Matryona's relatives in the story Matryona's yard. Matrenin's house characterization of the image of Grigoriev's Matryona Vasilievna

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

In 1962, in the magazine " New world”The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published, which made the name of Solzhenitsyn known throughout the country and far beyond its borders. A year later, in the same journal, Solzhenitsyn published several stories, including “Matryona Dvor”. Postings have stopped at this point. 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 "Matryona Dvor" was called "A village does not stand 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 Dvor", as the author himself noted, "is completely autobiographical and reliable." In all the notes to the story, the prototype of the heroine is reported - Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova from the village of Miltsovo, Kurlovsky district, Vladimir region. The narrator, like the author himself, teaches in the Ryazan village, living with the heroine of the story, and the narrator's patronymic - Ignatich - is consonant with A. Solzhenitsyn's patronymic - 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 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 peace of mind endowed with such qualities that we talk with her, as with Anna Karenina. Reading these words in Literary newspaper”, Solzhenitsyn immediately wrote to Tvardovsky: “Needless to say, the paragraph of your speech referring to Matryona means a lot to me. You pointed to the very essence - to a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism scoured all the time from above, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and neighboring ones.
The first title of the story "A village is not worth without the righteous" contained deep meaning: the Russian village rests on people whose way of life is based on the universal values ​​of kindness, labor, sympathy, help. Since a righteous person is called, firstly, a person who lives in accordance with religious rules; secondly, a person who does not sin in anything against the rules of morality (rules that determine mores, behavior, spiritual and spiritual qualities, necessary for a person in society). The second name - "Matryona Dvor" - somewhat changed the angle of view: moral principles began to have clear boundaries only within the Matrenin Dvor. On a larger scale of the village, they are blurred, the people around the heroine are often different from her. Having titled the story "Matryona Dvor", Solzhenitsyn focused readers' attention on wonderful world Russian woman.

gender, genre, creative method analyzed work

Solzhenitsyn once remarked that he rarely turned to the genre of short story, for "artistic pleasure": small form You can fit a lot, and it's 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 "Matryona Dvor" all facets are honed with brilliance, and meeting with the story becomes, in turn, a great pleasure for the reader. The story is usually based on a case that reveals the character of the protagonist.
Regarding the story "Matryona Dvor" in literary criticism, there were two points of view. One of them presented Solzhenitsyn's story as a phenomenon of "village prose". V. Astafiev, calling "Matryona 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 "Matryona Dvor" was associated with the original genre monumental story. 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” were recognizable in A. Solzhenitsyn’s Matrenin Dvor, V. Zakrutkin’s The Human Mother, and E. Kazakevich’s In the Light of Day. The main difference of this genre is the image of a simple person who is the keeper universal values. Moreover, the image of a simple person is given in sublime colors, and the story itself is focused on high genre. So, in the story "The Fate of a Man" features of the epic are visible. And in the "Matryona Dvor" the emphasis is on the lives of the saints. Before us is the life of Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva, the righteous and great martyr of the era of "solid collectivization" and the tragic experiment on the whole country. Matryona was portrayed by the author as a saint ("Only she had fewer sins than a rickety cat").

The subject of the work

The theme of the story is a description of the life of the patriarchal Russian village, which reflects how flourishing egoism and rapacity disfigure Russia and "destroy communications and meaning." The writer raises short story serious problems of the Russian village in the early 50s. (her life, customs and mores, the relationship between power and a working person). The author repeatedly emphasizes that the state needs only working hands, and not the person himself: “She was lonely all around, but 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 with the unscrupulous attitude of others to business.

An analysis of the work shows that the problems raised in it are subordinated to one goal: to reveal the beauty of the Christian Orthodox worldview of the heroine. On the example of the fate of a village woman, to show that life's losses and suffering only more clearly show the measure of the human in each of the people. But Matryona dies - and this world collapses: her house is pulled apart by a log, her modest belongings are greedily divided. And there is no one to protect Matryona's yard, no one even thinks that with the departure of Matryona, something very valuable and important, not amenable to division and primitive everyday assessment, passes away. “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand. No city. Not all our land." Last phrases expand the boundaries of the Matrona Court (as the personal world of the heroine) to the scale of humanity.

The main characters of the work

The main character of the story, as indicated in the title, is Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva. Matrena is a lonely destitute peasant woman with a generous and disinterested soul. She lost her husband in the war, buried six of her own and raised other people's children. Matryona gave her pupil the most precious thing in her life - the house: "... she did not feel sorry for the upper room, which stood idle, as well as neither her labor nor her goodness ...".
The heroine has endured many hardships in life, but has not lost the ability to empathize with others, joy and sorrow. She is disinterested: she sincerely rejoices in someone else's good harvest, although she never has it on the sand herself. All the wealth of Matrena is a dirty white goat, a lame cat and large flowers in tubs.
Matrena - concentration best features national character: shy, understands the "education" of the narrator, respects him for it. The author appreciates in Matryona her delicacy, the absence of annoying curiosity about the life of another person, hard work. For a quarter of a century she worked on a collective farm, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get it for her husband, that is, for the breadwinner. As a result, she never received a pension. Life was extremely difficult. She got grass for a goat, peat for warmth, collected old stumps turned out by a tractor, soaked lingonberries for the winter, grew potatoes, helping those who were nearby to survive.
Analysis of the work says that the image of Matryona and individual details in the story are symbolic. Solzhenitsyn's Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of a Russian woman. As noted in critical literature, the appearance of the heroine is like an icon, and life is like the lives of saints. Her house, as it were, symbolizes the ark of the biblical Noah, in which he is saved from global flood. The death of Matryona symbolizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world in which she lived.
The heroine lives according to the laws of Christianity, although her actions are not always clear to others. Therefore, the attitude towards it is different. Matryona is surrounded by sisters, sister-in-law, stepdaughter Kira, the only friend in the village, Thaddeus. However, no one appreciated it. She lived in poverty, wretchedly, lonely - a "lost old woman", exhausted by work and illness. Relatives almost did not appear in her house, everyone condemned Matryona in chorus that she was funny and stupid, she worked for others for free all her life. Everyone mercilessly took advantage of Matryona's kindness and innocence - and unanimously judged her for it. Among the people around her, the author treats her heroine with great sympathy; both her son Thaddeus and her pupil Kira love her.
The image of Matryona is contrasted in the story with the image of the cruel and greedy Thaddeus, who seeks to get Matryona's house during her lifetime.
Matrena's yard is one of key images story. The description of the courtyard, the house is detailed, with a lot of details, devoid of bright colors. Matryona lives "in the wilderness." It is important for the author to emphasize the inseparability of the house and the person: if the house is destroyed, its mistress will also die. This unity is already stated in the very title of the story. The hut for Matryona is filled with a special spirit and light, the life of a woman is connected with the "life" of the house. Therefore, for a long time she did not agree to break the hut.

Plot and composition

The story consists of three parts. In the first part, we are talking about how fate threw the hero-narrator to the station with a strange name for Russian places - Peat product. A former prisoner, now a school teacher, longing to find peace in some remote and quiet corner of Russia, finds shelter and warmth in the house of an elderly and familiar life Matrena. “Maybe, to someone from the village, who is richer, Matryona’s hut didn’t seem well-lived, but we were quite good with her that autumn and winter: it didn’t leak from the rains and the cold winds blew the furnace heat out of it not immediately, only in the morning , especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side. In addition to Matryona and me, they also lived in the hut - a cat, mice and cockroaches. They immediately find mutual language. Next to Matryona, the hero calms down with his soul.
In the second part of the story, Matrena recalls her youth, the terrible ordeal that befell her. Her fiancé Thaddeus went missing in World War I. The younger brother of her missing husband, Yefim, who was left alone after death with the younger children in his arms, asked her to woo her. She took pity on Matryona Efim, married an unloved one. And here, after three years of absence, Thaddeus himself unexpectedly returned, whom Matryona continued to love. The hard life did not harden Matrena's heart. In worries about daily bread, she went her way to the end. And even death overtook a woman in labor worries. Matryona dies helping Thaddeus and his sons to drag across railway on a sleigh, part of his own hut, bequeathed to Kira. Thaddeus did not want to wait for the death of Matryona and decided to take the inheritance for the young during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death.
In the third part, the tenant learns about the death of the mistress of the house. The description of the funeral and commemoration showed the true attitude of people close to her towards Matryona. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry more out of duty than 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 of the analyzed story

The artistic world in the story is built linearly - in accordance with the life story of the heroine. In the first part of the work, the whole story about Matryona is given through the perception of the author, a person who has endured a lot in his lifetime, who dreamed of "getting lost and getting lost in the very interior of Russia." The narrator evaluates her life from the outside, compares it with the environment, becomes an authoritative witness of righteousness. In the second part, the heroine talks about herself. The combination of lyrical and epic pages, the chaining of episodes according to the principle of emotional contrast allows the author to change the rhythm of the narration, its tone. In this 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 is opened by the beginning, which tells about the tragedy at the railway siding. We learn the details of this tragedy at the end of the story.
Solzhenitsyn in his work does not give a detailed, specific description of the heroine. Only one portrait detail is constantly emphasized by the author - Matryona's "radiant", "kind", "apologising" smile. Nevertheless, by the end of the story, the reader imagines the appearance of the heroine. Already in the very tonality of the phrase, the selection of "colors" is felt author's attitude to Matryona: “From red frosty sun the frozen window of the passage, now shortened, filled with a little pink, and Matrena's face was warmed by this reflection. And then - a direct author's description: "Those people always have good faces, who are at odds with their conscience." Even after the terrible death of the heroine, her "face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead."
Embodied in Matryona folk character, which is primarily manifested in her speech. Expressiveness, a bright individuality gives her language an abundance of colloquial, dialectal vocabulary (hurry up, kuzhotkamu, summer, lightning). The manner of her speech is also deeply folk, the way she pronounces her words: “They began with some kind of low warm murmur, like grandmothers in fairy tales.” “Matryonin 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 “inhabitants” and with sounds - from the rustling of mice and cockroaches to the state of ficuses and a crooked cat. Every detail here characterizes not only the peasant life, Matryonin's yard, but also the storyteller. The voice of the narrator reveals in him a psychologist, a moralist, even a poet - in the way he observes Matryona, her neighbors and relatives, 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, translating the speech into blank verse:
“The Veems lived next to her / and did not understand / that she is the same righteous man, / without whom, according to the proverb, / the village does not stand. /Nor the city./Nor all our land.
The writer was looking for a new word. An example of this is his convincing articles on language in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, fantastic commitment to Dahl (researchers note that about 40% of the vocabulary in the story Solzhenitsyn borrowed from Dahl's dictionary), ingenuity in vocabulary. In the story "Matryona's Dvor" Solzhenitsyn came to the language of preaching.

The meaning of the work

“There are such born angels,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in the article “Repentance and Self-Restriction”, as if characterizing Matryona, “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, we were surprised (“eccentrics”), we used their good, in good minutes answered them the same, they dispose, - and immediately plunged again into our doomed depth.
What is the essence of Matrona's righteousness? In life, not by lies, we will now say in the words of the writer himself, uttered much later. Creating this character, Solzhenitsyn places him in the most ordinary circumstances of rural collective farm life in the 1950s. The righteousness of Matrena lies in her ability to preserve her humanness even in such inaccessible conditions for this. As N.S. Leskov wrote, righteousness is the ability to live “without lying, without deceit, without condemning one’s neighbor and without condemning a biased enemy.”
The story was called "brilliant", "a truly brilliant work." In reviews of him, it was noted that even among Solzhenitsyn's stories he stands out for his strict artistry, the integrity of the poetic embodiment, and the consistency of artistic taste.
The story of A.I. Solzhenitsyn "Matryona Dvor" - for all time. It is especially relevant today, when questions moral values And life priorities are acute in modern Russian society.

Point of view

Anna Akhmatova
When his big thing came out (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”), I said: all 200 million should read this. And when I read Matrenin Dvor, I cried, and I rarely cry.
V. Surganov
After all, it’s not so much the appearance of Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona that evokes an internal rebuff in us, but the author’s frank admiration for beggarly disinterestedness and no less frank desire to exalt and oppose it to the rapacity of the owner, nesting in the people around her, close to her.
(From the book The Word Makes Its Way.
Collection of articles and documents about A.I. Solzhenitsyn.
1962-1974. - M.: Russian way, 1978.)
This is interesting
On August 20, 1956, Solzhenitsyn left for his place of work. There were many such names as "Peat product" in the Vladimir region. Peat product (the local youth called it "Tyr-pyr") - was a railway station 180 kilometers and a four-hour drive from Moscow along the Kazan road. The school was located in the nearby village of Mezinovsky, and Solzhenitsyn had a chance to live two kilometers from the school - in the Meshchera village of Miltsevo.
Only three years will pass, and Solzhenitsyn will write a story that will immortalize these places: a station with a clumsy name, a village with a tiny bazaar, a landlady's house Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova and Matryona herself, the righteous and the sufferer. A photograph of the corner of the hut, where the guest will put a cot and, having pushed aside the master's ficuses, will arrange a table with a lamp, will go around the whole world.
The teaching staff of Mezinovka consisted of about fifty members that year and significantly influenced the life of the village. There were four schools here: primary, seven-year, secondary and evening for working youth. Solzhenitsyn received a referral to high school She was in an old one-story building. The academic year began with the August teacher's conference, so that, having arrived in Torfoprodukt, the teacher of mathematics and electrical engineering of grades 8-10 managed to go to the Kurlovsky district for a traditional meeting. “Isaich,” as his colleagues dubbed him, could, if desired, refer to a serious illness, but no, he did not talk about it with anyone. We only saw how he was looking for a birch chaga mushroom and some herbs in the forest, and briefly answered questions: “I make medicinal drinks.” He was considered shy: after all, a person suffered ... But that was not the point at all: “I came with my goal, with my past. What could they know, what could u tell them? I sat with Matryona and wrote a novel every free minute. Why am I talking to myself? I didn't have that style. I was a conspirator to the end." Then everyone will get used to the fact that this thin, pale, tall man in a suit and tie, who, like all teachers, wore a hat, coat or raincoat, keeps his distance and does not get close to anyone. He will remain silent when a document on rehabilitation comes in six months - just the school head teacher B.S. Protserov will receive a notification from the village council and send a teacher for help. No talking when the wife starts arriving. “What is it to whom? I live with Matryona and I live. Many were alarmed (isn't it a spy?) that he goes everywhere with a Zorkiy camera and shoots something completely different from what amateurs usually shoot: instead of relatives and friends - houses, wrecked farms, boring landscapes.
Coming to school at the beginning school year, he proposed his own methodology - giving all classes a control, according to the results he divided the students into strong and mediocre, and then worked individually.
In the lessons, everyone received a separate task, so there was neither the possibility nor the desire to write off. Not only the solution of the problem was valued, but also the method of solution. The introductory part of the lesson was shortened as much as possible: the teacher spared time for "trifles". He knew exactly who and when to call to the board, who to ask more often, who to trust independent work. The teacher never sat at the teacher's table. He did not enter the class, but burst into it. He ignited everyone with his energy, knew how to build a lesson in such a way that there was no time to be bored or doze off. He respected his students. Never shouted, never even raised his voice.
And only outside the class Solzhenitsyn was silent and withdrawn. He went home after school, ate the “cardboard” soup prepared by Matryona and sat down to work. The neighbors remembered for a long time how inconspicuously the guest lodged, did not arrange parties, did not participate in fun, but read and wrote everything. “She loved Matryona Isaich,” used to say Shura Romanova, the adopted daughter of Matryona (in the story she is Kira). - Sometimes, she will come to me in Cherusti, I persuade her to stay longer. "No," he says. “I have Isaich - he needs to cook, heat the stove.” And back home."
The lodger also became attached to the lost old woman, cherishing her disinterestedness, conscientiousness, cordial simplicity, a smile that he tried in vain to catch in the camera lens. “So Matryona got used to me, and I to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening classes, did not annoy me with any questions. There was absolutely no woman's curiosity in her, and the lodger did not stir her soul either, but it turned out that they opened up to each other.
She learned about the prison, and about the serious illness of the guest, and about his loneliness. And there was no bitterer loss for him in those days than ridiculous death Matryona on February 21, 1957, under the wheels of a freight train at the crossing of the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the branch that goes to Murom from Kazan, exactly six months after the day he settled in her hut.
(From the book of Lyudmila Saraskina "Alexander Solzhenitsyn")
Matrenin yard is poor, as before
Solzhenitsyn's acquaintance with "condo", "interior" Russia, in which he so wanted to be after the Ekibastuz exile, a few years later was embodied in the received world fame story "Matryona yard". This year marks 40 years since its inception. As it turned out, in Mezinovsky itself, this work by Solzhenitsyn became a second-hand rarity. This book is not even available at Matrenin Dvor itself, where Lyuba, the niece of the heroine of Solzhenitsyn's story, now lives. “I had pages from a magazine, the neighbors once asked when they began to study it at school, and they never returned it,” complains Lyuba, who today brings up her grandson in the “historical” walls on disability benefits. Matryona's hut she inherited from her mother - the youngest sister of Matryona. The hut was moved to Mezinovsky from the neighboring village of Miltsevo (in Solzhenitsyn's story - Talnovo), where Matryona Zakharova (Solzhenitsyn - Matryona Grigorieva) and lodged future writer. In the village of Miltsevo, for the visit of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1994, a similar, but much more solid house was hastily erected. Shortly after the memorable arrival of Solzhenitsyn, the countrymen uprooted window frames and floorboards from this unguarded building of Matrenina, standing on the outskirts of the village.
The "new" Mezin school, built in 1957, now has 240 students. In the unpreserved building of the old one, in which Solzhenitsyn taught lessons, about a thousand studied. For half a century, not only the Miltsevskaya river became shallow and the peat reserves in the surrounding swamps became scarce, but also the neighboring villages were empty. And at the same time, Solzhenitsyn's Thaddeus did not disappear, calling the good of the people "ours" and considering that losing it is "shameful and stupid."
The crumbling house of Matryona, rearranged to a new place without a foundation, has grown into the ground for two crowns, buckets are put under a thin roof in the rain. Like Matryona, cockroaches are in full swing here, but there are no mice: there are four cats in the house, two of our own and two that have nailed it. A former foundry worker at a local factory, Lyuba, like Matryona, who once straightened out her pension for months, goes to the authorities to extend her disability allowance. “No one but Solzhenitsyn helps,” she complains. “Somehow one came in a jeep, called himself Alexei, examined the house and gave money.” Behind the house, like Matryona, there is a garden of 15 acres, on which Lyuba plants potatoes. As before, mint potatoes, mushrooms and cabbage are the main products for her life. In addition to cats, she doesn’t even have a goat in her courtyard, which Matryona had.
So lived and live many Mezinovsky righteous. Local historians write books about the stay of the great writer in Mezinovsky, local poets compose poems, new pioneers write essays “On the difficult fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate", as they once wrote essays about Brezhnev's "Virgin Land" and "Small Land". They are thinking of resurrecting the museum hut of Matrena on the outskirts of the deserted village of Miltsevo. And the old Matrenin yard lives the same life as it did half a century ago.
Leonid Novikov, Vladimir region.

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