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- Matrenin Dvor
Year: 1959 Genre: story
1959 Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes the story “Matrenin’s Dvor”, which will be published only in 1963. The essence of the plot of the text of the work is that Matryona, the main character, lives like everyone else at that time. She is one. He lets the tenant-storyteller into his hut. She never lived for herself. Her whole life is about helping someone. The finale of the work tells about the absurd death of Matryona.
The main idea of A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s wonderful work “Matrenin’s Dvor” is that the author focuses the reader’s attention on the way of life of the village, but this way of life contains the spiritual poverty and moral ugliness of people. Matryona's life truth is righteousness. Solzhenitsyn asks the question: “What will weigh on the scales of life?” It is probably for this reason that the story was originally titled “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.”
Read the summary of Matrenin Dvor Solzhenitsyn chapter by chapter
Chapter 1
The author-storyteller returns from “places not so remote” to Russia in 1956. No one is waiting for him, and there is no need for him to rush. He has a great desire to be a teacher somewhere in the taiga outback. He was offered to go to Vysokoye Polye, but he didn’t like it there, and he voluntarily asked to go to the place “Torfprodukt”.
In fact, this is the village of Talnovo. In this locality, the author met a kind woman at the market who helped him find shelter. So he became Matryona's lodger. In Matryona's hut there lived mice, cockroaches and a lanky cat. There were also ficus trees on the stools, and they were also members of Matryona’s family.
The rhythm of Matryona’s life was constant: she got up at 5 in the morning because she didn’t rely on the clock (they were already about 27 years old), fed the goat and prepared breakfast for the tenant.
Matryona was told that a decree had been issued according to which it was possible to receive a pension. She began to seek a pension, but the office was far away, and there, either the stamp was in the wrong place, or the certificate was out of date. In general, everything did not work out. In general, people lived in poverty in Talnovo. And this despite the fact that the village was surrounded by peat bogs. But the lands belonged to the trust, and in order not to freeze in winter, people were forced to steal peat and hide it in secluded places.
Matryona was often asked by fellow villagers for help on their plot. She did not refuse anyone and provided assistance with pleasure. She liked the growth of living plants.
Once every 6 months, Matryona’s turn came to feed the shepherds, and this event drove Matryona into great expense. She herself ate sparingly.
Closer to winter, Matryona received a pension. The neighbors began to envy her. Matryona made herself new felt boots, a coat from an old overcoat and hid 200 rubles for the funeral.
Epiphany has arrived. At this time, her younger sisters came to Matryona. The author was surprised that they had not come to her before. Matryona, having received her pension, became more joyful and, one might say, “flourished in her soul.” The only sad thing was that in the church someone took her bucket of holy water, and she was left without a bucket and without water.
Chapter 2
All of Matryona's neighbors were interested in her guest. Because of her old age, she recounted their questions to him. The narrator told Matryona that he was in prison. Matryona was also not particularly willing to talk about her life. About the fact that she got married and gave birth to 6 children, but they all died in infancy. My husband did not return from the war.
One day Thaddeus came to Matryona. He pleaded for his son in front of the narrator. In the evening, the author learns that Thaddeus is the brother of Matryonushka’s deceased husband.
That same evening Matryona opened up, told how she loved Thaddeus, how she married his brother, how Thaddeus returned from captivity and she apologized to him. How Thaddeus later married another girl. This girl gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, but Matryona’s children did not live well in this world.
Then, according to Matryona, the war began, the husband went to fight and never returned. Then Matryona took her niece Kira and raised her for 10 years until the girl grew up. Since Matryona was in poor health, she thought about death early, accordingly she wrote a will and in it she promised a room-annex to Kira.
Kira comes to Matryona and talks about how in order to get ownership of the land, you need to build something on it. So Thaddeus began to persuade Matryona to move the annex to Kira in the village. Matryona doubted for a long time, but still decided. Then Thaddeus and his sons began to separate the upper room from the hut.
The weather was windy and frosty, so the upper room lay disassembled near Matryona's hut for quite a long time. Matryona was grieving, and on top of that, the cat was missing.
One fine day, the author came home and saw Thaddeus loading a room on a sleigh to transport it to a new place. Matryona decided to escort the upper room. Late at night, the author heard voices and learned the terrible news that at the crossing the locomotive collided with the second sleigh and the son of Thaddeus and Matryona were killed.
Chapter 3
It's dawn. They brought Matryona's body. Preparations for the funeral are underway. Her sisters grieve “from the people.” Only Kira is sincerely sad, and Thaddeus’s wife. The old man was not at the wake - he was trying to deliver a sleigh with boards and logs home.
Matryona was buried, her hut was boarded up, and the narrator was forced to move to another house. He always remembered Matryonushka with a kind word and affection. The new owner always condemned Matryona. The story ends with the words: “We all lived next to her, and did not understand that she was the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, not a village would stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.”
Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin's Dvor"
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Read summary Matrenin Dvor. Brief retelling. For a reader's diary, take 5-6 sentences
Summary of “Matryonin Dvor”
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 Vasilievna 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 in the 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. Matryona has enormous 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.
“Matryonin’s Dvor”, a summary of the chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s story
1
In the summer of 1956, the narrator (Ignatich) returns to Russia. His absence from the beginning of the war lasted for ten years. The man has nowhere to rush, and no one is waiting for him. The narrator is on his way to the Russian outback with forests and fields, where you can find solitude and tranquility. After a long search, he gets a job as a teacher in the village of Talnovo, which is located next to the village with the strange name Torfoprodukt.
At the local bazaar, the author meets a woman who finds him housing. Soon the narrator settles with a lonely woman of respectable age, whom everyone calls only by her first name - Matryona. In addition to the owner herself, the dilapidated house is inhabited by mice, cockroaches and a lame cat.
Every day Matryona woke up at five in the morning and went to feed the goat. Now she had to prepare breakfast for the tenant. Usually it was potatoes from the garden, soup from the same potatoes (cardboard) or barley porridge.
One day Matryona learned from her neighbors that a new pension law had been passed. He gave the woman a chance to receive a pension, which she was not paid. Matryona wanted to resolve this issue at all costs. But in reality, everything was quite complicated: the offices that needed to be visited were located in different directions from Talnovo. The woman had to walk several kilometers every day. Often such trips turned out to be in vain: either the accountant was not there, or the seal was taken away.
In Torfoprodukt and the surrounding villages they lived poorly. Since the soil in these places was sandy, harvests were scarce. And the peat bogs around belonged to the trust. Residents had to secretly stock up on fuel for the winter, hiding from the guards.
Fellow villagers often asked Matryona to help in the garden. She didn’t refuse anyone and didn’t even take money. She dropped what she was doing and went to help. Even on a foreign land, the woman worked with desire and was sincerely happy about the good result.
About once every month and a half it was Matryona’s turn to feed the goat shepherds. Such a lunch was not cheap for her, since she had to buy butter, sugar, canned food and other products at the general store. Matryona did not allow herself this, even on holidays, but ate only what grew in the garden.
The hostess loved to tell Ignatich a story about the horse Volchok, who once carried a sleigh into the lake. All the men got scared and jumped to the sides, and Matryona grabbed the horse by the bridle and stopped it. But she also had her fears. Matryona was afraid of fire and trains.
Finally, in the winter, the woman began to receive a pension, and her neighbors began to envy her. Matryona was able to order felt boots and a coat from an old overcoat and put aside two hundred rubles for the funeral. The woman seemed to come to life: her work was easier, and illnesses bothered her less often. Only one incident darkened Matryona’s mood - at Epiphany, someone took her pot of holy water from the church. The missing item was never found.
2
Neighbors often asked the woman about Ignatich. Matryona passed on questions from her fellow villagers to the lodger, but did not ask anything herself. The author only told the owner that he was in prison. He himself never delved into Matryona’s soul or asked about the past.
One day Ignatich found the black-haired old man Thaddeus in the house, who had come to ask for a teacher for his son Anton. The teenager was famous throughout the school for his bad behavior and falling behind in subjects. In the eighth grade, he did not yet know fractions and did not know what triangles were.
After Thaddeus left, Matryona was silent for a long time, and then suddenly began to open up with the tenant. It turned out that Thaddeus is her husband’s brother. In their youth, Matryona and this black-haired old man were in love with each other and were planning to start a family. Their plans were interrupted by the First World War. Thaddeus went to the front and disappeared there. Three years later, his mother died, and the hut was left without a mistress. Soon, Thaddeus’s younger brother Efim wooed Matryona. In the summer they had a wedding, and in the winter Thaddeus, who had long been considered dead, unexpectedly returned from Hungarian captivity. Having learned about what had happened, Thaddeus said right at the door: “If it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both down!”
A little later, he married a girl from another village, whose name was also Matryona. He told his fellow villagers that he chose her only because of his favorite name.
Thaddeus’s wife often came to the hostess and cried that her husband was hurting her, even beating her. But she and Matryona’s ex-fiancé had six children. But the children of Matryona and Efim died in infancy; no one survived. The woman was sure that these troubles were due to the damage that had been brought upon her.
Thaddeus was no longer taken to the Patriotic War, and Efim did not return from the front. A lonely woman took in Thaddeus's daughter Kira. Having matured, the girl quickly married a driver and left for another village.
Since Matryona was often ill, she made a will early. It followed from it that the owner was giving the extension to the hut to Kira. The fact is that the pupil needed to legalize her plot of land in a new place. To do this, it was enough to put any building on your “claptic”.
The extension bequeathed by Matryona was very useful, so Thaddeus decided to resolve this issue during the woman’s lifetime. He began to often come to Matryona and persuade her to give up the room now. Matryona didn’t feel sorry for the extension itself, but she really didn’t want to destroy the roof of the hut.
Thaddeus finally achieved his goal. One cold winter day he came to Matryona with the children to separate the upper room. For two weeks, the dismantled extension lay near the hut, as a snowstorm swept away all the roads. The sisters came to Matryona and scolded the woman for her stupid kindness. At the same time, Matryona’s lame cat left the house somewhere.
One day Ignatich saw Thaddeus in the yard with people who were loading a dismantled room onto a tractor sled. In the dark they took her to the village to see Kira. Matryona also left with them, but did not return for a long time.
After midnight, the narrator heard conversations on the street. Two men in overcoats entered the house and began to look for signs of drinking. Having found nothing, they left, and the author felt that a misfortune had happened.
His fears were soon confirmed by Matryona’s friend Masha. She said in tears that the sleigh got stuck on the rails and fell apart, and at that time a steam locomotive was walking and ran over them. The driver, the son of Thaddeus and Matryona, were killed.
3
In the morning they brought the coffin and everything that was left of Matryona to the house. The sisters came to say goodbye to her, cried “on show” and blamed Thaddeus for the woman’s death. Only Kira and the second Matryona grieved sincerely. Thaddeus himself did not come to the wake, but then appeared in the house and argued with Matryona’s sisters over property. As a result, this house and Matryona’s meager property were somehow divided between relatives so that the village council would not take everything. The woman lived an honest and righteous life, but was unable to save practically anything in her old age.
After Matryona's funeral, the author moved in with her sister-in-law. She often remembered the deceased, but only with condemnation. Matryona, with her spiritual purity and kindness, did not fit into the worldview of her fellow villagers.
- “Matryonin’s Dvor”, analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s story
- “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s story
- “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, a summary of Solzhenitsyn’s story
- Brief biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Based on the work: “Matryonin’s Dvor”
According to the writer: Solzhenitsyn Alexander Isaevich
