Summary of "Matrenin Dvor", a story by A. Solzhenitsyn

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Even a summary of the story "Matrenin Dvor", written by A. Solzhenitsyn in 1963, can give the reader an idea of the patriarchal life of the Russian rural hinterland.

Summary of Matrenin Dvor (Introduction)

On the way from Moscow, at the 184th kilometer along the Murom and Kazan branches, even six months after the events described, the trains involuntarily slowed down. For a reason known only to the narrator and the machinists.

Summary of "Matrenin Dvor" (Part 1)

The narrator, having returned from Asia in 1956, after a long absence (he fought, but did not immediately return from the war, received 10 years in the camps), got a job as a teacher of mathematics in a village school in the Russian outback. Not wanting to live in the village barracks of "Peat Product", he was looking for a corner in a rural house. In the village of Talnovo, a lodger was brought to Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva, a lonely woman in her sixties.

Matryona's hut was old and solid, built for a large family. The spacious room was darkish, at the window in pots and tubs silently "crowded" ficuses - favoritesmistresses. There was also a rickety cat, mice, and cockroaches in the tiny kitchenette.

Matryona Vasilievna was ill, but she was not given disability, and she did not receive a pension, having no relation to the working class. On the collective farm she worked for workdays, that is, there was no money.

Matryona herself ate and fed Ignatich - the guest teacher - poorly: small potatoes and porridge from the cheapest cereals. The villagers were forced to steal fuel from the trust, for which they could be imprisoned. Although peat was mined in the area, local residents were not supposed to sell it.

Matrona's hard life consisted of various things: collecting peat and dry stumps, as well as lingonberries in the swamps, running around offices for pension certificates, secretly extracting hay for a goat, as well as relatives and neighbors. But this winter, life got a little better - she let go of her illness, and they began to pay her for a tenant and a tiny pension. She was happy that she was able to order new felt boots, turn an old railway overcoat into a coat and buy a new padded jacket.

Summary of "Matrenin Dvor" (Part 2)

Once the teacher found in the hut a black bearded old man - Faddey Grigoriev, who came to ask for his son-loser. It turned out that Matryona was supposed to marry Thaddeus, but he was taken to the war, and for three years there was no news from him. Efim, his younger brother, wooed her (after the death of her mother, there were not enough hands in the family), and she went to marry him in a hut built by their father, where she has lived to this day.

Thaddeus, returning from captivity, did not chop them onlybecause he took pity on his brother. He married, choosing also Matryona, cut down a new hut, where he now lived with his wife and six children. That other Matryona, after being beaten, often resorted to complaining about her husband's greed and cruelty.

Matryona Vasilievna had no children of her own, she buried six newborns before the war. Yefim was taken to the war and went missing.

Then Matryona asked her namesake for a baby to raise. She raised, as if she were her own, the girl Kira, whom she successfully married - to a young driver in a neighboring village, from where help was sometimes sent to her. Often ill, the woman decided to bequeath part of the hut to Kira, although three Matryona sisters counted on her.

Kira asked for her inheritance in order to eventually build a house. Old Thaddeus demanded to give up the hut during Matryona's life, although she was sorry to death to break the house in which she had lived for forty years.

He gathered relatives to dismantle the upper room, and then reassemble it again, he built a hut together with his father for himself and the first Matryona. While the men's axes were clattering, the women were preparing moonshine and snacks.

When transporting a hut at a railway crossing, a sleigh with boards got stuck. Three people died under the wheels of a steam locomotive, including Matryona.

Summary of "Matrenin Dvor" (Part 3)

At a village funeral, the funeral was more like a settling of scores. Matryona's sisters, lamenting over the coffin, expressed their thoughts - they defended the rights to her inheritance, but the relatives of the late husband did not agree. Insatiable ThaddeusBy hook or by crook, he dragged the logs of the donated upper room into his yard: it was indecent and shameful to lose good.

Listening to the opinions of fellow villagers about Matryona, the teacher realized that she did not fit into the usual framework of peasant ideas about happiness: she did not keep a pig, did not strive to acquire goodness and outfits that hide all the vices and ugliness of the soul under her brilliance. The grief from the loss of her children and her husband did not make her angry and heartless: she still helped everyone for free and rejoiced in all the good things that she met in life. And all she got was ficuses, a rickety cat and a dirty white goat. Everyone who lived nearby did not understand that she was the true righteous woman, without whom neither the village, nor the city, nor our land could stand.

In his story Solzhenitsyn ("Matryona's Dvor"), the summary does not include this episode, he writes that Matryona believed passionately, rather she was a pagan. But it turned out that in her life she did not deviate one iota from the rules of Christian morality and morality.