To help the student: a summary and analysis of "Matrenin Dvor" by A. I. Solzhenitsyn

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

The work of the Russian Soviet prose writer AI Solzhenitsyn is one of the brightest and most significant pages of our literature.

His main merit to readers lies in the fact that the author made people think about their past, about the dark pages of history, told the cruel truth about many inhumane orders of the Soviet regime and revealed the origins of the lack of spirituality of subsequent - post-perestroika - generations. The story "Matryonin Dvor" is the most indicative in this regard.

History of creation and autobiographical motives

So, the history of creation and analysis. "Matryona Dvor" refers to stories, although in size it significantly exceeds the traditional boundaries of the mentioned literary genre. It was written in 1959, and printed - thanks to the efforts and efforts of Tvardovsky, the editor of the most progressive at that timeliterary magazine Novy Mir - in 1963. Four years of waiting is a very short period for a writer who spent time in camps with the stigma of "enemy of the people" and disgraced after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Let's continue the analysis. Progressive critics consider “Matryona Dvor” to be even a stronger and more significant work than “One Day …”. If in the story about the fate of prisoner Shukhov the reader was captivated by the novelty of the material, the boldness of the choice of the topic and its presentation, the accusatory power, then the story about Matryona impresses with its amazing language, mastery of the living Russian word and the highest moral charge, pure spirituality that fill the pages of the work. Solzhenitsyn planned to name the story like this: “A village is not worth without a righteous man,” so that the main theme and idea would be stated from the very beginning. But censorship would hardly have missed such a shocking title for the Soviet atheistic ideology, so the writer inserted these words at the end of his work, titled it by the name of the heroine. However, the story only benefited from the rearrangement.

What else is important to note while continuing the analysis? "Matrenin Dvor" is referred to the so-called village literature, rightly noting its fundamental importance for this trend in Russian verbal art. The principled and artistic truthfulness of the author, a firm moral position and heightened conscientiousness, the inability to compromise, as required by the censors and the situation, became the reason for further hushing up the story, on the one hand, and a vivid, living examplefor writers - Solzhenitsyn's contemporaries, on the other. The author's position is most fully correlated with the theme of the work. And it could not have been otherwise, telling about the righteous Matryona, an elderly peasant woman from the village of Talnovo, who lives in the most "interior", primordially Russian outback.

Solzhenitsyn knew the prototype of the heroine personally. In fact, he talks about himself - a former military man who spent a decade in camps and in a settlement, immensely tired of the hardships and injustices of life and eager to rest his soul in a calm and uncomplicated provincial silence. And Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva is Matryona Zakharova from the village of Miltsevo, in whose hut Alexander Isaevich rented a corner. And the life of Matryona from the story is a somewhat artistically generalized fate of a real simple Russian woman.

Theme and idea of the piece

Whoever read the story will not complicate the analysis. "Matryona Dvor" is a kind of parable about a disinterested woman, a woman of amazing kindness and gentleness. Her whole life is serving people. She worked on a collective farm for “workday sticks”, lost her he alth, and did not receive a pension. It is difficult for her to go to the city, it is difficult for her, and she does not like to complain, cry, and even more so to demand something. But when the chairman of the collective farm demands to go to work on harvesting or weeding, no matter how bad Matryona feels, she still goes and helps the common cause. And if the neighbors asked to help dig potatoes, she behaved the same way. She never took payment for her work, she rejoiced from the bottom of her heart at someone else's rich harvest and did notenvious when her potatoes were small, like fodder.

Matrenin Dvor is a composition based on the author's observations of the mysterious Russian soul. This is the soul of the heroine. Outwardly nondescript, living extremely poor, almost beggarly, she is unusually rich and beautiful with her inner world, her enlightenment. She never pursued we alth, and all her goodness is a goat, a gray legged cat, ficuses in the upper room and cockroaches. Having no children of her own, she raised and raised Kira, the daughter of her former fiancé. She gives her part of the hut, and during transportation, helping, she dies under the wheels of the train.

Analysis of the work "Matryona Dvor" helps to reveal an interesting pattern. During their lifetime, people like Matryona Vasilievna cause bewilderment, irritation, and condemnation in those around them and relatives. The same sisters of the heroine, “mourning” her, lament that nothing was left after her from things or other we alth, they have nothing to profit from. But with her death, it was as if some kind of light went out in the village, as if it became darker, more boring, sadder. After all, Matryona was the righteous woman on whom the world rests, and without which neither the village, nor the city, nor the Earth itself stands.

Yes, Matryona is a weak old woman. But what will happen to us when such last guardians of humanity, spirituality, cordiality and kindness disappear? This is what the writer invites us to think about …