and who was released from heavy manual labor due to a serious illness.

She always tried to help people, even strangers. When the narrator comes to her to rent a house, the author notes the modesty and selflessness of this woman.

Matryona never intentionally looked for a tenant and did not seek to profit from this. All her property consisted of flowers, an old cat and a goat. Matryona's dedication knows no bounds. Even her marital union with the groom's brother is explained by her desire to help. Since their mother died, there was no one to do housework, then Matryona took on this burden.

The peasant woman had six children, but they all died at an early age. Therefore, the woman began raising Kira, Thaddeus’s youngest daughter. Matryona worked from early morning until late evening, but never showed her dissatisfaction to anyone, did not complain about fatigue, did not grumble about fate.

She was kind and sympathetic to everyone. She never complained and didn't want to be a burden to anyone. Matryona decided to give her room to the grown-up Kira, but to do this it was necessary to divide the house. During the move, Thaddeus's things got stuck on the railway, and the woman died under the wheels of the train. From that moment on, there was no longer a person capable of selfless help.

Meanwhile, Matryona's relatives thought only about profit, about how to divide the things left from her. The peasant woman was very different from the rest of the villagers. This was the same righteous man - the only one, irreplaceable and so invisible to the people around him.

Ignatyich is the prototype of the writer. At one time, the hero served exile, then he was acquitted. Since then, the man set out to find a quiet corner where he could spend the rest of his life in peace and serenity, working as a simple school teacher. Ignatyich found his refuge with Matryona.

The narrator is a private person who does not like excessive attention and long conversations. He prefers peace and quiet to all this. Meanwhile, he managed to find a common language with Matryona, but due to the fact that he did not understand people well, he was able to comprehend the meaning of the peasant woman’s life only after her death.

Thaddeus- Matryona’s former fiancé, Efim’s brother. In his youth, he was going to marry her, but he went into the army, and there was no news of him for three years. Then Matryona was given in marriage to Efim. Returning, Thaddeus almost hacked to death his brother and Matryona with an ax, but came to his senses in time.

The hero is distinguished by cruelty and intemperance. Without waiting for Matryona’s death, he began to demand part of the house from her for her daughter and her husband. Thus, it is Thaddeus who is to blame for the death of Matryona, who was hit by a train while helping her relatives take apart their house piece by piece. He was not at the funeral.

The story is divided into three parts. The first talks about the fate of Ignatyich, that he is a former prisoner and now works as a school teacher. Now he needs a quiet refuge, which the kind Matryona gladly provides him with.

The second part tells about the difficult events in the life of a peasant woman, about the youth of the main character and the fact that the war took her lover away from her and she had to throw in her lot with an unloved man, the brother of her fiancé.

In the third episode, Ignatyich learns about the death of a poor peasant woman and talks about the funeral and wake. Relatives squeeze out tears because circumstances require it. There is no sincerity in them, their thoughts are occupied only with how best to divide the property of the deceased.

Problems and arguments of the work

Matryona is a person who does not demand rewards for her good deeds; she is ready to sacrifice herself for the good of another person. They don’t notice her, don’t appreciate her, and don’t try to understand her. Matryona's whole life is full of suffering, starting from her youth, when she had to unite her fate with an unloved person, experiencing the pain of loss, ending with maturity and old age with their frequent illnesses and hard manual labor.

The meaning of the heroine’s life is in hard work, in which she forgets about all the sorrows and problems. Her joy is caring for others, helping, compassion and love for people. This is the main theme of the story.

The problem of the work comes down to issues of morality. The fact is that in the village material values ​​are placed above spiritual ones, they prevail over humanity.

The complexity of Matryona's character and the sublimity of her soul are inaccessible to the understanding of the greedy people surrounding the heroine.

Matryona serves as an example that the difficulties and hardships of life temper a strong-willed person; they are unable to break him. After the death of the main character, everything that she built begins to collapse: the house is taken away into pieces, the remains of the pitiful property are divided, the yard is left to the mercy of fate. No one sees what a terrible loss has occurred, what a wonderful person has left this world.

The author shows the frailty of material things, teaches not to judge people by money and regalia. The true meaning lies in moral character. It remains in our memory even after the death of the person from whom this amazing light of sincerity, love and mercy emanated.