Matryonin yard
At the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down almost to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows and went out into the vestibule: they were 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 drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.
In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to middle lane– without heat, with the leafy roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most intimate Russia - if such a thing existed somewhere, it lived.
A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. They told me knowledgeable people, that there is no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m passing through in vain.
But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the Vladimir oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that personnel they no longer sat here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:
– Tell me, do you need mathematicians? Somewhere away from the railway? I want to live there forever.
They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - after all, everyone is asking to go to the city, and bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - High Field. Just the name made my soul happy.
The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely 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 like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.
Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.
I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked and stamped on my order: “Peat product.”
Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!
At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barracks, there was a stern sign: “Only board the train from the station side!” A nail was scratched on the boards: “And without tickets.” And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: “No tickets.” I appreciated the exact meaning of these additions later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.
And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, raising his collective farm and receiving a Hero of Socialist Labor for himself.
The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous, poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses from the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.
A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling shrilly, dragged trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunk people wandering down the street and stabbing each other with knives.
This is where my 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. There was such a fresh wind blowing there at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.
I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. In the morning, the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.
I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:
- Drink, drink with all your heart. Are you a newcomer?
- Where are you from? – I brightened up.
And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock 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. And then there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.
A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy 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 turned out to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself had no place (she and her husband brought up her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; everywhere it was cramped and crowded.
So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.
“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. “But her latrine is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.”
Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, 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 to look like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the frame and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.
The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Behind front door the internal steps rose to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up to upper room– a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.
It was built long ago and soundly, on big family, and now there lived a lonely woman of about sixty.
When I entered the hut, it 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 part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness 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 also behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.
While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a bad illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,
- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.
And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.
And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:
- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.
We agreed on the price and 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 ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid a pension. Her family didn't help her much. And on the collective farm she did not work for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.
So I settled with Matryona Vasilyevna. We didn't 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 ficus trees away from the light, I placed a table at another window. There was electricity in the village - it was brought in from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers wrote then - “Ilyich’s light bulbs,” and the men, their eyes widening, said: “Tsar Fire!”
In the summer of 1956, the narrator (Ignatich) returns to Russia. His absence from the beginning of the war lasted for ten years. The man has nowhere to rush, and no one is waiting for him. The narrator is on his way to the Russian outback with forests and fields, where you can find solitude and tranquility. After long search he gets a job as a teacher in the village of Talnovo, which is located next to a village with the strange name Torfoprodukt.
At the local bazaar, the author meets a woman who finds him housing. Soon the narrator moves in with a lonely woman venerable age, whom everyone calls only by her first name - Matryona. In addition to the owner herself, the dilapidated house is inhabited by mice, cockroaches and a lame cat.
Every day Matryona woke up at five in the morning and went to feed the goat. Now she had to prepare breakfast for the tenant. Usually it was potatoes from the garden, soup from the same potatoes (cardboard) or barley porridge.
One day Matryona learned from her neighbors that a new pension law had been passed. He gave the woman a chance to receive a pension, which she was not paid. Matryona wanted to resolve this issue at all costs. But in reality, everything was quite complicated: the offices that needed to be visited were located in different directions from Talnovo. The woman had to walk several kilometers every day. Often such trips turned out to be in vain: either the accountant was not there, or the seal was taken away.
In Torfoprodukt and the surrounding villages they lived poorly. Since the soil in these places was sandy, harvests were scarce. And the peat bogs around belonged to the trust. Residents had to secretly stock up on fuel for the winter, hiding from the guards.
Fellow villagers often asked Matryona to help in the garden. She didn’t refuse anyone and didn’t even take money. She dropped what she was doing and went to help. Even on a foreign land, the woman worked with desire and was sincerely happy about the good result.
About once every month and a half it was Matryona’s turn to feed the goat shepherds. Such a lunch was not cheap for her, since she had to buy butter, sugar, canned food and other products at the general store. Matryona did not allow herself this, even on holidays, but ate only what grew in the garden.
The hostess loved to tell Ignatich a story about the horse Volchok, who once carried a sleigh into the lake. All the men got scared and jumped to the sides, and Matryona grabbed the horse by the bridle and stopped it. But she also had her fears. Matryona was afraid of fire and trains.
Finally, in the winter, the woman began to receive a pension, and her neighbors began to envy her. Matryona was able to order felt boots and a coat from an old overcoat and put aside two hundred rubles for the funeral. The woman seemed to come to life: her work was easier, and illnesses bothered her less often. Only one incident darkened Matryona’s mood - at Epiphany, someone took her pot of holy water from the church. The missing item was never found.
Neighbors often asked the woman about Ignatich. Matryona passed on questions from her fellow villagers to the lodger, but did not ask anything herself. The author only told the owner that he was in prison. He himself never delved into Matryona’s soul or asked about the past.
One day Ignatich found the black-haired old man Thaddeus in the house, who had come to ask for a teacher for his son Anton. The teenager was famous throughout the school for his bad behavior and falling behind in subjects. In the eighth grade, he did not yet know fractions and did not know what triangles were.
After Thaddeus left, Matryona was silent for a long time, and then suddenly began to open up with the tenant. It turned out that Thaddeus - brother her husband. In their youth, Matryona and this black-haired old man were in love with each other and were planning to start a family. Their plans were interrupted by the First World War. Thaddeus went to the front and disappeared there. Three years later, his mother died, and the hut was left without a mistress. Soon, Thaddeus’s younger brother Efim wooed Matryona. In the summer they had a wedding, and in the winter Thaddeus, who had long been considered dead, unexpectedly returned from Hungarian captivity. Having learned about what had happened, Thaddeus said right at the door: “If it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both down!”
A little later, he married a girl from another village, whose name was also Matryona. He told his fellow villagers that he chose her only because of his favorite name.
Thaddeus’s wife often came to the hostess and cried that her husband was hurting her, even beating her. But she and Matryona’s ex-fiancé had six children. But the children of Matryona and Efim died in infancy; no one survived. The woman was sure that these troubles were due to the damage that had been brought upon her.
On Patriotic War Thaddeus was no longer taken, and Efim did not return from the front. A lonely woman took in Thaddeus's daughter Kira. Having matured, the girl quickly married a driver and left for another village.
Since Matryona was often ill, she made a will early. It followed from it that the owner was giving the extension to the hut to Kira. The fact is that the pupil needed to legalize her plot of land in a new place. To do this, it was enough to put any building on your “claptic”.
The extension bequeathed by Matryona was very useful, so Thaddeus decided to resolve this issue during the woman’s lifetime. He began to often come to Matryona and persuade her to give up the room now. Matryona didn’t feel sorry for the extension itself, but she really didn’t want to destroy the roof of the hut.
Thaddeus finally achieved his goal. One cold winter day he came to Matryona with the children to separate the upper room. For two weeks, the dismantled extension lay near the hut, as a snowstorm swept away all the roads. The sisters came to Matryona and scolded the woman for her stupid kindness. At the same time, Matryona’s lame cat left the house somewhere.
One day Ignatich saw Thaddeus in the yard with people who were loading a dismantled room onto a tractor sled. In the dark they took her to the village to see Kira. Matryona also left with them, but did not return for a long time.
After midnight, the narrator heard conversations on the street. Two men in overcoats entered the house and began to look for signs of drinking. Having found nothing, they left, and the author felt that a misfortune had happened.
His fears were soon confirmed by Matryona’s friend Masha. She said in tears that the sleigh got stuck on the rails and fell apart, and at that time a steam locomotive was walking and ran over them. The driver, the son of Thaddeus and Matryona, were killed.
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 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 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 works for someone: for the collective farm, for her neighbors, while doing “peasant” work, and never asks 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 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 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.
The story “Matryonin’s Dvor” was written by Solzhenitsyn in 1959. The first title of the story is “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man” (Russian proverb). The final version of the name was invented by Tvardovsky, who was at that time the editor of the magazine " New world", where the story was published in No. 1 for 1963. At the insistence of the editors, the beginning of the story was changed and the events were attributed not to 1956, but to 1953, that is, to the pre-Khrushchev era. This is a bow to Khrushchev, thanks to whose permission Solzhenitsyn’s first story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962) was published.
The image of the narrator in the work “Matryonin’s Dvor” is autobiographical. After Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn was rehabilitated, actually lived in the village of Miltsevo (Talnovo in the story) and rented a corner from Matryona Vasilyevna Zakharova (Grigorieva in the story). Solzhenitsyn very accurately conveyed not only the details of the life of the prototype Marena, but also the features of life and even the local dialect of the village.
Literary direction and genre
Solzhenitsyn developed Tolstoy's tradition of Russian prose in a realistic direction. The story combines the features of an artistic essay, the story itself and elements of life. The life of the Russian village is reflected so objectively and diversely that the work approaches the genre of “novel-type story.” In this genre, the character of the hero is shown not only at a turning point in his development, but also the history of the character and the stages of his formation are illuminated. The fate of the hero reflects the fate of the entire era and country (as Solzhenitsyn says, the earth).
Issues
At the center of the story is a moral issue. Are many worth it? human lives a captured plot or a decision dictated by human greed not to make a second trip with a tractor? Material values among the people are valued higher than the person himself. Thaddeus's son and his once beloved woman died, his son-in-law is threatened with prison, and his daughter is inconsolable. But the hero is thinking about how to save the logs that the workers did not have time to burn at the crossing.
Mystical motives are at the center of the story. This is the motive of the unrecognized righteous man and the problem of curse on things touched by people with unclean hands pursuing selfish goals. So Thaddeus undertook to demolish Matryonin’s upper room, thereby making it cursed.
Plot and composition
The story "Matryonin's Dvor" has a time frame. In one paragraph, the author talks about how at one of the crossings and 25 years after a certain event, trains slow down. That is, the frame dates back to the early 80s, the rest of the story is an explanation of what happened at the crossing in 1956, the year of the Khrushchev Thaw, when “something began to move.”
The hero-narrator finds the place of his teaching in an almost mystical way, having heard a special Russian dialect at the bazaar and settling in “kondovaya Russia”, in the village of Talnovo.
The plot centers on the life of Matryona. The narrator learns about her fate from herself (she talks about how Thaddeus, who disappeared in the first war, wooed her, and how she married his brother, who disappeared in the second). But the hero finds out more about the silent Matryona from his own observations and from others.
The story describes in detail Matryona's hut, located in a picturesque place near the lake. The hut plays in the life and death of Matryona important role. To understand the meaning of the story, you need to imagine a traditional Russian hut. Matryona's hut was divided into two halves: the actual living hut with a Russian stove and the upper room (it was built for the eldest son in order to separate him when he got married). It is this upper room that Thaddeus dismantles in order to build a hut for Matryona’s niece and his own daughter Kira. The hut in the story is animated. The wallpaper that has fallen off the wall is called its inner skin.
The ficus trees in the tubs are also endowed with living features, reminding the narrator of a silent but living crowd.
The development of action in the story is a static state of harmonious coexistence between the narrator and Matryona, who “do not find the meaning of everyday existence in food.” The climax of the story is the moment of destruction of the upper room, and the work ends with the main idea and bitter omen.
Heroes of the story
The hero-narrator, whom Matryona calls Ignatich, makes it clear from the first lines that he came from prison. He is looking for a teaching job in the wilderness, in the Russian outback. Only the third village satisfies him. Both the first and the second turn out to be corrupted by civilization. Solzhenitsyn makes it clear to the reader that he condemns the attitude of Soviet bureaucrats towards people. The narrator despises the authorities who do not grant Matryona a pension, who force her to work on the collective farm for sticks, who not only do not provide peat for the fire, but also forbid asking about it. He instantly decides not to extradite Matryona, who brewed moonshine, and hides her crime, for which she faces prison.
Having experienced and seen a lot, the narrator, embodying the author’s point of view, acquires the right to judge everything that he observes in the village of Talnovo - a miniature embodiment of Russia.
Matryona is the main character of the story. The author says about her: “Those people have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.” At the moment of meeting, Matryona’s face is yellow, and her eyes are clouded with illness.
To survive, Matryona grows small potatoes, secretly brings forbidden peat from the forest (up to 6 bags a day) and secretly mows hay for her goat.
Matryona lacked womanly curiosity, she was delicate, and did not annoy her with questions. Today's Matryona is a lost old woman. The author knows about her that she got married before the revolution, that she had 6 children, but they all died quickly, “so two didn’t live at once.” Matryona's husband did not return from the war, but disappeared without a trace. The hero suspected that he had new family somewhere abroad.
Matryona had a quality that distinguished her from the rest of the village residents: she selflessly helped everyone, even the collective farm, from which she was expelled due to illness. There is a lot of mysticism in her image. In her youth, she could lift bags of any weight, stopped a galloping horse, had a presentiment of her death, being afraid of steam locomotives. Another omen of her death is a cauldron with holy water that disappeared to God knows where at Epiphany.
Matryona's death seems to be an accident. But why are the mice running around like crazy on the night of her death? The narrator suggests that 30 years later the threat of Matryona’s brother-in-law Thaddeus struck, who threatened to chop Matryona and his own brother, who married her.
After death, Matryona's holiness is revealed. The mourners notice that she, completely crushed by the tractor, has only her right hand left to pray to God. And the narrator draws attention to her face, which is more alive than dead.
Fellow villagers speak of Matryona with disdain, not understanding her selflessness. Her sister-in-law considers her unscrupulous, not careful, not inclined to accumulate goods; Matryona did not seek her own benefit and helped others for free. Even Matryonina’s warmth and simplicity were despised by her fellow villagers.
Only after her death did the narrator understand that Matryona, “not chasing after things”, indifferent to food and clothing, is the basis, the core of all of Russia. On such a righteous person stands the village, the city and the country (“the whole land is ours”). For the sake of one righteous person, as in the Bible, God can spare the earth and save it from fire.
Artistic originality
Matryona appears before the hero as fairy creature, similar to Baba Yaga, who reluctantly gets off the stove to feed the passing prince. She, like a fairytale grandmother, has animal helpers. Shortly before Matryona’s death, the lanky cat leaves the house; the mice, anticipating the death of the old woman, make a particularly rustling noise. But cockroaches are indifferent to the fate of the hostess. Following Matryona, her favorite ficus trees die, looking like a crowd: they don’t represent practical value and taken out into the cold after Matryona’s death.
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 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 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.