The era of Stalinism distorted the fate of many people, including writers who tell the bitter truth "about the happiest and freest country." In February 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing the "Father of the Nations" and sentenced to eight years. It was a difficult time: a prison research institute, work in a political special camp, exile in Kazakhstan, rehabilitation. In 1974 - exile to the West (after the Nobel Prize!). While abroad, the writer tried to convey to people living in Russia that you need to live honestly, not to participate in

In lies, rule the country on the basis of laws, and then everything will work out.
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn revealed to us the cruel truth about the state in which we live, about the forgotten village.
The story “Matryona Dvor”, which was originally called “A village cannot stand without a righteous man,” tells the story of the fate of one person - Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva. Through the eyes of the intellectual Ignatich, in whom Alexander Isaevich himself is easily recognizable, who in 1956, after his exile in Kazakhstan, came to a remote village in the Ryazan region to teach, we see village life, Matryona, an old and sick mistress, who took on a strange man. With the arrival of Ignatich, life became easier: part of the fuel was provided by the school. Matrona, who worked all her life on the collective farm for workdays, did not even receive a pension. However, the woman did not complain about her fate: she was sympathetic and delicate, had an honest and caring heart, hands that did not know peace. She loved her ficuses and her rickety cat, she loved her poor house, and she didn’t want anything else. She kindly accepted the teacher, did not hide the hardships of life from him, did not promise full meals.
Other people lived next to Matryona: prudent neighbors, greedy relatives, swaggering village bosses. She was indifferent to material enrichment, devoid of greed, if she helped clean potatoes like a neighbor, she would not take money, she would be happy for people. “Ah, Ignatich, and she has large potatoes! I was digging for hunting, I didn’t want to leave the site, by God it’s true!” she tells the guest.
Matryona is the soul of the people. In the tradition of Nekrasov, Solzhenitsyn describes how she managed to subdue a frightened racing horse. The village rests on such women, they are called righteous in Russia (hence the original title of the work). Therefore, it is especially insulting when Matryona is oppressed by those whom she calls “enemies”, those in power. She has to hide peat, secretly brought to heat the house. You have to steal fuel. But Solzhenitsyn makes it clear: the forgotten peasants are forced to do so. Rotten conscience of the collective farm authorities, who consider themselves people of the highest class. Not ashamed of those around him, the chairman provides himself with state peat. His wife gives an order to Matryona, who left the collective farm due to illness, to do the usual work for rural residents for free. For a trifling reference, an elderly woman walks for many kilometers.
The fate of the righteous ends tragically: she dies, squeezed between a sleigh and a tractor. It seems that this ending is predetermined. Among selfish, envious, unscrupulous people, Matryona could not bear to live. The narrator complains about human spiritual blindness, without singling out himself: “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, there is no village, no city, no all our land.”
Solzhenitsyn in his work tells about the fate of Matryona, whose name in Latin means “mother”. It seems to me that this story is also about “all our land”. All the troubles that occur in the country, whether in a single village, come from a lie, according to the writer. Faddey Mironovich, the brother of Matryona's husband, who disappeared in the war, has a “scrape” Antoshka. The whole life of an eighth-grader is built on deceit: he lies both at school and at home. The school turns a blind eye to the poor studies of the son of Thaddeus, in the struggle for the percentage of academic performance transfers him from class to class. And the school is part of the system. The writer wants to say that it is convenient for the state to have subjects who, under the trump, carry out the orders of their superiors, arrange a show, and are inattentive to an individual.
Matryona is shy and unselfish by nature. And this, the author of the story wants to say, is leaving our lives. Remains rudeness, evil, envy. A person who is delicate by nature, kind, who knows how to sincerely rejoice for others, and manage small things himself, has no place in this life. People like this woman are only assigned the role of a “white crow”, which can be robbed, and even laugh at her naivety, others remain the masters of life.
A. I. Solzhenitsyn wants to say that in memory of Matryona, each of us needs to rebuild the Matryona Yard in our hearts. Because greed, cynicism, lust for power is spiritual death. It is necessary to revive what has been lost over the years: conscience, kindness, empathy. These are the best national traits of our compatriots. They equip Russia!

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The journal Novy Mir published several works by Solzhenitsyn, among them Matrenin Dvor. The story, according to the writer, "is completely autobiographical and authentic." It talks about the Russian village, about its inhabitants, about their values, about kindness, justice, sympathy and compassion, work and help - qualities that fit in a righteous man, without whom "the village does not stand."

"Matryona Dvor" is a story about the injustice and cruelty of a person's fate, about the Soviet order of the post-Stalin era and about the life of the most ordinary people who live far from city life. The narration is conducted not on behalf of the main character, but on behalf of the narrator, Ignatich, who in the whole story seems to play the role of only an outside observer. What is described in the story dates back to 1956 - three years have passed since the death of Stalin, and then the Russian people did not yet know and did not realize how to live on.

Matrenin Dvor is divided into three parts:

1. The first tells the story of Ignatich, it begins at the Torfprodukt station. The hero immediately reveals the cards, without making any secret of it: he is a former prisoner, and now works as a teacher at a school, he came there in search of peace and tranquility. In Stalin's time, it was almost impossible for people who had been imprisoned to find a job, and after the death of the leader, many became school teachers (a scarce profession). Ignatich stops at an elderly hardworking woman named Matrena, with whom he is easy to communicate and calm at heart. Her dwelling was poor, the roof sometimes leaked, but this did not mean at all that there was no comfort in it: “Maybe, to someone from the village, who is richer, Matryona’s hut didn’t seem well-lived, but we were with her that autumn and winter good."
2. The second part tells about the youth of Matryona, when she had to go through a lot. The war took her fiancé Fadey away from her, and she had to marry his brother, who had children in his arms. Taking pity on him, she became his wife, although she did not love him at all. But three years later, Fadey suddenly returned, whom the woman still loved. The returned warrior hated her and her brother for their betrayal. But the hard life could not kill her kindness and hard work, because it was in work and caring for others that she found solace. Matrena even died doing business - she helped her lover and her sons drag a part of her house over the railway tracks, which was bequeathed to Kira (his own daughter). And this death was caused by Fadey's greed, greed and callousness: he decided to take away the inheritance while Matryona was still alive.
3. The third part talks about how the narrator finds out about the death of Matryona, describes the funeral and commemoration. People close to her cry not from grief, but rather because it is customary, and in their heads they only think about the division of the property of the deceased. Fadey is not at the wake.

main characters

Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva is an elderly woman, a peasant woman, who was released from work on a collective farm due to illness. She was always happy to help people, even strangers. In the episode when the narrator settles in her hut, the author mentions that she never intentionally looked for a lodger, that is, she did not want to earn money on this basis, she did not even profit from what she could. Her wealth was pots of ficuses and an old domestic cat that she took from the street, a goat, and also mice and cockroaches. Matryona also married her fiancé's brother out of a desire to help: "Their mother died ... they did not have enough hands."

Matryona herself also had children, six, but they all died in early childhood, so she later took her youngest daughter Fadeya Kira to be raised. Matryona got up early in the morning, worked until dark, but did not show fatigue or discontent to anyone: she was kind and responsive to everyone. She was always very afraid of becoming someone's burden, she did not complain, she was even afraid to call the doctor once again. Matryona, who had matured, Kira, wanted to donate her room, for which it was necessary to share the house - during the move, Fadey's things got stuck in a sled on the railway tracks, and Matryona fell under a train. Now there was no one to ask for help, there was no person ready to selflessly come to the rescue. But the relatives of the deceased kept in mind only the thought of gain, of sharing what was left of the poor peasant woman, already thinking about it at the funeral. Matryona stood out very much against the background of her fellow villagers; she was thus irreplaceable, invisible and the only righteous man.

Narrator, Ignatich, to some extent is the prototype of the writer. He left the link and was acquitted, then set off in search of a calm and serene life, he wanted to work as a school teacher. He found refuge at Matryona. Judging by the desire to move away from the bustle of the city, the narrator is not very sociable, he loves silence. He worries when a woman mistakenly takes his quilted jacket, and finds no place for himself from the volume of the loudspeaker. The narrator got along with the mistress of the house, this shows that he is still not completely asocial. However, he does not understand people very well: he understood the meaning that Matryona lived only after she passed away.

Topics and issues

Solzhenitsyn in the story "Matryona Dvor" tells about the life of the inhabitants of the Russian village, about the system of relationships between power and man, about the high meaning of selfless labor in the realm of selfishness and greed.

Of all this, the theme of labor is most clearly shown. Matryona is a person who does not ask for anything in return, and is ready to give herself everything for the benefit of others. They don’t appreciate it and don’t even try to understand it, but this is a person who experiences a tragedy every day: at first, the mistakes of youth and the pain of loss, then frequent illnesses, hard work, not life, but survival. But from all the problems and hardships, Matryona finds solace in work. And, in the end, it is work and overwork that lead her to death. The meaning of Matrena's life is precisely this, and also care, help, the desire to be needed. Therefore, active love for neighbor is the main theme of the story.

The problem of morality also occupies an important place in the story. Material values ​​in the village are exalted above the human soul and its labor, above humanity in general. The secondary characters are simply incapable of understanding the depth of Matryona's character: greed and the desire to possess more blind their eyes and do not allow them to see kindness and sincerity. Fadey lost his son and wife, his son-in-law is threatened with imprisonment, but his thoughts are how to save the logs that they did not have time to burn.

In addition, there is a theme of mysticism in the story: the motive of an unidentified righteous man and the problem of cursed things - which were touched by people full of self-interest. Fadey made Matryona's upper room cursed, undertaking to bring it down.

Idea

The above themes and problems in the story "Matryona Dvor" are aimed at revealing the depth of the pure worldview of the main character. An ordinary peasant woman is an example of the fact that difficulties and losses only harden a Russian person, and do not break him. With the death of Matrena, everything that she figuratively built collapses. Her house is being torn apart, the rest of the property is divided among themselves, the yard remains empty, ownerless. Therefore, her life looks pitiful, no one is aware of the loss. But won't the same thing happen to the palaces and jewels of the mighty of this world? The author demonstrates the frailty of the material and teaches us not to judge others by wealth and achievements. The true meaning is the moral image, which does not fade even after death, because it remains in the memory of those who saw its light.

Maybe, over time, the heroes will notice that they are missing a very important part of their lives: invaluable values. Why disclose global moral problems in such a wretched scenery? And what then is the meaning of the title of the story "Matryona Dvor"? The last words that Matryona was a righteous woman erase the boundaries of her court and push them to the scale of the whole world, thereby making the problem of morality universal.

Folk character in the work

Solzhenitsyn argued in the article “Repentance and Self-Restriction”: “There are such born angels, they seem to be weightless, they seem to glide over this slurry, without drowning in it at all, even touching its surface with their feet? Each of us met such people, there are not ten or a hundred of them in Russia, they are the righteous, we saw them, were surprised (“eccentrics”), used their good, in good moments answered them the same, they dispose, - and immediately sank back to our doomed depths."

Matryona is distinguished from the rest by the ability to maintain humanity and a solid core inside. To those who shamelessly used her help and kindness, it might seem that she was weak-willed and malleable, but the heroine helped, based only on inner disinterestedness and moral greatness.

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A. N. Solzhenitsyn, returning from exile, worked as a teacher at the Miltsev school. He lived in an apartment with Matrena Vasilievna Zakharova. All events described by the author were real. Solzhenitsyn's story "Matryona's Dvor" describes the difficult life of a collective farm Russian village. We offer for review an analysis of the story according to the plan, this information can be used to work in literature lessons in grade 9, as well as in preparation for the exam.

Brief analysis

Year of writing– 1959

History of creation– The writer began work on his work on the problems of the Russian village in the summer of 1959 on the Crimean coast, where he was visiting his friends in exile. Being wary of censorship, it was recommended to change the title "A village without a righteous man" and, on the advice of Tvardovsky, the writer's story was called "Matryona's Dvor".

Topic- The main theme of this work is the life and life of the Russian hinterland, the problems of the relationship of an ordinary person with power, moral problems.

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

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

Direction- Realism.

History of creation

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

Myself the meaning of the name"Matryona's Yard" is a reflection of the main idea of ​​the work, where the boundaries of her court expand to the scale of the whole country, and the idea of ​​morality turns into universal problems. From this we can conclude that the history of the creation of the "Matryona Dvor" does not include a separate village, but the history of the creation of a new outlook on life, and on the power that governs the people.

Topic

After analyzing the work in Matrenin Dvor, it is necessary to determine main topic story, to find out what the autobiographical essay teaches not only the author himself, but, by and large, the whole country.

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

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

Villagers think only about their own enrichment, for them there are no moral values. Faddey Mironovich, her husband's brother, forced Matryona to give the promised part of the house to her adopted daughter, Kira, during her lifetime. Matryona agreed, and when, out of greed, two sledges were hooked to one tractor, the cart fell under the train, and Matryona died along with her nephew and the tractor driver. Human greed is above all, that very evening, her only friend, Aunt Masha, came to her house to pick up the little thing promised to her, until Matryona's sisters stole it.

And Faddey Mironovich, who also had a coffin with his dead son in his house, still managed to bring the logs abandoned at the crossing before the funeral, and did not even come to pay tribute to the memory of the woman who died a terrible death because of his irrepressible greed. Matrena's sisters, first of all, took away her funeral money, and began to divide the remains of the house, crying over her sister's coffin not from grief and sympathy, but because it was supposed to be.

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

Composition

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

Narrator starts his narrative from the time he was looking for a job as a teacher, trying to find a remote village to live. By the will of fate, he ended up in the village where Matryona lived, and decided to stay with her.

In the second part, the narrator describes the difficult fate of Matryona, who has not seen happiness since her youth. Her life was hard, in everyday work and worries. She had to bury all her six children born. Matryona endured a lot of torment and grief, but she did not become embittered, and her soul did not harden. She is still hardworking and disinterested, benevolent and peaceful. She never condemns anyone, she treats everyone evenly and kindly, as before, she works in her farmstead. She died trying to help her relatives move her own part of the house.

In the third part, the narrator describes the events after the death of Matryona, all the same soullessness of people, relatives and relatives of the woman who, after the death of the woman, swooped like crows into the remains of her yard, trying to quickly take everything apart and plunder, condemning Matryona for her righteous life.

main characters

Genre

The publication of Matryona Dvor caused much controversy among Soviet critics. Tvardovsky wrote in his notes that Solzhenitsyn is the only writer who expresses his opinion without regard to the authorities and the opinion of critics.

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

Artwork test

Analysis Rating

Average rating: 4.7. Total ratings received: 1601.

The story “Matryonin Dvor” was written by Solzhenitsyn in 1959. The first title of the story is “There is no village 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 Novy Mir magazine, where the story was published in No. 1 for 1963. At the insistence of the editors, the beginning of the story was changed and the events were attributed not to 1956, but to 1953, that is, to the pre-Khrushchev era. This is a nod 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 Dvor" is autobiographical. After Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated, indeed he lived in the village of Miltsevo (Talnovo in the story) and rented a corner from Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova (Grigorieva in the story). Solzhenitsyn very accurately conveyed not only the details of the life of Marena's prototype, but also the features of life and even the local dialect of the village.

Literary direction and genre

Solzhenitsyn developed the Tolstoyan tradition of Russian prose in a realistic direction. The story combines the features of an artistic 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, the stages of his formation are covered. The fate of the hero reflects the fate of the entire era and the country (as Solzhenitsyn says, the land).

Issues

Moral issues are at the center of the story. Are many human lives worth the occupied area or the decision dictated by human greed not to make a second trip by a tractor? Material values ​​among the people are valued higher than the person himself. Thaddeus lost his son and the once beloved woman, his son-in-law is threatened with prison, and his daughter is inconsolable. But the hero thinks about how to save the logs that the workers at the crossing did not have time to burn.

Mystical motifs are at the center of the problematic of the story. This is the motif of an unrecognized righteous man and the problem of cursing things that are touched by people with unclean hands pursuing selfish goals. So Thaddeus undertook to bring down Matryonin's room, thereby making her cursed.

Plot and composition

The story "Matryonin Dvor" has a time frame. In one paragraph, the author talks about how trains slow down at one of the crossings and 25 years after a certain event. That is, the frame refers to the beginning of the 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 started to move”.

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

In the center of the plot is the life of Matryona. The narrator learns about her fate from herself (she tells 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, which stands 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. Matrona's hut was divided into two halves: the actual residential hut with a Russian stove and the upper room (it was built for the eldest son to separate him when he marries). It is this chamber that Thaddeus disassembles in order to build a hut for Matryona's niece and his own daughter Kira. The hut in the story is animated. The wallpaper left behind the wall is called its inner skin.

Ficuses in tubs are also endowed with living features, reminding the narrator of a silent, but lively crowd.

The development of the action in the story is a static state of harmonious coexistence of the narrator and Matryona, who "do not find the meaning of everyday existence in food." The culmination of the story is the moment of the destruction of the chamber, and the work ends with the main idea and a bitter omen.

Heroes of the story

The hero-narrator, whom Matryona calls Ignatich, from the first lines makes it clear that he came from places of detention. He is looking for a job as a teacher in the wilderness, in the Russian outback. Only the third village satisfies him. Both the first and the second turn out to be corrupted by civilization. Solzhenitsyn makes it clear to the reader that he condemns the attitude of Soviet bureaucrats towards man. The narrator despises the authorities, who do not assign a pension to Matryona, forcing her to work on the collective farm for sticks, not only not giving peat for the furnace, but also forbidding anyone to ask about it. He instantly decides not to extradite Matryona, who brewed moonshine, hides her crime, for which she faces prison.

Having experienced and seen a lot, the narrator, embodying the author's point of view, acquires the right to judge everything that he observes in the village of Talnovo - a miniature embodiment of Russia.

Matryona is the main character of the story. The author says about her: “Those people have good faces who are at odds with their conscience.” At the moment of acquaintance, 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 sacks a day) and secretly cuts hay for her goat.

There was no woman's curiosity in Matryona, she was delicate, did not annoy 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 did not live at once." Matryona's husband did not return from the war, but went missing. The hero suspected that he had a new family somewhere abroad.

Matryona had a quality that distinguished her from the rest of the villagers: 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 sacks of any weight, stopped a galloping horse, foresaw her death, being afraid of locomotives. Another omen of her death is a pot of holy water that went missing on Epiphany.

Matryona's death seems to be an accident. But why on the night of her death, the mice rush about like crazy? The narrator suggests that it was 30 years later that the threat of Matryona's brother-in-law Thaddeus, who threatened to chop down Matryona and his own brother, who married her, struck.

After death, the holiness of Matryona is revealed. The mourners notice that she, completely crushed by the tractor, has only the right hand left to pray to God. And the narrator draws attention to her face, more alive than dead.

Fellow villagers speak of Matryona with disdain, not understanding her disinterestedness. The sister-in-law considers her unscrupulous, not careful, not inclined to accumulate good, Matryona did not seek her own benefit and helped others for free. Despised by fellow villagers was even Matryonina's cordiality and simplicity.

Only after her death did the narrator realize that Matryona, "not chasing after the factory", indifferent to food and clothing, is the foundation, the core of all of Russia. On such a righteous person stands a village, a city and a country ("all our land"). For the sake of one righteous man, as in the Bible, God can spare the earth, protect 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 prince who is passing by. She, like a fairy grandmother, has helper animals. Shortly before the death of Matryona, the rickety cat leaves the house, the mice, anticipating the death of the old woman, rustle especially. But cockroaches are indifferent to the fate of the hostess. Following Matryona, her favorite ficuses, similar to the crowd, die: they are of no practical value and are taken out into the cold after Matryona's death.

In the summer of 1956, the hero of the story, Ignatich, returns to central Russia from Asian camps. In the story, he is endowed with the function of the narrator. The hero works as a teacher in a rural school and settles in the village of Talnovo in the hut of the sixty-year-old Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva. The tenant and the hostess turn out to be people who are spiritually close to each other. In Ignatich's story about Matryona's everyday life, in the assessments of the people around her, in her actions, judgments and memories of what she experienced, the fate of the heroine and her inner world are revealed to the reader. The fate of Matryona, her image becomes for the hero a symbol of fate and the image of Russia itself.

In winter, Matrena's husband's relatives take part of the house - the upper room - from the heroine. While transporting a dismantled room, Matryona Vasilievna dies at a railway crossing under the wheels of a steam locomotive, trying to help the men to take out the stuck sleigh with logs from the crossing. Matryona appears in the story as a moral ideal, as the embodiment of the lofty spiritual and moral principles of the people's life that are forced out by the course of history. She - in the eyes of the hero-narrator - is one of those righteous people on whom the world stands.

With its genre features, Solzhenitsyn's story approaches the essay and goes back to the Turgenev tradition of the Hunter's Notes. Along with this, Matrenin Dvor, as it were, continues the tradition of Leskov's stories about the Russian righteous. In the author's version, the story was called "The Village Doesn't Stand Without a Righteous Man", but it was first published under the title "Matryona Dvor".

The fate of the hero-narrator of Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin Dvor" is correlated with the fate of the heroes of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Ignatich, as it were, continues the fate of Shukhov and his camp comrades. His story tells what awaits the prisoners in life after release. Therefore, the first important problem in the story becomes the problem of choosing the hero of his place in the world.

Ignatich, who spent ten years in prison and camp, after living in exile in the "dusty hot desert", seeks to settle in a quiet corner of Russia, "where it would not be a shame to live and die." The hero wants to find a place in his native land that would preserve the original features and signs of folk life unchanged. Ignatich hopes to find spiritual and moral support, peace of mind in the traditional national way of life, which has withstood the destructive influence of the inexorable course of history. He finds it in the village of Talnovo, settling in the hut of Matryona Vasilievna.

What explains this choice of hero?

The hero of the story refuses to accept the terrible inhuman absurdity of existence, which has become the norm of life of contemporaries and has multiple manifestations in the daily way of life of people. Solzhenitsyn shows this with the ruthlessness of a publicist in the story "Matryona's Dvor". One example is the careless, nature-destroying actions of the chairman of the collective farm, who received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for the successful destruction of centuries-old forests.

The consequence of the abnormal course of history, the illogical way of life is the tragic fate of the hero. The absurdity and unnaturalness of the new way of life is especially noticeable in cities and industrial towns. Therefore, the hero aspires to the outback of Russia, wants to "settle ... forever" "somewhere away from the railway." The railway is a traditional symbol for Russian classical literature of a soulless modern civilization that brings destruction and death to man. In this sense, the railway appears in Solzhenitsyn's story.

At first, the hero's wish seems impossible. He bitterly notices both in the life of the village of Vysokoe Pole and in the village of Torfoprodukt (“Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such things in Russian!” the narrator says about the name of the village) the terrible realities of the new way of life. Therefore, the village of Talnovo, Matryona's house and she herself become the last hope for the hero, the last opportunity to fulfill his dream. Matryona's yard becomes for the hero the desired embodiment of that Russia, which was so important to him to find.

In Matryona, Ignatich sees the spiritual and moral ideal of a Russian person. What character traits, personality traits of Matryona allow us to see in her the embodiment of the high spiritual and moral principles of the people's life that have been supplanted by the course of history? What narrative techniques are used to create the image of the heroine in the story?

First of all, we see Matryona in an everyday environment, in a series of daily worries and affairs. Describing the actions of the heroine, the narrator seeks to penetrate into their hidden meaning, to understand their motives.

In the story about the first meeting between Ignatich and Matryona, we see the sincerity, simplicity, unselfishness of the heroine. “It was only later that I found out,” says the narrator, “that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilievna did not earn a single ruble from anywhere. Because she didn't get paid. Her family did little to help her. And on the collective farm she worked not for money - for sticks. But Matrena does not seek to get a profitable tenant. She fears that she will not be able to please a new person, that he will not like it in her house, which she directly tells the hero about. But Matryona is pleased when Ignatich still stays with her, because with a new person her loneliness comes to an end.

Matryona has inner tact and delicacy. Getting up long before the guest, she “quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, stoked the Russian stove, went to milk the goat,” “she didn’t invite guests to her place in the evenings, respecting my work,” says Ignatich. In Matryona there is no "woman's curiosity", she "did not annoy with any questions" to the hero. Ignatich is especially captivated by the benevolence of Matrena, her kindness is revealed in a disarming "radiant smile" that transforms the whole appearance of the heroine. “Those people always have good faces who are at odds with their conscience,” concludes the narrator.

“Deeds called to life,” says the narrator about Matryona. Work becomes for the heroine and a way to restore peace in her soul. “She had a sure way to regain her good mood - work,” the narrator notes.

Working on a collective farm, Matrena did not receive anything for her work, helping her fellow villagers, she refused money. Her work is selfless. Working for Matryona is as natural as breathing. Therefore, the heroine considers it inconvenient and impossible to take money for her work.

A new way to create the image of Matryona is the introduction of the heroine's memories into the narrative. They demonstrate new facets of her personality, in which the heroine reveals herself in full.

From the memoirs of Matrena, we learn that in her youth she, like the heroine of Nekrasov, stopped a galloping horse. Matryona is capable of a decisive, even desperate act, but behind this is not a love of risk, not recklessness, but a desire to ward off misfortune. The desire to ward off misfortune, to help people will dictate the behavior of the heroine in the last minutes of her life before her death, when she rushed to help the peasants to pull out the sleigh stuck at the railway crossing. Matryona remains true to herself to the end.

“But Matryona was by no means fearless,” the narrator notes. “She was afraid of the fire, she was afraid of the lightning, and most of all, for some reason, the train.” From one kind of train, Matryona "throws into a fever, her knees are shaking." The panic fear experienced by Matrena from one kind of train, which at first causes a smile, by the end of the story, after the death of the heroine under its wheels, acquires the meaning of a tragically true foreboding.

In the heroine's recollections of the experience, it is revealed that she has self-esteem, cannot bear the insults and resolutely protests when her husband raised his hand against her.

The outbreak of the First World War separates her from her loved one, Thaddeus, and predetermines the entire subsequent tragic course of Matryona's life. For three years, new tragedies have occurred in the life of Russia: “And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned upside down. Matrona's life was also turned upside down. Like the whole country, Matrena faces a “terrible choice”: she must choose her own fate, answer the question: how to live on? The younger brother of Thaddeus, Yefim, wooed Matryona. The heroine married him - started a new life, chose her fate. But the choice was wrong. Six months later, Thaddeus returns from captivity. In the disastrous game of passions that gripped him, Thaddeus is ready to kill Matryona and her chosen one. But Thaddeus is stopped by a moral prohibition that still exists in life - he does not dare to go against his brother.

For the heroine, there is no turning back. The choice of Matryona does not bring her happiness. A new life does not add up, her marriage is fruitless.

In 1941, the world war began again, and in the life of Matryona, the tragedy experienced in the First World War was repeated again. As in the first war Matryona lost her beloved, so in the second she loses her husband. The inexorable course of time dooms Matrenin Dvor to death: “The once noisy hut rotted and grew old, and now it’s a deserted hut - and the homeless Matryona grew old in it.”

Solzhenitsyn reinforces this motif, showing that the terrible inhuman absurdity of existence, which has become the norm of people's lives in a new historical era and from which the hero was looking for salvation in Matryona's house, did not pass the heroine. A new way of life relentlessly invades Matryona's life. The eleven post-war years of collective farm life were marked by the aggressive, inhuman stupidity and cynicism of collective farm practices. It seems that Matryona and her fellow villagers were experimented with for survival: the collective farm was not paid money for labor, they “cut off” personal gardens, did not allocate mowing for livestock, and deprived them of fuel for the winter. A celebration of the absurdity of collective farm life appears in the story as the transfer of the property of Matryona, who worked for many years on the collective farm: “a dirty white goat, a crooked cat, ficuses.” But Matryona managed to overcome all the hardships and hardships and keep the peace of her soul unchanged.

Matrona's house and its mistress appear as opposed to the surrounding world, the illogical and unnatural way of life that has established itself in it. The world of people feels this and cruelly takes revenge on Matryona.

This motif receives plot development in the story of the destruction of Matrenin's yard. Contrary to the fate that doomed her to loneliness, Matrena raised Thaddeus's daughter, Kira, for ten years, and became her second mother. Matryona decided: after her death, half of the house, the upper room, should be inherited by Kira. But Thaddeus, with whom Matryona once wanted to unite her life, decides to take the upper room during the life of her mistress.

In the actions of Thaddeus and his assistants, Solzhenitsyn sees a manifestation of the triumph of a new way of life. The new way of life formed a special attitude to the world, determined the new nature of human relationships. The terrible inhumanity and absurdity of the existence of people is revealed by the author in the substitution of concepts established in the minds of contemporaries, when “our language terribly calls our property” “good”. In the plot of the story, this "good" turns into an all-destroying evil. The pursuit of such “good”, which “losing is considered shameful and stupid before people”, turns into a different, immeasurably greater loss of true and enduring good: the world is losing a good, beautiful person - Matryona, high spiritual and moral principles are lost in life. The desperate and reckless pursuit of "good-property" brings death to the human soul, calls to life the terrible destructive properties of human nature - selfishness, cruelty, greed, aggressiveness, greed, cynicism, pettiness. All these base passions will manifest themselves in the people surrounding Matryona, determining their behavior in the history of the destruction of her home and the death of herself. The soul of Matrena, her inner world is opposed to the souls and inner world of the people around her. The soul of Matryona is beautiful because, according to Solzhenitsyn, the purpose of Matryona's life was not good-property, but good-love.

Matryona's house becomes in Solzhenitsyn's story a symbol of the harmonious traditional way of peasant life, high spiritual and moral values, which Matryona is the guardian of. Therefore, she and the house are inseparable. The heroine intuitively feels this: “it was terrible for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. ... for Matryona it was the end of her whole life, ”concludes the narrator. But Thaddeus and his assistants think otherwise. The fatal passions of the hero are no longer held back - there are no longer moral prohibitions on their way. They "knew that her house could be broken in her lifetime."

Matrenin's Yard, where the hero of the story found spiritual and moral support, becomes the last stronghold of the traditional national way of life, which could not resist the destructive influence of the inexorable course of history.

The destruction of Matrona's house becomes in the story a symbol of the violation of the natural course of historical time, fraught with catastrophic upheavals. Thus, the death of Matrenin's court becomes an accusation of a new historical era.

The final chord in creating the image of the heroine becomes in the finale of the story, after the death of Matryona, a comparison of her with the people around her. The tragic death of Matryona was supposed to shock people, make them think, awaken their souls, shake off the veil from their eyes. But that doesn't happen. The new way of life has devastated the souls of people, their hearts have hardened, there is no place in them for compassion, empathy, genuine sorrow. This is shown by Solzhenitsyn at the rites of farewell, funeral, commemoration of Matryona. The rites are losing their lofty, mournful, tragic meaning; all that remains of them is a ossified form, mechanically repeated by the participants. The tragedy of death is not able to stop their mercenary and conceited aspirations in people.

The loneliness of Matryona in life after her death takes on a special and new meaning. She is lonely because the spiritual and moral world of Matryona objectively, in addition to the will of the heroine, opposes the values ​​of the world of the people around her. The world of Matrena was alien and incomprehensible to them, it caused irritation and condemnation. So the image of Matryona allows the author to show in the story the moral trouble and spiritual emptiness of modern society.

The narrator's acquaintance with the people surrounding Matryona helps him fully understand her high destiny in the world of people. Matryona, who did not accumulate property, endured cruel trials and withstood her spirit, is “the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand.

Neither city.

Not all our land."