Matryonin yard
In the summer of 1956, “at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes to Murom and Kazan,” a passenger gets off the train. This is the narrator, whose fate resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front “was ten years late in returning,” that is, he served in a camp and was in exile, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents was “searched”). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But it didn’t work out to live in the village with the wonderful name Vysokoye Polye: “Alas, they didn’t bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The whole village was dragging food in bags from the regional city.” 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: “A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy 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 worked for someone: for a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asked 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 Matryona, who gives herself to others without reserve, and “... is... the very righteous man, without whom... the village does not stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.” 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.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - Matryonin's Dvor
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Matrenin Dvor
This edition is true and final.
No lifetime publications can cancel it.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
April 1968
At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down almost to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows and went out into the vestibule: they were repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?
No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.
Only the drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.
Yes I.
1
In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to go to the middle zone - without the heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most intimate Russia - if there was such a thing somewhere, it lived.
A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there’s no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m wasting my time.
But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the …sky oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:
- Tell me, do you need mathematicians somewhere away from the railway? I want to live there forever.
They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - everyone asks to go to the city all day, and for bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoe Pole. Just the name made my soul happy.
The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.
Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.
I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked, and typed in my order: “Peat product.”
Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!
At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barracks, there was a stern sign: “Only board the train from the station side!” A nail was scratched on the boards: “And without tickets.” And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: “No tickets.” I appreciated the exact meaning of these additions later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.
And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, thereby raising his collective farm.
The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and houses from the fifties, with carvings on the facade and glassed-in verandas. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.
A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling piercingly, dragged trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunks wandering along the street - not without that, and stabbing each other with knives.
This is where my dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. There was such a fresh wind blowing there at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.
I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. In the morning, the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.
I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:
- Drink, drink with your heart. Are you a newcomer?
- Where are you from? - I brightened.
And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.
A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy Russia.
And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.
I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concerns, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself did not have a place (she and her husband were raising her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; it was cramped and cramped.
So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.
“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. “Only her latrine is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.”
Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated as a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.
The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Beyond the front door, internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up into the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down into the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.
It had been built long ago and soundly, for a large family, but now lived a lonely woman of about sixty.
When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there at the entrance, covered with vague dark rags, so priceless in the life of a working man.
The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the remaining light and behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.
While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a black illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,
- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.
And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.
And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:
- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.
We agreed on the price and the peat that the school would bring.
I only found out later that year after year, 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 the accountant’s greasy book.
