Solzhenitsyn's heroes are Matryona, Ivan Denisovich, and the janitor Spiridon. Essay “The Problem of a Positive Hero” (based on the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and the story “Matryonin’s Dvor” by A.I. Solzhenitsyn)

The ideological core of Solzhenitsyn’s works was the fate of Russia in the 20th century and the fate of the Russian people inextricably linked with it. And this is by no means an accident. Truly a bearer folk traditions and the main properties of the national character, according to the writer, are, first of all, the peasantry. The image of the Russian peasant, his fate is in almost all of the writer’s works - and in short stories, and in novels, and in “The Gulag Archipelago”, and in the epic “The Red Wheel”.

The personality and fate of the heroes of the stories “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, “ Matrenin Dvor", "Zakhar Kalita", " Apricot jam”, features of the Russian national character, as Solzhenitsyn saw them, - all this occupied a special niche in the history of Russian literature. The heroes of these stories contain different faces of this character.

The images of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona, Fedya (“Apricot Jam”) contain primordial peasant traits: patience, dexterity, hard work, kindness, which no hardships of life can erase. In Ivan Denisovich, the writer highlights the feelings of community and justice that have been inherent in Russian people from time immemorial. In the terrible conditions of the camp, while maintaining his human nature, Shukhov is humane and honest, with a desire to work “together”, ready to try “for everyone.” This person “has such inner stability, faith in himself, in his own hands and his mind that he doesn’t need God.”

Thanks to his peasant “survivability,” Ivan Denisovich Shukhov manages to adapt even to the conditions of camp life and find a way for himself to earn an extra bowl of gruel here. Like any village resident who is not used to sleeping for a long time, this hero “never overslept” and “before the divorce” managed to “earn extra money”: “to sew someone a mitten cover from an old lining; give the rich brigadier dry felt boots directly to the bed..., sweep or bring something..., collect bowls from the tables...”

We will not find either a groan or a sound of complaint from the lips of this hero, anything that could reveal in Shukhov a man weak and broken by circumstances on the pages of this story. This is a Russian peasant, hardened by years of labor, “carried away” by work “in itself, regardless of the fact that it is servile and does not promise anything.” This simple mason, generous, brave and naive, hardened by life’s difficulties, does not strive for florid reasoning about the meaning of life, he only tries to remain human no matter what.

Matryona, the heroine of another story by Solzhenitsyn, unlike Ivan Denisovich, lives in her native village, in her hut, but her fate is deeply dramatic.

In Matryona, as in Shukhov, Solzhenitsyn values ​​the heroine’s simplicity and responsiveness, cordiality and spiritual purity, resignation and gentleness. These qualities of the Russian peasant woman shine through in the very appearance of the heroine, “a woman of about sixty” “with a roundish face... yellow and sick,” with “clouded” eyes of a person “exhausted by illness.” She speaks singly, in Ryazan. The writer especially notes the “disarming radiant smile” of this peasant woman and her “faded blue eyes”, the taciturnity and selflessness of his heroine. Like Ivan Denisovich, Matryona “got up at four or five in the morning” and was busy with housework from dawn until late in the evening. “Matryona had many grievances,” but she “drowned” all her sorrows in work: “she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work.”

There is one more in this story important point. Solzhenitsyn compares the character, life and mental way of his heroine with other residents of the village, her relatives and shows how much they have irretrievably lost from those primordial folk properties that were in Matryona.

In the story “Zakhar Kalita” the writer created a slightly different image. There is no backstory about him, but the details that the author notices in the guise of the Warden of Kulikov Field speak of Zakhar’s peasant soul. He partly looked like a peasant, “partly like a robber” with a sack, whose “arms and legs were good.” His external appearance does not coincide with his inner essence, something deeply hidden, dramatic appears in him more and more, and at the same time there was something epic, mythological in the whole appearance of this man, a descendant of those glorious sons of the Fatherland who stood on the Kulikovo field .

The writer draws with particular sharpness folk characters, which become one of those “knots” of Russian destiny that before Solzhenitsyn were sought by Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Nekrasov, Leskov, Korolenko and other Russian writers, who allowed the reader to feel the true beauty of the Russian person.

Publication: Literary newspaper

"Matryonin's Dvor", written in the summer of 1959 and lying around three years motionless, was published in the New World in January 1963. A year earlier, there had been an editorial discussion, where they decided that the idea was useless, it was impossible to publish “Matryona”: the village in the story was too pathetic, only ghouls lived there and the Christian line stuck out too much - it was unclear why they were making a revolution. A. T. Tvardovsky, however, seeing similarities with the moral prose of L. N. Tolstoy (and considering this a plus), asked the author not to become an ideologically consistent writer, not to write something that goes without a hitch. Was it destined to bring “Matryona” to the pages of the magazine? “To Ivan Denisovich”: “Such was the power of general praise, general take-off,” wrote A.I. in “Telenok”, “that on those same days Tvardovsky told me: now let’s let “Matryona” go! Matryona, which the magazine refused at the beginning of the year, which can never be published, is now with a light hand he sent it to the set, even forgetting about his refusal then!”
Anna Akhmatova will say insightfully: “It’s amazing how they could publish it? Is this worse than “Ivan Denisovich”? There you can blame everything on a cult, but here? After all, it wasn’t Matryona, but the entire Russian village that was hit by a locomotive and smashed to pieces?” K.I. Chukovsky, having become acquainted with Matryona, wrote: “I realized that Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov have a worthy successor.” The author himself rejoiced at the new publication even more than the release of Ivan Denisovich. “There is a theme, and here it is pure literature. Now let them judge!”
And the judges were not slow to make their presence known. Very soon, Solzhenitsyn’s Novomir stories were called “malicious slander” in the central newspapers; the magazine was called "a sewer collecting all the rot in literature." The watchful eye of the censor saw in “Matryona” a stamp of hopelessness, pessimism and mustiness. Party hearts experienced spiritual bitterness: after all, the author distorted the historical perspective, confused the Bunin village with the Soviet one, critical realism replaced the socialist one. Fellow writers sensitive to changes in weather demanded a report on the revolutionary changes in peasant consciousness. Capital critics criticized the resident teacher, who was unable to clear the owner’s hut of mice and cockroaches. The author of “Matryona” was invited to look over the fence, see flourishing collective farms and show the leaders of labor - the true righteous of their time. “I found an ideal in a stinking old village woman with icons and did not contrast her with the positive type of a Soviet person!” - Chukovsky’s neighbor in Barvikha, a high-ranking military official, was indignant in the fall of 1963. Another nobleman told Korney Ivanovich: “I am a deputy of the region where Matryona lives. Your Solzhenitsyn lied about everything. She's not like that at all."
The story about the righteous Matryona (this word extremely irritated party reviewers) was forced out of all publishing plans, and in 1974 it was subjected (together with the rest of the writer’s publications) to withdrawal from all state libraries. It took the country fifteen years to return to the lofty and piercing truth of “Matryonin’s Court.”
In a strange way the fate of the play of the same name, which premiered recently on the Small Stage of the Theater. Evg. Vakhtangov, repeated the dramatic path of the story. Now, however, no one reproached the author for his adherence to “ethical abstractions, the idealistic concept of good and evil.” There was simply nowhere to perform the play - he had neither his own home nor his theater venue, and without money for renting rehearsal spaces, wandering artists were not allowed anywhere.
Conceived back in 1998 by Elena and Alexander Mikhailov, long-time graduates of the theater school named after. Shchukin, who left successful career in Central children's theater In order to establish oneself in faith and find one’s way in the Church, the birth of the performance was difficult and long. The idea to bring Matryona's story to life on stage belonged to Alexander; in 2003, professor of the Shchukin School Vladimir Ivanov, in collaboration with the artist Maxim Obrezkov, undertook to implement the plan. After a long, painstaking, careful work with the text, it was prose that sounded from the stage, divided into two actor’s voices. Rehearsals and run-throughs with the audience took place either in the Old Arbat theater house, or in the Actor's House, or in the Glas theater (it was there that I first saw the play in the fall of 2006), but it always ended with planned or unscheduled repairs being thrown out “Matryona” from the next shelter to the street along with props and scenery.
And now - the blessed chamber space of the Small Vakhtangov Hall, where this spring the wanderers were invited by the new artistic director Theater Rimas Tuminas. For the first time in ten years, “Matryona” received registration (for now only for a year) in the famous academic theater, ended up in the repertoire, on posters, and in theater programs.
The story of the awkward life of a sixty-year-old peasant woman Matryona Vasilievna Zakharova, who lived in the wilderness of the Vladimir region, where Solzhenitsyn taught after his exile in Kazakhstan, settling in a neglected hut with ficus trees, a lanky cat, mice and cockroaches, unfolds in a minimalist, conventional scenery. Light planed boards form the porch of the hut, which during the performance Matryona’s relatives will dismantle into pieces, deciding during her lifetime to divide the house they were promised - in the end, all that will remain is a cross on her grave. Meager props (an icon, photographs in a common frame, a clock, a chest that serves as a bed for a guest, a gray soldier’s blanket, a repaired loudspeaker) make up the life of Matryona and her tenant, who came here with a dilapidated suitcase and a patched duffel bag. Boards as construction kit parts form key images performance: house, table (behind it the guest teacher eats Matryonin’s cardboard cooking, reads, checks school notebooks), dismantled master’s room, coffin.
There are only two on stage - Matryona and her lodger: the text of the story in director's cut skillfully distributed between them, so that Solzhenitsyn's Word sounds energetic, charming, authentic. “If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it?” - says Matryona, but we see that this woman pleases the guest with her very existence. Her simple name, her yard, her life in the forest intertwined with the fate of Ignatich into a single whole. After all, it is to him, a former prisoner and camp inmate, and now a village teacher who has settled in a rotten hut with Matryona, despised by her fellow villagers, that the inner beauty of a man who foolishly worked for others for free, who did not accumulate property for death and died because of human irrepressible greed, is revealed. It is Ignatich who says those very main words at the end of the story: “We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand. Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.”
But who is Ignatich after all - in Solzhenitsyn’s story and in the stage version of “Matryonin’s Dvor”? Is it just a former camp inmate? Only a rural school math teacher? What is he doing? winter evenings and at night, sitting at a desk by the window, surrounded by ficus trees? Is it only by checking notebooks in algebra and geometry? “She did not interfere with my long evening studies, did not annoy me with any questions,” says Ignatich in the story, who “wrote his work in the silence of the hut to the rustle of cockroaches and the tapping of walkers.” What is it - yours - the guest writes? There are no answers to these questions in the play yet: the true context of the guest’s life is hidden from the viewer.
But the prototype of the autobiographical hero, a former camp inmate, teacher, who settled in the house of the real Matryona Zakharova (in the story Matryona Grigorieva), that is, Solzhenitsyn himself, had deep reasons to seek solitude in a quiet corner of Russia. And he was grateful to Matryona for the fact that he could, when leaving for school, not be afraid of her curiosity, for in the hut there were not only student notebooks and lesson plans, but also secret manuscripts. During the six months that he lived in Matryona’s hut, the first edition of the novel “In the First Circle” was completed - Isaich-Ignatich was working on it on the winter evenings of 1957. Only the writer, the creator of the legendary “Circle”, the future author of “Ivan Denisovich” could have seen, understood and described the way Matryona Ignatich saw, understood and described. Matryona the Righteous was revealed to the eye of a penetrating, profound artist and revealed to the soul of a great writer. Just a guest everyday person, would hardly have been able to cope with such a task.
This means that the performance has creative space for growth and development. And if the luck of finding a house in Solzhenitsyn’s anniversary year does not leave the small team, we will still see how and where the stage version of the classic story can move.

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….. 2
1. Matrenin’s yard …………………………………………………………………………………4
2. “One day” of a prisoner and the history of the country………………………………………….7
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………29
References……………………………………………………………...31

Introduction

In the mid-50s came new stage in the development of our country. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, having successfully criticized Stalin’s personality cult, becomes the head of the country and the period of so-called “warming” begins.
Contradictory trends emerged in the development of culture. General approach to cultural sphere distinguished by his previous desire to put it in the service of administrative-command ideology. But the process of renewal itself could not but cause a revival of cultural life.
A real shock for millions Soviet people was the publication of A. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” small in volume but strong in humanistic sound. It clearly showed that the one who suffered most from Stalinism was the “simple Soviet man,” whose name Stalinists of all stripes swore.
The story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is a small work about one of the three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of the period, but it contains the life of the entire country, all its truth and bitterness.
Solzhenitsyn showed the whole camp life in one day. After reading, it becomes clear that this one single day is enough to reflect the entire life of the camp. As the author himself said, it is enough to describe only one ordinary, unremarkable day in the smallest detail, the day of the simplest worker, and the whole life will be reflected in it.
Today, the reader looks at many events and stages of our history with different eyes, and strives to more accurately and definitely evaluate them. The increased interest in problems of the recent past is not accidental: it is caused by deep requests for updating. Today the time has come to say that the most terrible crimes of the 20th century were committed by German fascism and Stalinism. And if the first brought down the sword on other nations, then the second - on his own. Stalin managed to turn the country's history into a series of monstrous crimes against it. The strictly guarded documents contain a lot of shame and grief, a lot of information about sold honor, cruelty, and the triumph of meanness over honesty and devotion.
This was the era of real genocide, when people were ordered: betray, bear false witness, applaud executions and sentences, sell your people... The most severe pressure affected all areas of life and activity, especially in art and science. After all, it was then that the most talented Russian scientists, thinkers, writers (mainly those who did not obey the “elite”) were destroyed and imprisoned in camps. This was largely because the authorities feared and hated them for their true, limited intention to live for others, for their sacrifice.
That is why many valuable documents were hidden behind the thick walls of archives and special storage facilities, unwanted publications were confiscated from libraries, churches, icons and other cultural values ​​were destroyed. The past has died for the people and ceased to exist. Instead, a distorted history was created, which shaped the public consciousness accordingly. Romain Roland wrote in his diary about the ideological and spiritual atmosphere in Russia in those years: “This is a system of uncontrolled absolute arbitrariness, without the slightest guarantee left to elementary freedoms, the sacred rights of justice and humanity.”

1. Matrenin Dvor

A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s short story “Matrenin’s Dvor” absorbed many themes and problems characteristic of Russian literature. Solzhenitsyn created the image of a peasant woman, making us remember the peasant women of Nekrasov, on whose shoulders the heavy burden of farming and family always fell in Rus'. Despite backbreaking work and worries, Russian women remained and remain the guardians of eternal spiritual values: kindness, compassion, selflessness, selflessness. Solzhenitsyn created his early works based on personal life experience. The first story that brought him all-Russian fame, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” is based on the camp experience of a writer who was repressed during the Stalin years, “Matrenin’s Dvor” is a real story that happened when Solzhenitsyn, after the camps, got a job in the village
mathematics teacher.
The time of action in the story is 1956. One can imagine that the work has become obsolete, the shortcomings of that life have been overcome. Let's see if this is true. At the beginning of the story, the author's hero Ignatyich gets a job after camp to teach in a village with a poetic name - Vysokoye Polye. But, as it turns out, it is impossible to live there: the peasants do not bake bread, but carry it in bags from the city. Isn’t the current situation of our country, forced to buy imported products, a consequence of the ruin of agriculture? The next place where the hero ends up is called Peat Product. It seems like a small detail, but it reflects the global problem of the impoverishment of the Russian language, which is now being resolved at the presidential level, because it has assumed catastrophic proportions. Solzhenitsyn himself always sought to return originality and brightness to the language. He actively uses folk expressions and proverbs.
The landscape of Torfoprodukt is depressing: the surrounding forests have been cut down, barbaric peat extraction is going on everywhere, chimneys spew out black smoke, a narrow-gauge railway cuts the village in half. The motif of the railway can be considered the most important in the story: the main character’s fear of the advancing urban civilization and her death are associated with the train. Whatever the appearance of the village, such is the external life of its inhabitants: “Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunks wandering along the street and stabbing each other with knives.” So, have the environmental situation or people's living conditions changed for the better? No, the story still sounds modern.
Along with journalistic acuity, there is artistic depth in the work. Eternal problems of spirituality and inner beauty of a person are revealed using the example of the image of Matryona.
Solzhenitsyn reveals her character in two stages. At first, the reader, together with the narrator, sees only the daily existence of a lonely old woman living on the edge of the village. Matryona's hut has been in need of repair for a long time, but it is still sound and warm. As the narrator humorously reports, besides him and Matryona, “they also lived in the hut: a cat, mice and cockroaches.” The desolation of Matryona’s yard is emphasized by the fact that there is no radio in her hut. The author's hero, looking for silence after the camp, is glad about this. He lives with Matryona month after month, but still sees only the external side of her existence.
Matryona does not die of hunger only thanks to the small garden where potatoes are grown. The collective farm where she worked all her life does not pay her a pension, since Matryona’s husband disappeared in the war, and necessary documents about the loss of a breadwinner are not collected.
Moreover, this does not prevent the unceremonious wife of the chairman from involving a lonely old woman in general collective farm work. Neighbors and relatives often ask Matryona for help. She does not refuse anyone, she is embarrassed to take money for help, and the author notices that in the village they treat the selfless Matryona with ridicule. The narrator knows that Matryona's children died in infancy and she raised adopted daughter Kira.
Suddenly, Matryona's past is revealed to the author. It turns out that there was love, separation, and jealousy in her life. Matryona's fiancé, Thaddeus, disappeared for three years after the First World War. Without waiting for him, Matryona married the groom’s brother, Efim. The returning Thaddeus did not kill both of them only because of his brother. Efim looked down on Matryona, went on a spree on the side and disappeared at the front, possibly fleeing abroad. Thaddeus looked for a bride with the same name and got married, but there was no happiness in their family. It was his daughter, Kira, who was asked to be raised by the childless Matryona. A lonely, sick old woman unexpectedly appeared before the author’s eyes as an interesting person who had experienced a lot.
And then comes the tragic ending. Matryona dies under the wheels of a train. In this seemingly random death, the author sees symbolic meaning. Thaddeus persuaded Matryona to give the upper room bequeathed to Kira during her lifetime. When transporting logs, Thaddeus and the tractor driver, out of greed, hitched two sleds at once, one of which got stuck on the rails. Matryona rushed, as she always did, to help the men, and then a train hit. The symbol of urban civilization crashed into a hut - a symbol of village life. Matryona dies, and with her some amazing spiritual warmth goes away, which is not found in other residents of the village. Even at the wake, they worry that Matrenino’s goods will not fall into the wrong hands.
Only after Matryona’s death does the author understand what kind of person she was: “I didn’t chase after acquisitions... I didn’t struggle to buy things and then cherish them more than my life. I didn’t bother with outfits.
Behind clothes that embellish freaks and villains.” Matryona, unlike her fellow villagers, understood the word “good” as a good feeling, and not as acquired things. Initially, Solzhenitsyn wanted to call the story “A village is not worthwhile without a righteous man.” The writer was able to discern a righteous woman in the funny and pitiful old woman, in the opinion of others.
Despite her hard life, numerous insults and injustices, Matryona remained a kind, bright person to the end.

2. “One day” of a prisoner and the history of the country

Natalya Belyaeva

Natalya Vasilievna Belyaeva - chief researcher at 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

Reading "Matryonin's Dvor"

First lesson

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

A.I. Solzhenitsyn. "Cancer Ward"

A word about the writer

You can start the lesson by showing a gallery of portraits of the writer and telling 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 points of the story can be presented in the form of a table (see Table 1), the second column of which the students will fill out while listening to the teacher and learning to take notes from the lecture (they will complete this work at home).

Table 1

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“Matryonin’s Dvor”: paintings of a post-war village

When starting to study the story “Matryonin’s Dvor,” schoolchildren can remember which female images of Russian literature of the 19th and 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.

Does the main character of the story, Matryona, cause you sympathy, pity, irritation or admiration? Justify your opinion.

Why does the writer begin his story with a “riddle”: “...For a good six months already After that all the trains were slowing down..."? Is it possible to immediately guess what happens next?

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 place names used in the text are reliable, and the features of the local dialect are preserved.)

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

The image of the narrator

Research work with the text can begin by studying the feelings of Ignatich, on whose behalf the story is told (see Table 2).

table 2

What in the life of the post-war village, regional center and the whole country gives him bright feelings, and what gives him 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 the author's humor.

Follow life path teachers Ignatich. How did Matryona treat him? Why did they “live simply”?

The table can be continued with other examples. A similar research work can be organized on 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 for the lesson?

On the theme of righteousness, a favorite in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century century, Solzhenitsyn approaches delicately, unobtrusively and even with humor. Speaking about Matryona, his hero remarks: “Only she had fewer sins than her lame-legged cat. She was strangling mice!..” The writer rethinks the images of the righteous in Russian literature and portrays the righteous person not as a person who went 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 “Talnovsky women” who live by material interests. She is one of those “three righteous people” who are so difficult to find.

Final questions.

Is it possible to say that using the example of a particular case from the life of one Russian peasant woman, the writer talks about the fate of the village as a whole and about the fate of the entire country?

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

Lesson summary. In the story "Matryonin's Dvor" the documentary and accuracy inherent in the essay genre are combined with such compositional means that help individual facts from privacy author to become facts of art, artistic text. Reflections on the hard work and patience of one Russian woman develop in the story into a broad narrative about the fate of the Russian village after the war, about 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. When choosing a school for work, he asks “away from the railway”, looking for a place to live in a more isolated place, but this “away from the railway” seems to foreshadow someone’s death. Like Matryona, Ignatich does not live by material interests. Matryona does not interfere with his evening activities, listens to his radio, her face is captured by his camera.

The artistic space of the story is interesting. It begins with its name, then expands to the railway station, which is located “one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow along the line that goes from Murom to Kazan,” and to the villages “over the hill,” and then covers the entire country that receives foreign delegation, and extends even into the Universe, which should be filled by artificial satellites of the Earth. The category of space is associated with images of a house and a road, symbolizing the life path of the characters.

Homework. Make a plan for a story about Matryona’s life. 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. Study the dictionary of literary terms semantic content the concept of “parable”.

Lesson two

...If, according to popular belief, no city can stand without the three righteous ones, then how can the whole earth stand with only the rubbish that lives in both my soul and yours, my reader.
It was both terrible and unbearable for me, and I went to look for the righteous, I went with a vow not to rest until I found at least that little number three the righteous, without whom the city cannot stand.

N.S. Leskov. Preface to the cycle “The Righteous”

Image of a righteous woman

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 “Soborians”: “Where, besides our holy Rus', will such women be born as this virtue?”; the second is Tyutchev’s poem “To a Russian Woman”.

Far from the sun and nature,
Far from light and art,
Far from life and love
Your younger years will flash by
Living feelings die
Your dreams will be shattered...
And your life will pass unseen
In a deserted, nameless land,
On an unnoticed land, -
How a cloud of smoke disappears
In the sky is dim and foggy
In the autumn endless darkness...

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

At the center of our lesson is a study of the main features of Matryona’s image, which can be organized in groups.

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

What do the lives of Matryona and other village residents have in common? (We got up early; we all went out to work together, slowly stole peat piled up to dry; we ate only potatoes; there was no radio in the houses, and electricity seemed like a miracle.)

How was Matryona different from other residents of the village of Talnovo? (Matryona went to work, even if she was sick; she didn’t “settle scores” and didn’t discuss “who came out and who didn’t”; she couldn’t refuse when someone asked for help with agricultural work: digging up potatoes, plowing her own garden She didn’t take money for her work; she fed the shepherds with food that she didn’t eat; she didn’t bother anyone with questions; she gave the upper room to her adopted daughter. , and not careful; and she didn’t even keep a pig; ... and, stupid, she helped strangers for free”; she didn’t chase clothes, didn’t accumulate property for death; the sister-in-law “spoke with contemptuous regret” about Matryona’s warmth and simplicity.)

Group 2. Matryona and Ignatich.

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

Table 3

Matryona immediately understood her tenant and protected him from nosy neighbors, and Ignatich, listening to disapproving reviews at the wake, writes: “...The image of Matryona floated before me, as I did not understand her... We all lived next to her and did not understand that she existed that same righteous..." Group 3.

Matryona and Thaddeus. Compare Matryona and Thaddeus. How do they behave around others? life situations

? (See Table 4.)

The tragedy of Matryona's fate

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

What caused Matryona's death? The external cause of death was her dedication, desire to help, and not sit on the sidelines. That is why she finds herself between a sleigh and a tractor at an ill-fated railroad crossing. But the catastrophes of the 20th century are inexorably knocking on Matryona’s fate, revealing the deep, hidden reasons for 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 you cannot honestly and openly transport your own hut, but you can trust a drunk driver who has quietly taken a collective farm tractor.

Among the underlying reasons for the tragic death of the heroine is her attachment to Thaddeus and his pupil, his daughter Kira. It is she who unwittingly 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 was also predetermined by the death of Matryona. She would no longer be able to live in a damaged house. The author also condemns the greed, greed, and acquisitiveness of Thaddeus, who is obsessed with the desire to seize a piece of land. Hence his order not to make a second voyage, and the removal of surviving logs during funerals and wakes. Matryona’s son-in-law, a railway worker, is also to blame for not warning the station about the transportation.

Three extinct destinies are the price to pay for saving the lives of the passengers of the twenty-first ambulance. Thus, the private fate of an ordinary Russian peasant woman turns out to be connected both with the vicissitudes of the cruel 20th century, and with the destinies of Russian women of the 19th century.

The moral meaning of the parable story

What is it moral meaning story told by the writer? Solzhenitsyn gave new meaning to the very concept of “righteous person.” Even the road as a symbol 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 you cannot live only for yourself, be a money-grubber and a hoarder. Meaning human existence in kindness, selflessness and the radiance that a person can radiate, illuminating the destinies of other people.

Homework. Answer one of the questions in writing.

What changed in the meaning of Solzhenitsyn’s story “A Village Is Not Standing Without a Righteous Man” when the writer called it “Matryonin’s Dvor”?

How were the events of Russian history in the post-war period reflected in the fates of the heroes of the story?

What is Matryona's righteousness?