Matryona and Faddey Mironovich. Matryona. Thaddeus. "Verb" characteristic. "Verb" characteristic. Good. Good. Everything is positive, good, useful. Property, things. She spoke (i.e. came out) whispered dropped (i.e. said) hid opened. He became worried, caught fire to seize, often demanded, pressed with ardor.

Literature Grade 8

"Creating the Comedy" The Inspector General "" - the Tsar at the comedy performance. Updating knowledge about the life and work of the writer. Brief information about N.V. Gogol. N.V. Gogol and A.S. Pushkin. Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky. Artemy Filippovich Strawberries. Events that influenced the creation of comedy. Ivan Alekseevich Khlestakov. Stage history of comedy. epigraph to comedy. The role of the mayor. Drama. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. History of the play. Poster.

"The cycle of Gogol's St. Petersburg stories" - Personality with society. Discussion of the work plan. Creative tasks. Continuer of traditions. methodological goals. Composition. The results of the research work of students. The last day of Pompeii. Appearance of Christ to the people. Researcher submission results. Peak lady. Diagnostic results. Storyline and composition. Petersburg and Moscow. Antithesis. Pushkin Petersburg. Arap of Peter the Great. Formation of competence.

"Gamzatov" - The art of dance. The world without Rasul Gamzatov. Rasul Gamzatov. Rasul Gamzatov's books have been translated into many languages ​​of the world. The art of literary translation is the art of communication. Take care of your friends. Beauty of Dagestan. Children at home alone. Monument to white cranes. Cranes. Popular recognition. Competitions, concerts, exhibitions. Art, understandable without words. Mother tongue is our great heritage. "Take care of the children." Art is a conductor of spiritual energy.

"Tvardovsky "For the distance - distance"" - Tomsk Cadet Corps. Vocabulary work. Old friend. Own perception. Questions. To a new distance. Poetry of Tvardovsky. Song. Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky. Genre originality of the poem.

"Hokku" - Garden of stones. Summarizing what was learned in the lesson. Tank. Origami. Haiku form analysis. Japan. Meaning. Issho. Hokku composition. Haiku as the main genre of Japanese poetry. How is it, friends. Demonstration material for the lesson. Plant. Japanese tanks. Ikebana. Rare scroll. Bonsai. Haiku content analysis. Hanami. Educated Japanese. Basho. Horse. Buson. Sakura. Haiku. Literature of Japan. Culture of Japan.

"The years of the life of Saltykov-Shchedrin" - Saltykov-Shchedrin sharply condemned the assassination of Alexander II. In 1889, the writer's health deteriorated sharply. Achievements of Saltykov-Shchedrin. The writer's parents The story "Contradictions" was called by Belinsky "idiotic stupidity." Statements about ME Saltykov - Shchedrin. Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin 1826 - 1889. N. G. Chernyshevsky Shchedrin has a magnificent, purely folk, well-aimed style ... L. N. Tolstoy. The novel "Poshekhonskaya antiquity" is considered partly biographical.

Natalya Belyaeva

Natalya Vasilievna Belyaeva - Chief Researcher of the Institute of Content and Teaching Methods of the Russian Academy of Education, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, Honored Teacher of the Russian Federation.

Lessons from Solzhenitsyn

We read "Matryonin Dvor"

First lesson

... To show the world a society in which all relations, foundations and laws will follow from morality - and only from it!

A.I. Solzhenitsyn. "Cancer Ward"

A word about a writer

You can start the lesson by showing the gallery of portraits of the writer and the story of the teacher and students about the life and work of Solzhenitsyn. For this, textbook materials and the writer's autobiography can be used. The main provisions of the story can be arranged in the form of a table (see Table 1), the second column of which the students will fill in, listening to the teacher and learning how to draw up a lecture summary (they will complete this work at home).

Table 1

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"Matryonin Dvor": paintings of the post-war village

Starting to study the story "Matryonin Dvor", schoolchildren can remember which female images of Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries are close to the image of the main character of the story. They will probably name Gorky's grandmother Akulina Ivanovna Kashirina, peasant women in Nekrasov's poetry and Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter.

Questions to identify perception.

Sympathy, pity, irritation or admiration does the main character of the story, Matryona, evoke in you? Justify your opinion.

Why does the writer begin his story with a “mystery”: “... Since a good six months After that all the trains were slowing down…”? Is it possible to guess immediately after what?

Try to prove that the pictures of the post-war village depicted in the story are reliable. (Exactly as in the essay, the place and time of events are indicated, the toponyms used in the text are reliable, the features of the local dialect are preserved.)

What impression did the language of the story make on you? How does the author feel about local words and expressions? Why?

The image of the narrator

Research work with the text can be started by studying the feelings of Ignatich, on whose behalf the narration is being conducted (see Table 2).

table 2

What in the life of the post-war village, the district center and the whole country causes him bright feelings, and what - irritation?

How is the village of Talnovo depicted?

Describe the narrator. What is his position in life? What is important to him, and what is secondary? Find examples of author's humor.

Follow the life path of teacher Ignatich. How did Matryona treat him? Why did they “live easily”?

The table can be continued with other examples. Similar research work can be organized for the second and third parts of the story.

The theme of righteousness in the story

Introductory question.

What is the original title of the story? How does it relate to the epigraph to the lesson?

Solzhenitsyn approaches the theme of righteousness, a favorite in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century, delicately, unobtrusively, and even with humor. Speaking about Matryona, his hero remarks: “Only she had fewer sins than her rickety cat. She choked mice!..” The writer rethinks the images of the righteous in Russian literature and depicts the righteous not as a person who has gone through many sins, repented and began to live like a god. He makes righteousness a natural way of life for the heroine. At the same time, Matryona is not a typical image, she is not like other “Talnovskaya women” who live by material interests. She is one of those "three righteous people" who are so hard to find.

Final questions.

Can it be argued that, using the example of a particular case from the life of one Russian peasant woman, the writer tells about the fate of the village as a whole and the fate of the whole country?

What is the narrative space? Is it limited to the village of Talnovo and the railway station Torfoprodukt? What cross-cutting images are associated with the artistic space of the story? What is their symbolic meaning?

Summary of the lesson. In the story "Matryonin Dvor", the documentary and accuracy inherent in the essay genre are combined with such compositional means that help individual facts from the author's private life become facts of art, a literary text. Reflections on the diligence and patience of one Russian woman develop into a broad narrative about the fate of the Russian village after the war, about the injustices in the country, about the dark and bright sides of the Russian character.

The narrator, teacher Ignatich, is a former prisoner who dreams of returning “from the dusty hot desert” back to Russia. Choosing a school for work, he asks “away from the railway”, looking for a quieter place to live, but this “away from the railway” seems to portend someone's death. Like Matryona, Ignatich does not live by material interests. Matryona does not interfere with his evening classes, listens to his radio, her face was captured by his camera.

The artistic space of the story is interesting. It starts with its name, then expands to the railway station, which is located “one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the branch that goes from Murom to Kazan”, and to the villages “over the hill”, and then covers the entire country that accepts foreign delegation, and extends even into the Universe, which artificial satellites of the Earth should fill. The images of the house and the road are associated with the category of space, symbolizing the life path of the characters.

Homework. Make a plan for a story about the life of Matryona. Prepare for group work on the following questions: what is common and different 1) in the images of Matryona and other residents of the village of Talnovo; 2) in the images of Matryona and Ignatich; 3) in the images of Matryona and Thaddeus. To study the semantic content of the concept of “parable” using the dictionary of literary terms.

Lesson two

… If, according to popular belief, not a single city stands without three righteous ones, then how can the whole earth with one rubbish that lives both in mine and in your soul, my reader, stand up.
It was both terrible and unbearable for me, and I went to look for the righteous, I went with a vow not to calm down until I found at least that small number of the three righteous, without whom there is no city of standing.

N.S. Leskov. Preface to the cycle "The Righteous"

The image of the righteous

You can start a conversation about the main character of the story by comparing two quotes about Russian women. The first is from Leskov's novel "Soboryane": "Where, besides our holy Rus', will women like this virtue be born?"; the second is Tyutchev's poem "Russian Woman".

Far from the sun and nature
Far from light and art
Far away from life and love
Your younger years will flash,
Feelings that are alive will die,
Your dreams will shatter...
And your life will pass unseen
In a land deserted, nameless,
On unseen land,
How the cloud of smoke disappears
In the sky dim and misty
In the autumn endless haze ...

What in these quotes is close to the image of Matryona? How does the heroine differ from the characteristics of Russian women in the 19th century?

In the center of our lesson is the study of the main features of the image of Matryona, which can be organized in groups.

Group 1. Matryona and other residents of the village of Talnovo.

What is common in the life of Matryona and other villagers? (They got up early; they all went to work together, quietly stealing peat piled up to dry; they ate only potatoes; there was no radio in the houses, and electricity seemed a miracle.)

How did Matryona differ from other residents of the Talnovo village? (Matryona went to work, even if she was sick; she didn’t “settle scores” and didn’t discuss “who went out and who didn’t go out”; she could not refuse when someone asked for help in agricultural work: dig potatoes, plow a garden ; didn’t take money for work; fed the shepherds with food that she didn’t eat herself; didn’t annoy anyone with questions; didn’t gossip; raised someone else’s girl; gave the upper room to her adopted daughter. But after her death, all the reviews about her were disapproving: “... and didn’t chase the equipment , and not careful; and did not even keep a pig; ... and, stupid, helped strangers for free "; did not chase outfits, did not accumulate property for death; the sister-in-law "spoke with contemptuous regret" about Matryona's cordiality and simplicity.)

Group 2 Matryona and Ignatich.

What brings together and what distinguishes Matryona and Ignatich? (See Table 3.)

Table 3

Group 3. Matryona and Thaddeus.

Compare Matryona and Thaddeus. How do they behave in close life situations? (See Table 4.)

Table 4

The tragedy of the fate of Matryona

The tragedy of Matryona's fate is not only in the lost fiancé, missing husband and dead children. She experienced these events together with the whole country. The tragedy of her life manifested itself when Matryona, having given away part of the house without pity, becomes a victim of human greed, money-grubbing, drunkenness. And the country, after the war finally turned into a bureaucratic state, found itself on different sides with the people. The peasants did not have passports, they were not paid wages and pensions, they did not have timber to build houses, they did not give collective farm tractors for private transportation, etc. The tragedy is that the villagers could not understand those good feelings that guided Matryona in life. Therefore, even after her death, her relatives want to quickly capture the “good” that was left after her.

What caused Matryona's death? The external cause of death was her dedication, the desire to help, and not sit on the sidelines. That is why she finds herself between a sleigh and a tractor at the ill-fated railway crossing. But the catastrophes of the 20th century are inexorably knocking on the fate of Matryona, revealing the deep, hidden causes of her death. Wars take away her fiancé, who loved her, then her husband. Post-war hunger and lack of medical care deprive her of six children. She also becomes a hostage of the Soviet state, in which it is impossible to honestly and openly transport her own hut, but you can trust a drunk driver who quietly took a collective farm tractor.

Among the underlying causes of the tragic death of the heroine is her attachment to Thaddeus and his pupil, his daughter Kira. It is she who involuntarily becomes the culprit of the destruction of the house where she lived with Matryona and where Matryona herself lived for forty years. The people who dismantled the upper room did not think that they were destroying the house, the main value of the family, its cornerstone. The death of the house predetermined the death of Matryona. She would no longer be able to live in a mutilated house. The author also condemns the greed, greed, money-grubbing of Thaddeus, who is obsessed with the desire to seize a piece of land. Hence his order not to make a second flight, and the removal of the surviving logs during the funeral and commemoration. The son-in-law of Matryona is also to blame - the railway worker who did not warn the station about the transportation.

Three extinct destinies is a payment for the safety of the lives of the passengers of the twenty-first ambulance. So the private fate of an ordinary Russian peasant woman turns out to be connected with the ups and downs of the cruel twentieth century, and with the fate of Russian women of the nineteenth century.

The moral meaning of the story-parable

What is the moral meaning of the story told by the writer? Solzhenitsyn endowed the very concept of “righteous” with new content. Even the road, as a symbol of people's fate, becomes in the story an iron road, in a figurative sense, inexorable, destructive. The moralizing, parable meaning of the story is that one cannot live only for oneself, to be a money-grubber and a hoarder. The meaning of human existence is in kindness, selflessness and the radiance that a person can radiate, illuminating the fate of other people.

Homework. Answer one of the questions in writing.

What has changed in the sense of Solzhenitsyn's story "A village is not worth without a righteous man" when the writer called it "Matryonin Dvor"?

How did the fate of the heroes of the story reflect the events of the history of Russia in the post-war period?

What is the righteousness of Matryona?

Without accumulating "wealth" and without having acquired any "good", Matrena Grigorieva managed to preserve for those around her a sociable disposition and a heart capable of compassion. She was a rare person with an immensely kind soul, who did not lose the ability to respond to someone else's misfortune. So, not a single plowing could do without it. Together with other women, she harnessed herself to the plow and dragged it on herself. Matryona could not refuse her help to any relative, even if she herself had urgent business. The absence of any self-interest and the desire to preserve “her” good leads to the fact that Matryona resignedly gives Kira and her husband the upper room, cut off from the old house.

“It was not a pity for the chamber itself, which stood idle, as Matryona never spared any labor or goodness of her own. And the chamber was bequeathed to Kira anyway. But it was terrible for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years ...

And for Matryona it was the end of life. In the second part of the story, the reader learns about Matrena Vasilievna's youth. From a young age, fate did not indulge the heroine: without waiting for her only love, Thaddeus, she married his younger brother, and when her beloved returned, he uttered terrible words that Matryona remembered for her whole life: “... if not for her brother my dear - I would chop both of you.

The image of the righteous woman Matryona in the story is contrasted by Thaddeus. In his words about the marriage of Matryona with his brother, fierce hatred is felt. The return of Thaddeus reminded Matryona of their wonderful past. In Thaddeus, nothing faltered after the misfortune with Matryona, he even looked at her dead body with some indifference. The train crash, under which both the room and the people who transported it, was predetermined by the petty desire of Thaddeus and his relatives to save on small things, not to drive the tractor twice, but to get by with one flight.

Many after her death began to reproach Matryona. So, the sister-in-law said about her: “... she was unclean, and she didn’t chase the furnishing, and she wasn’t careful; ... and stupid, helping strangers for free. Even Ignatich admits with pain and remorse: “There is no Matrena. A family member was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for her quilted jacket.

But if you think about it, would many of us be able to help strangers “for free” without striving to accumulate goodness or distribute it to others? And Matryona was able to Solzhenitsyn in her story "Matryona Dvor" seeks to warn the reader that righteousness is slowly leaving our lives, and this process is very dangerous, as it is associated with the destruction of the fundamental foundations of the national character. Together with Matryona, thousand-year-old Russia goes into the past, into oblivion. And only on such righteous people as Matryona, our great country still rests.

“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, there is no village, no city, or our whole land ...”.

The meaning of the title of the story, I think, is that without Matryona Vasilievna, there will be no normal life in the village of Talnovo. She was the center of everything that was happening, she added a particle of herself to the whole village life, work. She can rightfully be considered a hostess, because even the authorities, who, in fact, should help everyone, I turn to Matryona for help, “not a single plowing of the garden could do without Matryona,” nothing could do without Matryona.

And you can also say that Matryona's yard is her home, after the destruction of which her life is destroyed, the yard of selflessness, righteousness.

Without such people, Rus' will perish.

In the work “Matryona Dvor”, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn describes the life of a hardworking, smart, but very lonely woman - Matryona, whom no one understood or appreciated, but everyone tried to take advantage of her diligence and responsiveness.

The very title of the story "Matryona Dvor" can be interpreted in different ways. In the first case, for example, the word "yard" can simply mean Matryona's way of life, her household, her purely domestic worries and difficulties. In the second case, perhaps, we can say that the word "yard" focuses the reader's attention on the fate of the Matryona house itself, the Matryona economic yard itself. In the third case, the "yard" symbolizes the circle of people who were somehow interested in Matryona.

Each of the above meanings of the word "yard" contains the tragedy that is inherent, perhaps, in the lifestyle of every woman who looks like Matryona. But still in the third meaning, it seems to me, the tragedy is greatest. Here we are no longer talking about the difficulties of life and not about loneliness, but about the fact that even death cannot make people one day think about justice and the right attitude to human dignity. Much stronger in people is the fear for themselves, their lives, and the fate of others is of little concern to them. “Then I learned that crying over the deceased is not just crying, but a kind of mark. Matrona's three sisters flocked, seized the hut, the goat and the oven, locked her chest with a padlock, gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat, and told everyone that they were the only ones close to Matryona.

I think that in this case all three meanings of the word “yard” add up, and each of them reflects one or another tragic picture: the soullessness, deadness of the “living yard” that surrounded Matryona during her lifetime and later divided her household; the fate of Matryona's hut after Matryona's death and during Matryona's lifetime; the absurd death of Matryona.

The main feature of Solzhenitsyn's literary language is that Alexander Isaevich himself gives an explanatory interpretation of many of the replicas of the heroes of the story, and this reveals to us the veil behind which lies the very mood of Solzhenitsyn, his personal attitude to each of the heroes.

However, I got the impression that the author's interpretations are somewhat ironic, but at the same time they somehow synthesize replicas and leave in them only the ins and outs, undisguised, true meaning. "Ah, aunty aunty! And how could you not take care of yourself! And, probably, now they are offended by us! And you are our dear, and all your fault! And the upper room has nothing to do with it, and why did you go to where death guarded you? And no one called you there! And how you died - did not think! Why didn't you listen to us? (And from all these lamentations, the answer stuck out: we are not to blame for her death, but we’ll talk about the hut later!) ”

Reading between the lines of Solzhenitsyn's story, one can understand that Alexander Isaevich himself draws completely different conclusions from what he heard than those that could be expected. “And only then - from these disapproving reviews of the sister-in-law - did the image of Matryona emerge before me, which I did not understand her, even living side by side with her.” “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village cannot stand.” Involuntarily, the words of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery come to mind, the meaning of which is that in reality everything is not the same as in reality.

Matryona is a contrast to the environment, which in Solzhenitsyn's story is expressed through the anger, envy and money-grubbing of people. With her way of life, Matryona proved that anyone who exists in this world can be honest and righteous if he lives with a righteous idea and is strong in spirit.

The image of Thaddeus in the story "Matryonin Dvor"

Without accumulating "wealth" and without having acquired any "good", Matrena Grigorieva managed to preserve for those around her a sociable disposition and a heart capable of compassion. She was a rare person with an immensely kind soul, who did not lose the ability to respond to someone else's misfortune. So, not a single plowing could do without it. Together with other women, she harnessed herself to the plow and dragged it on herself. Matryona could not refuse her help to any relative, even if she herself had urgent business. The absence of any self-interest and the desire to preserve “her” good leads to the fact that Matryona resignedly gives Kira and her husband the upper room, cut off from the old house.

“It was not a pity for the chamber itself, which stood idle, as Matryona never spared any labor or goodness of her own. And the chamber was bequeathed to Kira anyway. But it was terrible for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years ...

And for it was the end of life. In the second part of the story, the reader learns about Matrena Vasilievna's youth. From a young age, fate did not indulge the heroine: without waiting for her only love, Thaddeus, she married his younger brother, and when her beloved returned, he uttered terrible words that Matryona remembered for her whole life: “... if not for her brother my dear - I would chop both of you.

The image of the righteous woman Matryona in the story is contrasted by Thaddeus. In his words about the marriage of Matryona with his brother, fierce hatred is felt. The return of Thaddeus reminded Matryona of their wonderful past. In Thaddeus, nothing faltered after the misfortune with Matryona, he even looked at her dead body with some indifference. The train crash, under which both the room and the people who transported it, was predetermined by the petty desire of Thaddeus and his relatives to save on small things, not to drive the tractor twice, but to get by with one flight.

Many after her death began to reproach Matryona. So, the sister-in-law said about her: “... she was unclean, and she didn’t chase the furnishing, and she wasn’t careful; ... and stupid, helping strangers for free. Even Ignatich admits with pain and remorse: “There is no Matrena. A family member was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for her quilted jacket.

But if you think about it, would many of us be able to help strangers “for free” without striving to accumulate goodness or distribute it to others? And Matryona was able to Solzhenitsyn in her story "Matryona Dvor" seeks to warn the reader that righteousness is slowly leaving our lives, and this process is very dangerous, as it is associated with the destruction of the fundamental foundations of the national character. Together with Matryona, thousand-year-old Russia goes into the past, into oblivion. And only on such righteous people as Matryona, our great country still rests.

“We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, there is no village, no city, or our whole land ...”.

The meaning of the title of the story, I think, is that without Matryona Vasilievna, there will be no normal life in the village of Talnovo. She was the center of everything that was happening, she added a particle of herself to the whole village life, work. She can rightfully be considered a hostess, because even the authorities, who, in fact, should help everyone, I turn to Matryona for help, “not a single plowing of the garden could do without Matryona,” nothing could do without Matryona.

And you can also say that Matryona's yard is her home, after the destruction of which her life is destroyed, the yard of selflessness, righteousness.

Without such people, Rus' will perish.

In the work “Matryona Dvor”, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn describes the life of a hardworking, smart, but very lonely woman - Matryona, whom no one understood or appreciated, but everyone tried to take advantage of her diligence and responsiveness.

The very title of the story "Matryona Dvor" can be interpreted in different ways. In the first case, for example, the word "yard" can simply mean Matryona's way of life, her household, her purely domestic worries and difficulties. In the second case, perhaps, we can say that the word "yard" focuses the reader's attention on the fate of the Matryona house itself, the Matryona economic yard itself. In the third case, the "yard" symbolizes the circle of people who were somehow interested in Matryona.

Each of the above meanings of the word "yard" contains the tragedy that is inherent, perhaps, in the lifestyle of every woman who looks like Matryona. But still in the third meaning, it seems to me, the tragedy is greatest. Here we are no longer talking about the difficulties of life and not about loneliness, but about the fact that even death cannot make people one day think about justice and the right attitude to human dignity. Much stronger in people is the fear for themselves, their lives, and the fate of others is of little concern to them. “Then I learned that crying over the deceased is not just crying, but a kind of mark. Matrona's three sisters flocked, seized the hut, the goat and the oven, locked her chest with a padlock, gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat, and told everyone that they were the only ones close to Matryona.

I think that in this case all three meanings of the word “yard” add up, and each of them reflects one or another tragic picture: the soullessness, deadness of the “living yard” that surrounded Matryona during her lifetime and later divided her household; the fate of Matryona's hut after Matryona's death and during Matryona's lifetime; the absurd death of Matryona.

The main feature of Solzhenitsyn's literary language is that Alexander Isaevich himself gives an explanatory interpretation of many of the replicas of the heroes of the story, and this reveals to us the veil behind which lies the very mood of Solzhenitsyn, his personal attitude to each of the heroes.

However, I got the impression that the author's interpretations are somewhat ironic, but at the same time they somehow synthesize replicas and leave in them only the ins and outs, undisguised, true meaning. "Ah, aunty aunty! And how could you not take care of yourself! And, probably, now they are offended by us! And you are our dear, and all your fault! And the upper room has nothing to do with it, and why did you go to where death guarded you? And no one called you there! And how you died - did not think! Why didn't you listen to us? (And from all these lamentations, the answer stuck out: we are not to blame for her death, but we’ll talk about the hut later!) ”

Reading between the lines of Solzhenitsyn's story, one can understand that Alexander Isaevich himself draws completely different conclusions from what he heard than those that could be expected. “And only then - from these disapproving reviews of the sister-in-law - did the image of Matryona emerge before me, which I did not understand her, even living side by side with her.” “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village cannot stand.” Involuntarily, the words of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery come to mind, the meaning of which is that in reality everything is not the same as in reality.

Matryona is a contrast to the environment, which in Solzhenitsyn's story is expressed through the anger, envy and money-grubbing of people. With her way of life, Matryona proved that anyone who exists in this world can be honest and righteous if he lives with a righteous idea and is strong in spirit.

teacher's word

A writer is judged by his best works. Among Solzhenitsyn's stories published in the 1960s, Matrenin Dvor was always put in first place. He was called "brilliant", "a truly brilliant work." "The story is true", "the story is talented", it was noted in criticism. Among Solzhenitsyn's stories, he stands out for his strict artistry, the integrity of his poetic embodiment, and the consistency of his artistic taste.

Question

Where does the story take place?

Answer

At "one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow." The exact indication of the place is important. On the one hand, it tends to the center of European Russia, to Moscow itself, on the other hand, the remoteness, the wilderness of the regions described in the story is emphasized. This is the place that is most characteristic of the then Russia.

Question

What is the name of the station where the story takes place? What is the absurdity of this name?

Answer

The industrial and prosaic name of the station "Peat product" cuts the ear: "Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!"

The lines following this ironic phrase are written in a completely different tone: “The wind of calmness drew me from the names of other villages: High Field, Talnovo, Chaslitsy, Shevertni, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shestimirovo.”

In this inconsistency of toponymy is the key to the subsequent understanding of the contrasts of everyday life and being.

Question

From whose perspective is the story being told? What is the role of the narrator?

Answer

The narrator, who leads the story, being an intellectual teacher, constantly writing “something of his own” at a dimly lit table, is put in the position of an outside observer-chronicler, trying to understand Matryona and everything “that happens to us.”

Teacher's comment

Matrenin Dvor is an autobiographical work. This is Solzhenitsyn's story about himself, about the situation in which he found himself, having returned in the summer of 1956 "from the dusty hot desert." He "wanted to get lost in the very interior of Russia", to find "a quiet corner of Russia away from the railways."

Ignatich (under this name the author appears before us) feels the delicacy of his position: a former camp inmate (Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated in 1957) could only be hired for hard work - to carry a stretcher. He also had other desires: “But I was drawn to teaching.” And in the structure of this phrase with its expressive dash, and in the choice of words, the mood of the hero is conveyed, the most cherished is expressed.

Question

What is the theme of the story?

Answer

The main theme of the story "Matryona Dvor" is "how people live." This is what Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn wants to understand and wants to tell about. The whole movement of the plot of his story is aimed at comprehending the secret of the character of the main character.

Exercise

Tell us about the heroine of the story.

Answer

The heroine of the story is a simple village woman Matryona. Numerous misfortunes fell to her lot - the capture of the groom, the death of her husband, the death of six children, a serious illness and resentment - deceit in the calculation for hellish work, poverty, expulsion from the collective farm, deprivation of pensions, callousness of bureaucrats.

Matrena's poverty looks from all angles. But where will prosperity come from in a peasant house?

“It was only later that I found out,” says Ignatich, “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 filthy record book.

These words will be supplemented by the story of Matryona herself about how many grievances she endured, bustling about her pension, about how she got peat for the stove, hay for the goat.

Teacher's comment

The heroine of the story is not a character invented by the writer. The author writes about a real person - Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova, with whom he lived in the 50s. Natalya Reshetovskaya's book "Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Reading Russia" contains photographs taken by Solzhenitsyn of Matrena Vasilievna, her house, and the room that the writer rented. His story-recollection echoes the words of A.T. Tvardovsky, who remembers his neighbor, Aunt Daria,

With her hopeless patience,
With her hut without canopy,
And with an empty workday,
And with hard work - not fuller ...
With all the trouble
Yesterday's war
And a grave current misfortune.

It is noteworthy that these lines and Solzhenitsyn's story were written at about the same time. In both works, the story of the fate of the peasant woman develops into reflections on the brutal ruin of the Russian village in the war and post-war period. “But can you tell me about it, what years you lived ...” This line from M. Isakovsky’s poem is consonant with the prose of F. Abramov, who tells about the fate of Anna and Lisa Pryaslins, Marfa Repina ... This is the literary context in which the story “Matryona’s Yard” falls "!

But Solzhenitsyn's story was written not only to reiterate the suffering and troubles that a Russian woman endured. Let us turn to the words of A. T. Tvardovsky, taken from his speech at the session of the Governing Council of the European Writers Association: “Why is the fate of an old peasant woman, told in a few pages, of such great interest to us? This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. And, however, her spiritual world is endowed with such a quality that we talk with her, as with Anna Karenina.

After reading this speech in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Solzhenitsyn immediately wrote to Tvardovsky: “Needless to say, the paragraph of your speech referring to Matryona means a lot to me. You pointed to the very essence - a woman who loves and suffers, while all the criticism scoured all the time from above, comparing the Talnovsky collective farm and neighboring ones.

Question

How can we characterize Matryona? How did the troubles affect her character?

Answer

Despite the misfortunes endured, Matryona managed to preserve in herself exceptional kindness, mercy, humanity, disinterestedness, readiness to always help others, great diligence, gentleness, patience, independence, delicacy.

That is why she married Yefim, because there were not enough hands in his ome. That's why she took Kira upbringing, that it was necessary to alleviate the fate of Thaddeus and somehow connect herself with his family. She helped any neighbor, harnessed the sixth to the plow during plowing, for general work, not being a collective farmer, she always went out. To help Kira acquire a piece of land, she gave her upper room. She even picked up a lame cat out of compassion.

Due to her delicacy, she did not want to interfere with another, she could not burden someone. By virtue of her kindness, she rushed to help the peasants, who were taking away part of her hut.

This gracious soul lived on the joys of others, and therefore a radiant, kind smile often illuminated her simple, round face.

Survive what Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova went through, and remain a disinterested, open, delicate, sympathetic person, not get angry at fate and people, keep your “radiant smile” until old age ... What mental strength is needed for this ?!

Question

How is the character of the heroine revealed in the story?

Answer

Matryona reveals herself not so much in her ordinary present as in her past. She herself, recalling her youth, confessed to Ignatich: “It was you who had not seen me before, Ignatich. 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.

Young, strong, beautiful, Matryona was from that breed of Russian peasant women that "stops a galloping horse." And it was like this: “Once the horse, out of fear, carried the sleigh into the lake, the men galloped away, and I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped it ...” - says Matryona. And at the last moment of her life, she rushed to “help the peasants” at the crossing - and died.

Matryona will be most fully revealed in the dramatic episodes of the second part of the story. They are connected with the arrival of the "tall black old man", Thaddeus, the brother of Matryona's husband, who did not return from the war. Thaddeus came not to Matryona, but to the teacher to ask for his eighth-grader son. Left alone with Matryona, Ignatich forgot to think about the old man, and even about herself. And suddenly from her dark corner she heard:

“I, Ignatich, once nearly married him.
She got up from the shabby rag bed and slowly came out to me, as if following her words. I leaned back - and for the first time I saw Matryona in a completely new way ...
- He was the first to marry me ... before Yefim ... He was an older brother ... I was nineteen, Thaddeus was twenty-three ... They lived in this very house then. Theirs was a house. Built by their father.
I looked around involuntarily. This old gray decaying house suddenly appeared to me through the faded green skin of the wallpaper, under which mice were running, as young, not yet darkened then, planed logs and a cheerful resinous smell.
- And you him? .. And what? ..
“That summer ... we went with him to sit in the grove,” she whispered. - There was a grove here ... Almost did not come out, Ignatich. The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war.
She dropped it and flashed before me the blue, white and yellow July of the fourteenth year: still a peaceful sky, floating clouds and people boiling with ripe stubble. I imagined them side by side: a resin hero with a scythe across his back; her, ruddy, hugging the sheaf. And - a song, a song under the sky ...
- He went to war - disappeared ... For three years I hid, waited. And no news, and no bones ...
Tied with an old faded handkerchief, Matrona's round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp - as if freed from wrinkles, from everyday careless attire - frightened, girlish, before a terrible choice.

Answer

The former lover and groom appears as a kind of "black man", foreshadowing misfortune, and then becomes the direct culprit of the death of the heroine.

Solzhenitsyn generously, seven times uses the epithet "black" within one paragraph at the beginning of the second chapter. The ax in the hands of Thaddeus (Ignatius clearly imagines him in the hands of this man) gives rise to associations with the ax of Raskolnikov, who kills an innocent victim, and at the same time with the ax of Lopakhin.

The story also evokes other literary associations. "The Black Man" also reminds Pushkin's gloomy stranger in "Mozart and Salieri".

Question

Are there other symbols in the story "Matryona Dvor"?

Answer

Many symbols of Solzhenitsyn are associated with Christian symbols: images-symbols of the way of the cross, the righteous, the martyr.

Question

What is the symbolic meaning of the story?

Answer

The courtyard, Matrona's house, is the “shelter” that the narrator finally finds in search of “interior Russia” after many years of camps and homelessness: “I didn’t like this place in the whole village.” Solzhenitsyn did not accidentally call his work "Matryona Dvor". This is one of the key images of the story. The description of the courtyard, detailed, with a mass of details, is devoid of bright colors: Matryona lives "in the wilderness." It is important for the author to emphasize the inseparability of the house and the person: if the house is destroyed, its mistress will also die.

“And the years went by, as the water floated…” As if from a folk song, this amazing proverb came into the story. It will contain the whole life of Matryona, all the forty years that have passed here. In this house, she will survive two wars - German and Patriotic, the death of six children who died in infancy, the loss of her husband, who went missing in the war. Here she will grow old, remain lonely, suffer need. All her wealth is a rickety cat, a goat and a crowd of ficuses.

The symbolic assimilation of the house of Russia is traditional, because the structure of the house is likened to the structure of the world.

teacher's word

The righteous Matryona is the moral ideal of the writer, on which, in his opinion, the life of society should be based. According to Solzhenitsyn, "the meaning of earthly existence is not in prosperity, but in the development of the soul." This idea is connected with the writer's understanding of the role of literature, its connection with the Christian tradition.

Solzhenitsyn continues one of the main traditions of Russian literature, according to which the writer sees his mission in preaching the truth, spirituality, he is convinced of the need to raise "eternal" questions and seek answers to them. He spoke about this in his Nobel lecture: “In Russian literature, the idea has long been innate to us that a writer can do a lot in his people - and should ... he is an accomplice in all the evil committed in his homeland or by his people.

Literature

N.V. Egorova, I.V. Zolotarev. Literature of the "thaw". Creativity A.I. Solzhenitsyn. // Lesson developments in Russian literature. XX century. Grade 11. II semester. M., 2004

V. Lakshin. Ivan Denisovich, his friends and enemies // New World. - 1964. - No. 1

P. Palamarchuk. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Guide. - M., 1991

George Niva. Solzhenitsyn. - M., 1993

V. Chalmaev. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: life and work. - M., 1994

E.S. Rogover. Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn // Russian literature of the XX century. SPb., 2002