History of creation and publication

The story began in late July - early August 1959 in the village of Chernomorskoye in western Crimea, where Solzhenitsyn was invited by friends in Kazakhstan exile by the spouses Nikolai Ivanovich and Elena Alexandrovna Zubov, who settled there in 1958. The story was completed in December of the same year.

Solzhenitsyn conveyed the story to Tvardovsky on December 26, 1961. The first discussion in the journal took place on January 2, 1962. Tvardovsky believed that this work could not be published. The manuscript remained with the editor. Having learned that censorship had cut Veniamin Kaverin’s memories of Mikhail Zoshchenko from “New World” (1962, No. 12), Lydia Chukovskaya wrote in her diary on December 5, 1962:

After the success of the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Tvardovsky decided to re-edit the discussion and prepare the story for publication. In those days, Tvardovsky wrote in his diary:

Before Solzhenitsyn’s arrival today, I re-read his “Righteous Woman” since five in the morning. Oh my god, writer. No jokes. A writer who is solely concerned with expressing what lies “at the core” of his mind and heart. Not a shadow of a desire to “hit the bull’s eye”, to please, to make the task of an editor or critic easier - whatever you want, get out of it, but I won’t get out of my way. I can only go further.

The name “Matryonin Dvor” was proposed by Alexander Tvardovsky before publication and approved during an editorial discussion on November 26, 1962:

“The title shouldn’t be so edifying,” argued Alexander Trifonovich. “Yes, I have no luck with your names,” Solzhenitsyn responded, however, quite good-naturedly.

Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s first published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was generally positively received by critics, Matryonin’s Dvor caused a wave of controversy and discussion in the Soviet press. The author's position in the story was at the center of a critical discussion on the pages of Literary Russia in the winter of 1964. It began with an article by the young writer L. Zhukhovitsky “Looking for a co-author!”

In 1989, “Matryonin Dvor” became the first publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s texts in the USSR after many years of silence. The story was published in two issues of the magazine “Ogonyok” (1989, No. 23, 24) with a huge circulation of more than 3 million copies. Solzhenitsyn declared the publication “pirated” because it was carried out without his consent.

Plot

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 he was “delayed in returning for ten years,” 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 new bride I found one for myself with the same name. The “second Matryona” gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, but the “first Matryona” had all the children from Efim (also six) die without living 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. In Matryona there is a huge 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 across railway on the sleigh is part of his own hut, bequeathed to Kira. 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.

Characters and prototypes

Notes

Literature

A. Solzhenitsyn. Matryonin's yard and other stories. Texts of stories on the official website of Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Zhukhovitsky L. Looking for a co-author! // Literary Russia. - 1964. - January 1
Brovman Gr. Is it necessary to be a co-author? // Literary Russia. - 1964. - January 1
Poltoratsky V. “Matryonin Dvor” and its surroundings // Izvestia. - 1963. - March 29
Sergovantsev N. The tragedy of loneliness and “continuous life” // October. - 1963. - No. 4. - P. 205.
Ivanova L. Must be a citizen // Lit. gas. - 1963. - May 14
Meshkov Yu. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Personality. Creation. Time. - Ekaterinburg, 1993
Suprunenko P. Recognition... oblivion... fate... Experience of a reader's study of the work of A. Solzhenitsyn. - Pyatigorsk, 1994
Chalmaev V. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Life and Creativity. - M., 1994.
Kuzmin V.V. Poetics of stories by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. Monograph. - Tver: TvGU, 1998. Without ISBN.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Stories and novellas	One day of Ivan Denisovich (1959) · Matryonin yard (1959) · Right hand (1960) · The incident at Kochetovka station (1963) · For the good of the cause (1963) · Zakhar-Kalita (1965) · What a pity (1965) · Easter procession (1966) · Tiny (1958-1963, 1996-1999)
Novels	In the first circle (1955-1958) · Cancer building (1963-1966)
Memories	A calf butted heads with an oak tree (1967-1974) · A grain landed between two millstones
Poems, poems	Dorozhenka (1947–1952) · Prussian nights (1947–1952)
Dramaturgy	Feast of the Winners (1951-1953) · Prisoners (1952-1953) · Deer and bowerbird (1954)
Essays and journalism	It’s not the custom to whiten cabbage soup with tar, that’s why sour cream (1965) · Peace and violence (1973) · On the return of breathing and consciousness (1974) · Repentance and self-restraint as categories of national life (1974) · Education (1974) · Don't live by lies (1974) · Shredding Freedom (1976) · Our pluralists (1982) · ...Your tripod is shaking (1984) · How can we arrange Russia? (1990) · Russia in collapse (1998) · Reflections on the February Revolution (2007)
Other	Gulag Archipelago (1973) · Red wheel · The Russian question towards the end of the 20th century (1994) · Russian language extension dictionary (1990-2000) · Two hundred years together (2001-2002)
Film adaptations	One day of Ivan Denisovich (1970) · In the first circle (2006)

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See what “Matryonin Dvor” is in other dictionaries: Matryonin Dvor is the second of those published in the magazine " New world

» stories by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Andrei Sinyavsky called this work the “fundamental thing” of all Russian “village” literature. The author's title of the story “The village is not worth it... ... Wikipedia

Wikipedia has articles about other people with this last name, see Solzhenitsyn. Alexander Solzhenitsyn ... Wikipedia The creative story of creating the story "»

Matrenin Dvor

Matryona, as the embodiment of the ideal of the Russian soul

The story was originally called “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” - according to a Russian proverb. The righteous peasant woman lived surrounded by unfriendly and selfish collective farmers. Their miserable and unhappy fate was not much different from the existence of camp prisoners. They lived according to traditional customs. Even after the death of Matryona, who had done so much good for everyone, the neighbors were not particularly worried, although they cried and went to the hut with their children, as if to a performance. “Those who considered themselves closer to the deceased began crying from the threshold, and upon reaching the coffin, they bent down to cry over the very face of the deceased.” The lament of relatives was “a kind of politics”: in it, everyone expressed their own thoughts and feelings. And all these lamentations boiled down to the fact that “we are not to blame for her death, but we’ll talk about the hut later!” It’s a pity that the language calls our property good, the people’s or our own. And losing it is considered shameful and stupid in front of people.

Matryona Vasilyevna is a person not of this world. Her children died in infancy, and her husband went missing during the war. It took her a long time to get a pension for him. And yet the woman did not become embittered, she remained cordial, open and selflessly responsive. Matryona resembles the biblical heroine Mary.

Solzhenitsyn's Matryona is the embodiment of the ideal of the Russian peasant woman. Her appearance is like an icon, her life is like the life of a saint. Her house is pass-through symbolic image story - like the ark of the biblical righteous Noah, in which he is saved from the flood along with his family and pairs of all earthly animals - in order to continue the human race.

Matryona is a righteous woman. But her fellow villagers do not know about her hidden holiness; they consider the woman simply stupid, although it is she who preserves the highest features of Russian spirituality. Like Lukerye from Turgenev’s story “Living Relics,” Matryona did not complain about her life, she did not bother God, because he already knows what she needs. God, how he missed ordinary people who haven't lost that one spiritual simplicity which each of us is endowed with from birth. How much tenderness and delight arouses the ordinary village woman - Matryona - big, merciless, soft, sloppy and yet somehow sweet and dear, selling milk, her appearance, her voice, her characteristic accent. The unfortunate woman lost all her six children and her beloved, having “ruined” her youth, she was left alone. She is not rich, not even prosperous. She is as poor as a “church mouse”, sick, but cannot refuse help. And very important quality The author notes in it - selflessness. It was not because of money that old Matryona dug potatoes for her neighbors and raised her niece Kirochka not for the sake of gratitude either, but simply loved children. She is a woman after all.

The life of a saint must end happy death connecting her with God. However, the death of the heroine is bitterly absurd. The brother of her late husband, the greedy old man Thaddeus, forces Matryona to give him her upper room. The trouble-free Matryona acutely feels guilty before Thaddeus: shortly before the First World War, she became his bride, but, confident that he died at the front, she married Thaddeus’s brother. The loss of the upper room and the sudden disappearance of the cat foreshadow the destruction of Matryona’s house and her death. Perhaps she had a presentiment that something was wrong: she was afraid of a fire, she was afraid of lightning, and most of all, for some reason, of a train. She got hit by a train. The death of the heroine symbolizes the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world in which she lived.

Solzhenitsyn: Matrenin Dvor

Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva is a peasant, a lonely woman of sixty years old, released from the collective farm due to illness. The story documents the life of Matrena Timofeevna Zakharova, a resident of the village of Miltsevo (near Solzhenitsyn Talkovo) in the Kurlovsky district of the Vladimir region. The original title “A village is not worth it without a righteous man” was changed at the suggestion of Tvardovsky, who believed that it revealed the meaning too straightforwardly central image and the whole story. Matryona, according to her fellow villagers, “didn’t chase after things,” dressed haphazardly, “helped strangers for free.” The house is old, in the corner of the door by the stove is Matryona’s bed, the best part of the hut near the window is lined with stools and benches, on which tubs and pots with her favorite ficus trees are her main wealth. Among the living creatures - a lanky old cat, which Matryona took pity on and picked up on the street, a dirty white goat with crooked horns, mice and cockroaches. Matryona got married even before the revolution, because “their mother died... they didn’t have enough hands.” She married Efim the younger, and loved the eldest, Thaddeus, but he went to war and disappeared. She waited for him for three years - “no news, not a bone.” On Peter's Day they got married to Efim, and Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity to Mikola in the winter and almost chopped them both with an ax. She gave birth to six children, but they “didn’t survive” - they didn’t live to see three months. Efim disappeared during World War II, and Matryona was left alone. In the eleven post-war years (the action takes place in 1956), Matryona decided that he was no longer alive. Thaddeus also had six children, all of whom were alive, and Matryona took in the youngest girl, Kira, and raised her. Matryona did not receive a pension. She was ill, but was not considered disabled; she worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century “by the sticks.” True, later they began to pay her eighty rubles, and she received more than a hundred more from the school and the resident teacher. She didn’t start anything “good”, didn’t rejoice at the chance to get a lodger, didn’t complain about illness, although she was sick twice a month. But she unquestioningly went to work when the chairman’s wife came running for her, or when a neighbor asked her to help dig potatoes - Matryona never refused anyone and never took money from anyone, for which they considered her stupid. “She was always interfering in men’s affairs. And a horse once almost knocked her into an ice hole in the lake,” and finally, when they took away her room, they could have done without her - no, “Matryona got carried away between the tractor and the sleigh.” That is, she was always ready to help another, ready to neglect herself, to give her last. So she gave the upper room to her pupil Kira, which means she will have to tear down the house and halve it - an impossible, wild act, from the owner’s point of view. And she even rushed to help transport it. She got up at four or five o’clock, had plenty of things to do until the evening, had a plan in advance of what to do, but no matter how tired she was, she was always friendly.

Matryona was characterized by innate delicacy - she was afraid to burden herself and therefore, when she was sick, she did not complain, did not moan, and was embarrassed to call a doctor from the village first-aid post. She believed in God, but not earnestly, although she began every business - “With God!” While rescuing Thaddeus's property, which was stuck on a sleigh at a railway crossing, M. was hit by a train and died. Its absence on this earth affects immediately: who will now go sixth to harness the plow? Who should I contact for help? Against the backdrop of Matryona's death, the characters of her greedy sisters, Thaddeus - her former lover, Masha's friend, and everyone who takes part in the division of her poor belongings - appear. There is a cry over the coffin, which turns into “politics”, into a dialogue between contenders for Matrenino’s “property”, of which there is only a dirty white goat, a lanky cat and ficus trees. Matryona's guest, observing all this, remembering the living Matryona, suddenly clearly understands that all these people, including himself, lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous man without whom “the village would not stand.” The narrator is an autobiographical character. Matryona calls him Ignatyich. After serving exile in the “dusty, hot desert,” he was rehabilitated in 1956 and wished to live in a village somewhere in middle lane Russia. Once in Talkov, he settled with Matryona and taught mathematics at school. The camp past appears in all his actions and desires: to get away from prying eyes, from any interference in his life. Ignatyich is painfully worried about the incident when Matryona accidentally put on his padded jacket; he cannot stand the noise, especially the loudspeaker. They immediately got along with Matryona - it was impossible not to get along with her, even though they lived in the same room - she was so quiet and helpful. But Ignatyich, a highly experienced and learned man, did not immediately understand Matryona, and truly appreciated her only after her death.

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials from the site were used ilib.ru/

Date of writing 1959 Date of first publication 1963, "New World" Electronic version

	Matryonin yard in Wikiquote

"Matryonin Dvor"- the second of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s stories published in the magazine “New World”. The author's title “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man” was changed at the request of the editors in order to avoid censorship obstacles. For the same reason, the time of action in the story was changed by the author to 1956.

Andrei Sinyavsky called this work “the fundamental thing” of all Russian “village literature”.

History of creation and publication

The story began at the end of July - beginning of August 1959 in the village of Chernomorskoye in western Crimea, where Solzhenitsyn was invited by friends from exile in Kazakhstan by the spouses Nikolai Ivanovich and Elena Alexandrovna Zubov, who settled there in 1958. The story was completed in December of the same year.

...What if they don’t publish Solzhenitsyn’s second work? I liked her more than the first one. She stuns with her courage, astonishes with her material, and, of course, with her literary skill; and “Matryona”... is already visible here great artist, humane, giving back to us native language, loving Russia, as Blok said, with mortally insulted love.<…>So Akhmatova’s prophetic oath comes true:
And we will save you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
Saved - revived - film by Solzhenitsyn.

Before Solzhenitsyn’s arrival today, I re-read his “Righteous Woman” since five in the morning. Oh my god, writer. No jokes. A writer who is solely concerned with expressing what lies “at the core” of his mind and heart. Not a shadow of a desire to “hit the bull’s eye”, to please, to make the task of an editor or critic easier - whatever you want, get out of it, but I won’t get out of my way. I can only go further.

The name “Matryonin Dvor” was proposed by Alexander Tvardovsky before publication and approved during an editorial discussion on November 26, 1962:

“The title shouldn’t be so edifying,” argued Alexander Trifonovich. “Yes, I have no luck with your names,” Solzhenitsyn responded, however, quite good-naturedly.

The story was published in the January notebook of the New World for 1963 (pages 42-63) along with the story “The Incident at Kochetovka Station” under the general heading “Two Stories”.

Plot

Matryona, not considering her fate interesting for a “cultured” person, sometimes in the evenings tells a guest about herself. The life story of this woman fascinates and at the same time stuns him. He sees a special meaning in it, 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 death of the heroine at the 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.

Characters

Ignatich - narrator
Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva - main character, righteous
Efim Mironovich Grigoriev - Matryona's husband
Thaddeus Mironovich Grigoriev - Efim's older brother ( ex-lover Matryona and who deeply loved her)
“Second Matryona” - wife of Thaddeus
Kira is the daughter of the “second” Matryona and Thaddeus, the adopted daughter of Matryona Grigorieva
Kira's husband, machinist
sons of Thaddeus
Masha - close friend Matryona
3 Matryona sisters

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 Vasilyevna 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.

Retold