Summary Matryonin yard

The story takes place in 1956. The author-narrator Ignatich was returning from Kazakhstan to Russia, not yet knowing where to stay and what he would do. Although his return from the front was delayed "for ten years", he was glad to be in the middle lane, where there was no sweltering heat and one could get lost in deciduous forests. Ignatich got off at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow, along the branch that leads from Murom to Kazan. A year before, he would not have been hired as an electrician, but he dreamed of "teaching".

When he turned to the Vladimir ObLONO with a request to send him to some remote place as a mathematics teacher, the officials were very surprised, but, having “felt” every letter in his documents, they gave him a direction to the High Field. The hero refused the offer, since there was nothing to eat in this place with a beautiful name. Then he was offered to go to the village of Torfoprodukt - a place unsightly, dull, built up with barracks. But there was not much to choose from, and he agreed. After spending the night at the station, he learned that nearby there was a more comfortable and quiet village called Talnovo, followed by Chaslitsy, Spudni, Ovintsy, and so on. One kind woman from the market promised to take him there and help him find a place to live.

Although he was a profitable tenant, after all, teachers were given not only a rent, but also a peat truck for the winter, and it was not easy to find housing. For a long time he was looking for where to stay in Talnovo and, finally, he found an unsightly shelter on the outskirts in the hut of an old woman named Matryona. The house was large, solid, built for a large family, but dilapidated and unkempt, and the hostess herself was ill. She kept lying on the stove and complained of a "black disease." In the hut, besides Matryona Vasilievna, there was also a cat, mice, and cockroaches. Food, the hostess cooked monotonous. Every day there was potato soup or barley porridge.

After talking, Ignatich learned that Matryona was very offended by the new pension reforms. She worked for twenty-five years on the collective farm for free, doing unbearably hard work, and did not deserve a pension. And the husband's pension could not be obtained, that is, the allowance for the loss of the breadwinner, since there were not enough certificates. My husband had been gone for fifteen years, since the beginning of the war, so it was not easy to get documents about his past experience. Still, by the winter, Matryona's life somehow improved: they began to pay eighty rubles for a pension, plus the school paid one hundred rubles for a guest. She sewed this money into the lining of her coat and saved it for the funeral. Neighbors began to envy her profits and even three sisters showed up.

The fate of Matryona was not easy. The husband went missing in the war. He was a good man, he never beat her, like other village husbands beat their wives, he treated her well and loved her. But did Matryona love him? She told the guest that in her youth she was supposed to marry her husband's brother - Thaddeus, but he went to war and disappeared. She waited for him for three years. There was no news. Then they married her off to her brother Thaddeus, Efim, and he took it and returned a few months later and almost killed his brother and his bride. The only thing that stopped him was that Yefim was his own brother. He loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride with the same name. And so they had a “second Matryona.

She bore Thaddeus six children. But Matrena Vasilievna had no children. She also gave birth to six children to her husband, but none survived. They said that "damage" on her. Thaddeus often beat his wife, she came to complain to Matryona. Years passed, Yefim went to the front and went missing. Matryona asked the “second Matryona” for her youngest daughter Kira to raise and raised her for ten years as her own, married her to a machinist in Cherust. As a legacy to the girl, she planned to leave a separate log house for the upper room. Now she lived alone, suffering from ailments and expecting a quick death. Watching Matrena, Ignatic noted that her day was filled with many things. Whenever she was called to collective farm work, she did not refuse. She didn't get anything for it, but she helped everyone. Neighbors also often asked her to help, either to dig up potatoes, or to plow a garden. She abandoned all her affairs and went to help the next petitioners.

Once Ignatich found Faddey Mironovich in the hut, a tall black old man with a beard. He came to ask for his negligent son, an eighth grade student. Soon he frequented Matryona. It turned out that Kire and her husband were in Cherusti land plot issued, and he demanded from Matryona the promised log house, that is, part of her hut. It was not easy for her to decide to break the roof under which she had lived for many years. The sisters scolded her, did not allow her to break the hut, worrying about the inheritance. But one day in February, Thaddeus came with his sons and "five axes clattered." In two weeks, the hut was dismantled, then loaded onto a sled and they began to argue about how best to carry it, either with one tractor at once or one by one. Wanting to save money, we decided to take it right away. Matryona personally helped to load the logs, and then went to see the tractor off until late and did not return.

At one o'clock in the morning, people in civilian clothes showed up and asked the teacher if there had been any booze. Then he realized that something had happened to the carriers of the hut. Everything became clear from the words of Masha, Matrena's friend. As it turned out, the tractor, moving through railway, got stuck at the crossing, because the cable broke. Matryona, with a tractor driver and one of Thaddeus's sons, went to help for some reason. There they were hit by a train and all three died. The sleigh was shattered into pieces, the tractor was mutilated, and the locomotives went off the rails. Such an absurd and tragic death overtook Matryona, a woman whose kindness kept the whole village. Relatives, burying Matryona, wept not from grief, but rather out of necessity. Everyone thought only about the division of her property, and Thaddeus did not even come to the wake.

ALEXANDER ISAEVICH SOLZHENITSYN

MATRYONIN DVOR

This edition is the true and final one.

No lifetime publications 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 point of feeling. Passengers clung to the windows, went out into the vestibule: they are 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 machinists knew and remembered why this was all.

Yes I.

1

In the summer of 1956, from the dusty hot desert, I returned at random - just to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling me at any point in it, because I was ten years late with the return. I just wanted to middle lane- without heat, with a leafy rumble of the forest. I wanted to cram in and get lost in the very interior of Russia - if there was such a place somewhere, I lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. Even an electrician for a decent construction would not take me. And I was drawn to teaching. They told me knowledgeable people that there is nothing to spend on a ticket, I’ll pass for nothing.

But something was already starting to falter. 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 glazed partition, like in a pharmacy. Nevertheless, I approached the window timidly, bowed and asked:

“Tell me, do you need mathematicians somewhere far away from the railroad?” I want to live there forever.

They felt every letter in my documents, walked from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - all day they ask to go to the city, but bigger. And suddenly they gave me a place - High Field. From one name the soul cheered.

The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, completely 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 not need to have breakfast and dinner every day, if only to stay here and at night listen to the branches rustle on the roof - when the radio is nowhere to be heard and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, no bread was baked there. They didn't sell anything edible. The whole village dragged food in bags from the regional city.

I returned to the personnel department and prayed in front of the window. At first they didn't want to talk to me. Then they all walked from room to room, called, creaked and printed in my order: "Peat product."

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wood barrack, hung a stern inscription: “Take the train only from the side of the station!” A nail on the boards was scratched: "And without tickets." And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: "No tickets." The exact meaning of these additions I appreciated later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and stood up to the revolution. Then they were cut down - peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, brought down quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, on which he elevated his collective farm.

Between the peat lowlands, a village was scattered randomly - monotonous poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see a partition that reached the ceiling, so I could not rent a room with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and the engines, also thickly smoking, piercingly whistling, dragged along it trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening a radiogram would be torn over the doors of the club, and drunks would wander along the street - not without that, and stab each other with knives.

This is where the 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. Such a fresh wind blew there at night and only the vault of stars swung open overhead.

I could not sleep on the station bench, and a little before light I again wandered around the village. Now I saw a tiny bazaar. Porani was the only woman standing there, selling milk. I took a bottle and started drinking immediately.

I was struck by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the very ones for which melancholy from Asia pulled me:

“Drink, drink with a thirsty soul. Are you a visitor?

- Where are you from? I brightened up.

And I learned that not everything is around the peat extraction, that there is a hillock behind the railway bed, and behind the hillock there 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. So whole region villages go: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo - everything is quieter, from the railway at a distance, to the lakes.

A wind of calm drew me from these names. They promised me horse-drawn 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 payment, the school promised me another peat truck for the winter. Worries, no longer touching, passed over the woman's face. She herself had no place (she and her husband raised her elderly mother), so she took me to one of her relatives and others. But even here there was no separate room, it was cramped and busy.

So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. A mile of this place did not please me in the whole village; two or three willows, a crooked hut, and ducks swam in the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves off.

“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” my guide said, already tired of me. - Only she is not so tidy, she lives in the wilderness, she is sick.

Matrona's house stood right there, not far away, 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 like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gate, once mighty, turned gray from old age, and their top was thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but put her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapping - a simple undertaking against cattle and a stranger. The yard was not covered, but there was much in the house under one connection. Per front door internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high-shadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up to the chamber - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the cellar. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

It was built long ago and soundly, for a large family, and now there 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 an indefinite dark rag, so priceless in the life of a working man.

The spacious hut, and especially the best window-side part of it, was lined with stools and benches—pots and tubs of ficuses. They filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the rest of the light, and besides, behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed to me yellow and sick. And in her cloudy eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.

While talking to me, she lay prone on the stove, without a pillow, with her head to the door, and I stood below. She did not show joy at getting a tenant, complained about a black ailment, from an attack of which she was now emerging: the ailment did not attack her every month, but, having swooped in, - ... keeps two-days and three-days, so I don’t get up, nor give you I won't be late. And the hut would not be a pity, live.

And she listed other hostesses to me, who would be more peaceful and pleasing to me, and sent me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror, which it was completely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and about the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. Here it was good for me because, due to poverty, Matryona did not keep a radio, and because of loneliness she had no one to talk to.

And although Matrena Vasilievna forced me to walk around the village, and although she denied it for a long time on my second visit:

- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook - how will you lose it? - but she already met me on her feet, and even as if pleasure arose in her eyes because I returned.

We got along about the price and about the peat that the school would bring.

I only found out later 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. For sticks of workdays in a grimy account book.

And so I settled with Matrena Vasilievna. We did not share rooms. Her bed was in the corner of the door by the stove, and I unfolded my cot by the window and, pushing Matryona's favorite ficuses away from the light, set a table by another window. Electricity was in the village - it was pulled up from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers then wrote “light bulbs of Ilyich”, and the peasants, wide-eyed, said: “Tsar Fire!”

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 cold winds blew the oven 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, a cat, mice and cockroaches also lived in the hut.

The cat was not young, and most importantly - a shabby. Out of pity, she was picked up by Matryona and took root. Although she walked on four legs, she limped heavily: she took care of one leg, her leg was sore. When the cat jumped from the stove to the floor, the sound of her touching the floor was not cat-soft, like everyone else's, but a strong simultaneous blow of three legs: dumb! - such swipe that I did not immediately get used to, shuddered. It was she who substituted three legs at once in order to save the fourth.

But the reason there were mice in the hut was not that the crooked-legged cat could not cope with them: she, like lightning, jumped into the corner after them and carried them out in her teeth. And the mice were inaccessible to the cat due to the fact that someone once, still on a good life, covered Matryona's hut with corrugated greenish wallpaper, and not just in a layer, but in five layers. The wallpaper stuck together well with each other, but lagged behind the wall in many places - and it turned out, as it were, an inner skin in a hut. Between the logs of the hut and the wallpaper skin, the mice made their own moves and brazenly rustled, running along them even under the ceiling. The cat angrily looked after their rustling, but could not get it.

Sometimes she ate a cat and cockroaches, but they made her sick. The only thing that the cockroaches respected was the line of the partition that separated the mouth of the Russian stove and the kitchenette from the clean hut. They did not crawl into a clean hut. On the other hand, the kitchenette swarmed at night, and if late in the evening, having gone to drink water, I lit a lamp there - the whole floor, and the large bench, and even the wall were almost completely brown and moved. I brought borax from the chemical laboratory, and, mixing it with dough, we poisoned them. There were fewer cockroaches, but Matryona was afraid to poison the cat along with them. We stopped adding poison, and the cockroaches bred again.

At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was busy at the table, the rare quick rustle of mice under the wallpaper was covered with a single, unified, uninterrupted, like the distant sound of the ocean, the rustle of cockroaches behind the partition. But I got used to him, because there was nothing evil in him, there was no lie in him. Their rustling was their life.

And I got used to the rude poster beauty, who from the wall constantly handed me Belinsky, Panferov and another pile of some books, but was silent. I got used to everything that was in Matrona's hut.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. The Khodik Matrenins were twenty-seven years old, as they were bought in a general store. They always went ahead, and Matryona did not worry - as long as they did not lag behind, so as not to be late in the morning. She turned on the lamp behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make any noise, stoked the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all her bellies were - this one dirty-white crooked-horned goat), walked for water and boiled in three pots: one pot - me , one for himself, one for the goat. She chose the smallest potatoes from the underground for the goat, the smallest for herself, and for me with egg. But her sandy garden, which had not been fertilized since the pre-war years and was always planted with potatoes, potatoes and potatoes, did not give large potatoes.

I hardly heard her morning chores. I slept for a long time, waking up in the late winter light and stretching, sticking my head out from under the blanket and sheepskin coat. They, and even a camp padded jacket on my legs, and a bag stuffed with straw at the bottom, kept me warm even on those nights when the cold pushed from the north into our frail windows. Hearing a restrained noise behind the partition, I always said measuredly:

— Good morning, Matrena Vasilievna!

And always the same friendly words were heard from behind the partition. They began with some kind of low warm murmur, like grandmothers in fairy tales:

“Mmmm…you too!”

And a little later:

- And breakfast is in time for you.

She did not announce what was for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unflaked potatoes, or cardboard soup (everyone in the village pronounced it that way), or barley porridge (other cereals that year could not be bought at Peat Product, and even barley battle - how the cheapest it fattened pigs and took sacks). It was not always salty, as it should be, it often burned, and after eating it left a coating on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

But it was not Matryona's fault: there was no butter in the Peat product, margarine was in great demand, but only combined fat was free. Yes, and the Russian stove, as I looked closely, is inconvenient for cooking: cooking goes on hidden from the cook, the heat rises to the cast-iron from different parties unevenly. But because it must have come to our ancestors from the Stone Age itself, because, once heated before dawn, it keeps food and drink for livestock warm, food and water for humans all day long. And sleep warmly.

I obediently ate everything boiled to me, patiently put aside if something unusual came across: a hair, a piece of peat, a cockroach leg. I didn't have the heart to reproach Matryona. In the end, she herself warned me: “If you don’t know how, don’t cook - how will you lose?”

“Thank you,” I said sincerely.

- On what? On your good? She disarmed me with a radiant smile. And, looking ingenuously with her pale blue eyes, she asked: “Well, what can I cook for you for the ugly one?”

To uzhotkomu meant - by the evening. I ate twice a day, as at the front. What could I order for the snake? All from the same, kartov or cardboard soup.

I put up with it, because life taught me not to find the meaning of everyday existence in food. The smile of her roundish face was dearer to me, which, having finally earned money for a camera, I tried in vain to catch it. Seeing the cold eye of the lens on herself, Matrena assumed an expression either strained or heightenedly severe.

Once I captured how she smiled at something, looking out the window at the street.

That autumn, Matryona had many grievances. Before that, a new pension law had come out, and her neighbors advised her to seek a pension. She was lonely all around, and since she became very ill, she was released from the collective farm. There were a lot of injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered an invalid; she worked for a quarter of a century on a collective farm, but because she wasn’t at a factory, she wasn’t entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get a pension for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But her husband had been gone for twelve years, since the beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to get those certificates from different places about his salary and how much he received there. There were troubles - to get these certificates; and so that they wrote all the same that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and to assure the certificate that she lives alone and no one helps her; and what year is she; and then wear it all to the social security; and re-wear, correcting what was done wrong; and still wear. And find out if they will give a pension.

These worries were made more difficult by the fact that the social security from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council was ten kilometers to the west, and the village council was to the north, an hour's walk. From the office to the office and drove her for two months - then for a dot, then for a comma. Each pass is a day. He goes to the village council, but today there is no secretary, just like that, as it happens in the villages. Tomorrow, then go again. Now there is a secretary, but he does not have a seal. Third day go again. And go on the fourth day because blindly they signed the wrong piece of paper, Matryona's papers are all chipped in one bundle.

“They oppress me, Ignatich,” she complained to me after such fruitless penetrations. - I took care of it.

But her forehead did not remain clouded for long. I noticed that she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work. Immediately she would either grab a shovel and dig for potatoes. Or with a bag under her arm, she went for peat. And then with a wicker body - berries in the distant forest. And not bowing to the office tables, but to the forest bushes, and having broken her back with a burden, Matryona returned to the hut already enlightened, pleased with everything, with her kind smile.

“Now I have put a tooth on it, Ignatich, I know where to get it,” she said about peat. - Well, the place, there is only one love!

“Yes, Matrena Vasilievna, isn’t my peat enough? The car is complete.

- Fu-u! your peat! so much more, and so much more - then, it happens, that's enough. Here, as winter spins and a duel through the windows, you don’t drown so much as blow it out. Letos we trained peat teams! Wouldn't I have dragged three cars even now? So they catch. Already one of our women is being dragged through the courts.

Yes, it was. The frightening breath of winter was already swirling - and hearts ached. We stood around the forest, and there was nowhere to get fireboxes. Excavators roared all around in the swamps, but peat was not sold to the inhabitants, but only carried - to the authorities, and who at the authorities, but by car - to teachers, doctors, factory workers. Fuel was not allowed - and it was not supposed to ask about it. The chairman of the collective farm walked around the village, looked into the eyes demandingly or dully or ingenuously, and talked about anything except fuel. Because he stocked up. Winter was not expected.

Well, they used to steal timber from the master, now they pulled peat from the trust. The women gathered in five, ten, to be bolder. We went during the day. During the summer, peat was dug up everywhere and stacked to dry. This is what peat is good for, that, having extracted it, they cannot take it away immediately. It dries until autumn, and even until snow, if the road does not become or the trust gets tired. This is the time the women took him. At once they carried away six peat in a bag if they were damp, ten peat if they were dry. One bag of this, sometimes brought three kilometers away (and it weighed two pounds), was enough for one heating. And there are two hundred days in winter. And it is necessary to drown: Russian in the morning, Dutch in the evening.

— Yes what to speak obapol! Matryona was angry at someone invisible. - As the horses are gone, so what you can’t fasten on yourself, that’s not even in the house. My back never heals. In winter, a sleigh on oneself, in the summer bundles on oneself, by God, it’s true!

Women went a day - more than once. AT good days Matryona brought six sacks. She piled my peat openly, hid hers under the bridges, and every evening she blocked the hole with a plank.

“They will guess, the enemies,” she smiled, wiping the sweat from her forehead, “otherwise they won’t find him for life.”

What was the trust to do? He was not allowed states to place guards in all the swamps. I had to, probably, having shown abundant production in reports, then write it off - for crumbs, for rains. Sometimes, in gusts, they gathered a patrol and caught women at the entrance to the village. The women threw their sacks and ran away. Sometimes, upon a denunciation, they went door-to-door with a search, drew up a report on illegal peat and threatened to take them to court. The women stopped wearing them for a while, but the winter approached and drove them again - with sleds at night.

In general, looking closely at Matryona, I noticed that, in addition to cooking and housekeeping, every day she had some other important business, she kept the natural order of these affairs in her head and, waking up in the morning, always knew what her day was. will be busy. In addition to peat, in addition to collecting old stumps, turned out by a tractor in a swamp, in addition to lingonberries, soaked for the winter in quarters ("Sharpen your teeth, Ignatich," she treated me), in addition to digging potatoes, in addition to running around on pension business, she had to go somewhere else. then to get hay for his only dirty white goat.

“Why don’t you keep cows, Matryona Vasilievna?”

“Eh, Ignatich,” Matryona explained, standing in an unclean apron in the kitchen doorway and turning to my table. - I have enough milk from a goat. And get a cow, so she will eat me with her legs. Don’t mow the canvas - there are their own owners, and there is no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and they don’t tell me on the collective farm - not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and the collective farmers, down to the whitest flies, are all in the collective farm, and for themselves from under the snow - what kind of grass? ... They boiled with hay in a low water period, from Petrov to Ilyin. It was considered grass - honey ...

So, one stout goat had to collect hay for Matryona - a great work. In the morning she took a sack and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the borders, along the road, along the islands in the middle of the swamp. Having stuffed a bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. From a bag of grass, dried hay was obtained - navilnik.

The new chairman, recently sent from the city, first of all cut the gardens for all the disabled. Fifteen acres of sand left Matryona, and ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, for fifteen acres, the collective farm Matrena sipped. When there were not enough hands, when the women refused very stubbornly, the wife of the chairman came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, resolute, with a short gray short coat and a menacing look, as if from a military man.

She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona interfered.

“So-so,” the chairman’s wife said separately. — Comrade Grigorieva? We must help the collective farm! I'll have to go pick up manure tomorrow!

Matryona's face was folded into an apologetic half-smile - as if she was ashamed of the chairman's wife that she could not pay her for the work.

“Well then,” she drawled. - I'm sick, of course. And now I'm not attached to your cause. - And then she hastily corrected herself: - What time is it to come?

- And take your pitchfork! the chairman instructed and left, rustling with her firm skirt.

— How! - Matryona scolded after him. - And take your pitchfork! There are no shovels or pitchforks on the collective farm. And I live without a man, who will plant me? ...

And then I thought all evening:

“What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post nor to the railing. You will stand, leaning on a shovel, and waiting for the whistle from the factory to twelve. Moreover, women will start up, settle scores, who went out, who did not go out. When, sometimes, they worked on their own, there was no sound, only oh-oh-oyin-ki, then dinner rolled up, then evening came.

Yet in the morning she went out with her pitchfork.

But not only the collective farm, but any distant relative or just a neighbor also came to Matryona in the evening and said:

“Tomorrow, Matryona, you will come and help me. Let's dig up potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her turn of affairs, went to help her neighbor, and, returning, still said without a trace of envy:

“Ah, Ignatich, she has big potatoes!” I was digging for hunting, I didn’t want to leave the site, by golly it’s true!

Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden could do without Matryona. The women of Talnovsky have established precisely that it is harder and longer to dig up your own garden with a shovel than, having taken a plow and harnessed with six of you, to plow six gardens on yourself. That's why they called Matryona to help.

Well, did you pay her? I had to ask later.

She doesn't take money. Involuntarily you hide it.

Another big fuss happened to Matryona when it was her turn to feed the goat herders: one - a hefty, non-deaf one, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This queue was a month and a half of roses, but it drove Matryona into a big expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, sold both sugar and butter, which she herself did not eat. It turns out that the housewives laid out in front of each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

“Be afraid of the tailor and the shepherd,” she explained to me. “They will slander you all over the village if something goes wrong with them.

And in this life, dense with worries, at times a severe illness still broke in, Matryona collapsed and lay in a layer for a day or two. She didn't complain, she didn't moan, but she hardly moved either. On such days, Masha, a close friend of Matryona from a very young age, came to look after the goat and heat the stove. Matryona herself did not drink, did not eat, and did not ask for anything. Calling a doctor from the village first-aid post to the house was amazing in Talnov, somehow indecent in front of the neighbors - they say, mistress. They called once, she arrived very angry, ordered Matryona, as soon as she was in bed, to come to the first-aid post herself. Matryona went against her will, they took tests, they sent her to the district hospital - and it just died out. There was also the fault of Matryona herself.

Deeds called to life. Soon Matryona began to get up, at first she moved slowly, and then again quickly.

“You haven’t seen me before, Ignatich,” she justified herself. - All my bags were, I didn’t consider five pounds a weight. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona! You'll break your back!" The divir did not come up to me to put my end of the log on the front end. We had a military horse Volchok, healthy ...

- Why military?

- And ours was taken to the war, this wounded man - in return. And he got some kind of verse. Once, out of fright, I carried the sleigh into the lake, the peasants jumped back, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped it. The horse was oatmeal. Our men loved to feed the horses. Which horses are oatmeal, those and tizheli do not recognize.

But Matryona was by no means fearless. She was afraid of fire, she was afraid of lightning, and most of all, for some reason, of trains.

- How can I go to Cherusti, a train will crawl out from Nechaevka, its hefty eyes will pop out, the rails are buzzing - it throws me into the heat, my knees are shaking. Oh god it's true! - Matryona herself was surprised and shrugged her shoulders.

- So, maybe because they don’t give tickets, Matrena Vasilievna?

Nevertheless, by that winter, Matryona's life improved as never before. They began to pay her eighty rubles pension. She got over a hundred more from the school and from me.

- Fu-u! Now Matryona does not need to die! some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. - More money for her, the old one, and nowhere to put it.

- And what is a pension? others objected. — The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, and tomorrow it will take away.

Matryona ordered herself to roll up new felt boots. Bought a new sweatshirt. And she made a coat from a worn railway overcoat, which was presented to her by a machinist from Cherusti, the husband of her former pupil Kira. The village tailor-hunchback put cotton wool under the cloth, and it turned out such a glorious coat, which Matryona had not sewn in six decades.

And in the middle of winter, Matryona sewed two hundred rubles into the lining of this coat for her funeral. Cheered up:

- Manenko and I saw peace, Ignatich.

December passed, January passed - for two months she had not been visited by illness. More often Matryona began to go to Masha's in the evenings to sit, to click seeds. She did not invite guests to her place in the evenings, respecting my work. Only at baptism, returning from school, I found a dance in the hut and was introduced to three of Matryona's sisters, who called Matryona as the eldest - Lyolka or nanny. Until that day, little was heard in our hut about the sisters - were they afraid that Matryona would ask them for help?

Only one event or an omen darkened this holiday for Matryona: she went five miles away to the church to bless the water, put her bowler hat between the others, and when the water bless was over and the women rushed, pushing, to disassemble - Matryona did not ripen among the first, and in the end - there was no her bowler hat. And instead of a bowler hat, no other dishes were left either. The bowler hat disappeared, as an unclean spirit carried it away.

- Baboons! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. - Did someone take someone else's consecrated water by inconvenience? in a pot?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys rejoiced, there were also boys. Matrona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t.

Not to say, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even more likely she was a pagan, superstition took over in her: that it was impossible to go into the garden on Ivan the Lenten - there would be no harvest next year; that if a blizzard twists, it means that someone strangled himself somewhere, and if you pinch your foot with the door - to be a guest. How long I lived with her - I never saw her praying, nor that she crossed herself at least once. And every business began “with God!” and to me every time “with God!” said when I went to school. Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid to oppress me. There was a holy corner in a clean hut, and an icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant in the kitchenette. Forgetfulness they stood in the dark, and during the vigil and in the morning on holidays, Matryona lit a lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her rickety cat. She choked mice ...

Having torn herself a little out of her studded little hut, Matryona began to listen more attentively to my radio as well (I did not fail to put intelligence on myself - that's what Matryona called the outlet. My receiver was no longer a scourge for me, because I could turn it off with my own hand at any moment; but, indeed, he came out for me from a deaf hut - intelligence). That year it was customary to receive two or three foreign delegations a week, see them off and take them to many cities, gathering rallies. And every day, the news was full of important reports about banquets, dinners and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned, sighed disapprovingly:

- They go, they go, they hit something.

Hearing that new machines had been invented, Matryona grumbled from the kitchen:

- Everything is new, new, they don’t want to work for the old ones, where will we put the old ones?

Back in that year, artificial satellites of the Earth were promised. Matryona shook her head from the stove:

— Oh-oh-oyinki, something will change, winter or summer.

Chaliapin performed Russian songs. Matryona stood, stood, listened and decisively sentenced:

- They sing wonderfully, not in our way.

- What are you, Matryona Vasilievna, but listen!

Still listened. She pressed her lips:

- Not. Not this way. Lada is not ours. And pampers with his voice.

But Matryona rewarded me. Somehow they broadcast a concert from Glinka's romances. And suddenly, after a heel of chamber romances, Matryona, holding on to her apron, came out from behind the partition, warmed up, with a veil of tears in her dim eyes:

“But this is our way…” she whispered.

To the number the best works A. I. Solzhenitsyn, undoubtedly, refers to the story "Matryona Dvor" about a simple Russian woman with a difficult fate. Many trials fell to her lot, but the heroine until the end of her days retained in her soul love of life, boundless kindness, readiness to sacrifice herself for the well-being of others. The article offers the reader a description of the image of Matryona.

"Matrenin Dvor": the real basis of the work

He wrote his own in 1959 and at first called it “A village is not worth without a righteous man” (for censorship reasons, the title was subsequently changed). The prototype of the main character was Matryona Timofeevna Zakharova, a resident of the village of Miltsevo, located in the Vladimir region. The writer lived with her during the years of his teaching after returning from the camps. Therefore, the feelings and thoughts of the narrator largely reflect the views of the author himself, from the first day, according to his confession, he felt something dear and close to his heart in the house of a woman he did not know. Why this became possible will help to explain the characteristics of Matryona.

"Matrenin Dvor": the first acquaintance with the heroine

The narrator was brought to Grigorieva's house, when all the options for apartments for the settlement had already been considered. The fact is that Matryona Vasilievna lived alone in an old house. All her property was a bed, a table, benches and ficuses beloved by the hostess. Yes, even a rickety cat, which a woman picked up on the street out of pity, and a goat. She did not receive a pension, since on the collective farm she was given sticks instead of workdays. I could no longer work for health reasons. Then, however, with great difficulty she issued a pension for the loss of her husband. At the same time, she always silently came to the aid of everyone who turned to her, and did not take anything for her work. This is the first characteristic of Matryona in the story "Matryona's Yard". To this we can add that the peasant woman also did not know how to cook, although the tenant was picky and did not complain. And a couple of times a month she was attacked by a severe illness, when the woman could not even get up. But even at that moment she did not complain, and even tried not to moan, so as not to disturb the tenant. The author especially emphasizes blue eyes and a radiant smile - a symbol of openness and kindness.

The difficult fate of the heroine

The history of life helps to better understand a person. Without it, the characterization of Matryona in the story "Matryona's Yard" will also be incomplete.

The peasant woman had no children of her own: all six died in infancy. She did not marry out of love: she waited for a groom from the front for several years, and then agreed to become the wife of his younger brother - the time was difficult, and there were not enough hands in the family. Shortly after the wedding of the young, Thaddeus returned, who never forgave Yefim and Matryona. It was believed that he put a curse on them, and later the heroine's husband would perish in World War II. And the woman will take Kira, the youngest daughter of Thaddeus, to bring up, and give her love and care. The narrator learned about all this from the hostess, and she suddenly appeared before him in a new guise. Even then, the narrator realized how far from the real his first characterization of Matryona was.

Matrenin's court, meanwhile, began to attract the eyes of Thaddeus more strongly, who wished to take the dowry assigned to Kira by her adoptive mother. This part of the chamber will cause the death of the heroine.

Live for others

Matrena Vasilievna had long foreseen trouble. The author describes her suffering when it turned out that during the baptism someone took away her pot of holy water. Then all of a sudden And before the parsing of the room, the hostess did not go at all herself. The collapse of the roof meant the end of her life. Such trifles formed the whole life of the heroine, which she lived not for herself, but for the sake of others. And when Matryona Vasilievna went along with everyone else, she also wanted to help. Sincere, open, not embittered by the injustices of life. She accepted everything as appointed by fate and never grumbled. The characteristic of Matryona leads to this conclusion.

Matrenin Dvor ends with a description of the heroine's funeral scene. She plays an important role in understanding how different this peasant woman was from the people who surrounded her. The narrator notes with pain that the sisters and Thaddeus immediately began to divide the meager property of the hostess. And even a friend, as if sincerely experiencing the loss, managed to snip off her blouse. Against the background of everything that was happening, the narrator suddenly remembered the living Matryona, so unlike everyone else. And I realized: she is the righteous man, without whom not a single village stands. Why is there a village - the whole land is ours. This is proved by the life and characteristics of Matryona.

"Matryona Dvor" contains the author's regret that during his lifetime he (as, indeed, others) could not fully understand the greatness of this woman. Therefore, one can perceive the work of Solzhenitsyn as a kind of repentance before the heroine for one's own and others' spiritual blindness.

Another point is indicative. On the mutilated body of the heroine, the bright face and right hand. “He will pray for us in the next world,” said one of the women in the story “Matryona Dvor”. The characteristic of Matryona, thus, makes us think about the fact that people live nearby who are able to maintain human dignity, kindness, humility in unbearable conditions. And partly thanks to them, there are still in our world filled with cruelty, such concepts as sympathy, compassion, mutual assistance.

In the summer of 1956, at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow, a passenger got off along the railway line to Murom and Kazan. This is a narrator whose fate is reminiscent of the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front he “delayed with the return of ten years”, that is, he spent time in the camp, which is also evidenced by the fact that when the narrator got a job, every letter in his documents "perepal"). He dreams of working as a teacher in the depths of Russia, away from urban civilization. But living in the village with the wonderful name High Field did not work out, because they did not bake bread and did not sell anything edible there. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his hearing Peat product. However, it turns out that “not everything is around peat extraction” and there are also villages with the names Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo ...

This reconciles the narrator with his share, for it promises him "condo Russia". In one of the villages called Talnovo, he settles. The mistress of the hut in which the narrator lodges is called Matryona Vasilievna Grigoryeva, or simply Matryona.

The fate of Matryona, about which she does not immediately, not considering it interesting for a "cultured" person, sometimes in the evenings tells the guest, fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees a special meaning in her fate, which is not noticed by fellow villagers and relatives of Matryona. The husband went missing at the beginning of the war. He loved Matryona and did not beat her like village husbands beat their wives. But Matryona herself hardly 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 the Thaddeus family, she married her younger brother, Yefim. And suddenly Thaddeus returned, who was in Hungarian captivity. According to him, he did not hack Matryona and her husband with an ax just because Yefim is his brother. Thaddeus loved Matryona so much that he found a new bride for himself with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to Thaddeus six children, but the “first Matryona” had all the children from Yefim (also six) died before they even lived for three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “spoiled”, and she herself believed in it. Then she took up the daughter of the “second Matryona” - Kira, 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 a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks for money for it. There is a huge inner strength in Matryona. For example, she is able to stop a rushing horse on the run, which men cannot stop.

Gradually, the narrator realizes that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without a trace, that the whole village and the whole Russian land still rests. But this discovery hardly pleases him. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to her next?

Hence the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies helping Thaddeus and his sons to drag part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railroad on a sleigh. 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. 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.

Thaddeus doesn't even come to the wake.

Matrenin Dvor is an autobiographical story.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, after the end of his term in the Gulag, arrives in one of the Russian villages and gets a job as a teacher.

He stops to live with one of the inhabitants of the village - Matryona (by the way, Matryona is the prototype of the real Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova).

The author settles with a sixty-year-old woman, Matrena. She is often sick. She had no one else in the house except for a rickety cat, a dirty white goat, mice and cockroaches. Ignatich (narrator) became very friendly with his mistress. They lived poorly, but okay.

They ate almost the same “cartoon”, as Matryona called potatoes. The woman experienced great need, but did not suffer from it. Her kindness was not impoverished by poverty and the cruelty of life. She also selflessly helps people. Everyone uses her work, but no one thinks of gratitude.

Once Matryona tells Ignatich her whole difficult life. In her youth, she wanted to marry her beloved Thaddeus, but he was taken to the war. She waited for him for three years, but he did not return. And she married his brother Yefim.

And soon Thaddeus returned. He got angry at Matryona, but did not touch his brother. He married a girl from a neighboring village, also Matryona. Thaddeus had six children, and Yefim and Matryona had six, only they did not live longer than three months, they all died. Yefim went to war and never came back.

Matryona asked Faddeeva Matryona for her daughter Kira. Raised her like her own. And recently, just before the arrival of Ignatich, she married Kira to a tractor driver from a neighboring village. Ignatitch listened attentively to Matryona's story. He was sympathetic to all her experiences of life. How much this woman endured, you do not wish anyone.

Soon a new misfortune came: Kira and her husband were given a plot of land. And in order to get land, you need to build some kind of building on it. Thaddeus decided to take the room from Matryona from her hut. Everyone knew that Matryona bequeathed this chamber to Kira after her death.

Matryona walked for several days in thought. What worried her more was not that she would have to give up the upper room, but that she had to give it back. ahead of time. Matryona has not yet died, but the chamber has been bequeathed. Thaddeus came with his sons and sons-in-law to sort out this room.

The boards under the roof crack, the ax knocks on the logs, and Matryona does not sleep at night. The logs were loaded onto a tractor. Yes, they didn’t want to carry it twice, they attached two carts to one tractor. And Matryona tagged along with them, where to help. Ignatich was waiting for Matryona in the evening for dinner, but she did not return.

I thought that I went on to see off. Waited for the night, did not return. And then a neighbor came and said that Matryona had died. At the crossing, the cable between the wagons was torn off. The son of Thaddeus and his nephew went to fix it, and Matryona was between them. Two cars were moving in reverse without lights and demolished the cart along with those who were nearby.

Matryona was brought to be buried in the village. What was left of her: part of the body, right arm and face - even, white, as if alive .... Thaddeus never came to the funeral. He greedily thought about how to take away the rest of the logs of the room and grab something else. The Matrena sisters also tried to divide the inheritance.

Only the adopted daughter Kira and her mother Matryona sincerely cried at the funeral. And Ignatich only after the funeral understood the whole essence of Matryona. How did he not notice this before? Matryona - who lost six children, lived her whole life for people, who did not save money or wealth. Here she is - a righteous man, without whom "there is no village, nor a city, nor our land."

Image of Matryona

The realism of events amazes readers. A woman who experienced so much grief and loss in her life, who did not know family happiness, did not lose human mercy. She felt sorry for her sick cat. She rushed to save her ficuses when a fire broke out. A simple, selfless, kind soul.

She helped everyone. No longer working on the collective farm, at the request of the formidable wife of the chairman, she took her pitchfork and went to rake the manure. A. Solzhenitsyn did not invent this image. He described a real Russian woman who lived in every village. He described with all the bitterness of her life, and he himself was imbued with sympathy for her.

The originality of the story

• The story is of artistic value in Russian literature:
• The main theme of the work is the human soul, which lives despite the complexity of being;
• genre features: the narration is given through the author with his assessment of what is happening and through his heroine with her attitude to life;
• the image of the heroine is symbolic: it is similar to the image of a saint;
• linguistic features (interspersed with dialectisms, colloquial speech, variants of pronunciation of words).