A detailed analysis of the story "Matryona Dvor" by Solzhenitsyn. Analysis of Solzhenitsyn's story "Matryona's yard" Solzhenitsyn's "Matryona's yard" brief analysis

Lesson topic: Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn.

Analysis of the story "Matrenin Dvor".

The purpose of the lesson: try to understand how the writer sees the phenomenon of the “simple person”, to understand the philosophical meaning of the story.

During the classes:

1. Teacher's word.

History of creation.

The story "Matryona Dvor" was written in 1959, published in 1964. "Matryona Dvor" is an autobiographical and reliable work. The original name is “A village does not stand without a righteous man”. Published in Novy Mir, 1963, No. 1.

This is a story about the situation in which he found himself, returning "from the dusty hot desert", that is, from the camp. He wanted to "get lost in Russia", to find a "quiet corner of Russia". The former prisoner could only be hired for hard work, he also wanted to teach. After rehabilitation in 1957, S. worked for some time as a physics teacher in the Vladimir region, lived in the village of Miltsevo with a peasant woman, Matrena Vasilievna Zakharova.

2. Conversation on the story.

1) The name of the heroine.

- Which of the Russian writers of the 19th century had the main character of the same name? What female images in Russian literature could you compare the heroine of the story with?

(Answer: the name of Solzhenitsyn’s heroine evokes the image of Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina, as well as the images of other Nekrasov women - workers: just like them, the heroine of the story “is dexterous for any work, she had to stop her galloping horse, and into a burning hut come in". There is nothing in her appearance from a majestic Slav, you cannot call her a beauty. She is modest and not noticeable.)

2) Portrait.

- Is there an extended portrait of the heroine in the story? What portrait details does the writer focus on?

(Answer: Solzhenitsyn does not give a detailed portrait of Matryona. From chapter to chapter, only one detail is repeated most often - a smile: “a radiant smile”, “the smile of her roundish face”, “smiled at something”, “apologetic half-smile.” It is important for the author to portray not so much the outward beauty of a simple Russian peasant woman, but the inner light streaming from her eyes, and the more clearly emphasize my idea, expressed directly: “Those people always have good faces who are at odds with their conscience.” Therefore, after the terrible death of the heroine, her face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.)

3) The speech of the heroine.

Write down the most characteristic statements of the heroine. What are the features of her speech?

(Answer: The deeply folk character of Matryona is manifested primarily in her speech. Expressiveness, a bright individuality betray her language with an abundance of colloquial, dialect vocabulary and archaism (2 - I’ll hurry up the days, to the ugly one, love, fly around, help, inconvenience). That's what everyone in the village used to say. Just as deeply popular are Matryona's manner of speech, the way she pronounces her "friendly words." “They started with some kind of low, warm purring, like grandmothers in fairy tales.”

4) Life of Matryona.

- What artistic details create a picture of Matryona's life? How are household items connected with the spiritual world of the heroine?

(Answer: Outwardly, Matryona’s life is striking in its disorder (“she lives in the wilderness”) All her wealth is ficus, a shaggy cat, a goat, mouse cockroaches, a coat altered from a railway overcoat. All this testifies to the poverty of Matryona, who has worked all her life, but only with great difficulty procured a tiny pension for herself. But something else is also important: these mean everyday details reveal her special world. It is no coincidence that the ficus says: "They filled the loneliness of the hostess. They grew freely ... "- and the rustling of cockroaches is compared with the distant sound of the ocean. It seems that nature itself lives in Matryona's house, all living things are drawn to her).

5) The fate of Matryona.

Restore the life story of Matryona? How does Matryona perceive her fate? What role does work play in her life?

(Answer: The events of the story are limited by a clear time frame: summer-winter 1956. Restoring the fate of the heroine, her life dramas, personal troubles, one way or another, are connected with the turns of history: With the First World War, in which Thaddeus was captured, with the Great Patriotic, with which her husband did not return, with the collective farm, which survived from her all the strength and left her without a livelihood.Her fate is a particle of the fate of the whole people.

And today, the inhuman system does not let Matryona go: she was left without a pension, and she is forced to spend whole days on obtaining various certificates; they don’t sell her peat, forcing her to steal, and even on a denunciation they go with a search; the new chairman cut gardens for all disabled people; it is impossible to get cows, since they are not allowed to mow anywhere; They don't even sell train tickets. Matryona does not feel justice, but she does not hold a grudge against fate and people. "She had a sure way to bring back a good mood - work." Not receiving anything for her work, at the first call she goes to help her neighbors, the collective farm. People around her willingly take advantage of her kindness. The villagers and relatives themselves not only do not help Matryona, but also try not to appear in her house at all, fearing that she will ask for help. To each and every one, Matrena remains absolutely alone in her village.

6) The image of Matryona among relatives.

What colors are painted in the story by Faddey Mironovich and Matryona's relatives? How does Thaddeus behave when he takes apart the upper room? What is the conflict in the story?

(Answer: The main character is opposed in the story by her late husband’s brother, Thaddeus. Drawing his portrait, Solzhenitsyn repeats the epithet “black” seven times. A man whose life was broken in his own way by inhuman circumstances, Thaddeus, unlike Matryona, harbored a grudge against fate , taking it out on his wife and son. The almost blind old man, revives when he presses on Matryona about the upper room, and then when he breaks down the hut of his former bride. Self-interest, the thirst to seize a plot for his daughter make him destroy the house that he once "He built it himself. Thaddeus' inhumanity is especially evident on the eve of Matryona's funeral. Thaddeus did not come to Matryona's funeral at all. But the most important thing is that Thaddeus was in the village, that Thaddeus was not alone in the village. At the commemoration, no one talks about Matryona herself.

The eventual conflict in the story is almost absent, because the very nature of Matryona excludes conflict relations with people. For her, good is the inability to do evil, love and compassion. In this substitution of concepts, Solzhenitsyn sees the essence of the spiritual crisis that struck Russia.

7) The tragedy of Matryona.

What signs portend the death of the heroine?

(Answer: From the very first lines, the author prepares us for the tragic denouement of the fate of Matryona. Her death is foreshadowed by the loss of a pot of consecrated water and the disappearance of a cat. For relatives and neighbors, the death of Matryona is just an excuse to gossip about her until the opportunity to profit from her not cunning good, for the narrator is the death of a loved one and the destruction of the whole world, the world of that people's truth, without which the Russian land does not stand)

8) The image of the narrator.

What is common in the fate of the narrator and Matryona?

(Answer: The narrator is a man of a difficult family, behind whom there is a war and a camp. Therefore, he is lost in a quiet corner of Russia. And only in Matryona's hut did the hero feel something akin to his heart. And the lonely Matryona felt trust in her guest. Only she tells him about his bitter past, only he will reveal to her that he spent a lot in prison. The heroes have in common both the drama of their fate and many life principles. Their relationship is especially evident in speech. And only the death of the mistress forced the narrator to comprehend her spiritual essence, which is why it sounds so strong in the final story motive of repentance.

9) What is the theme of the story?

(Answer: The main theme of the story is "how people live."

Why is the fate of an old peasant woman, told in a few pages, of such interest to us?

(Answer: This woman is unread, illiterate, a simple worker. To survive what Matryona Vasilievna had to endure, and remain a disinterested, open, delicate, sympathetic person, not be angry at fate and people, keep her “radiant smile” until old age - what mental strength is needed for this!

10) -What is the symbolic meaning of the story "Matryona Dvor"?

(Answer: Many symbols of S. are associated with Christian symbols: the images are symbols of the way of the cross, the righteous, the martyr. The first name “Matryona Yard” indicates this directly. And the name itself is of a generalizing nature. finds the narrator after many years of camps and homelessness. The fate of the house is, as it were, repeated, the fate of its mistress is predicted. Forty years have passed here. In this house she survived 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. The house falls into disrepair - the mistress grows old. The house is dismantled like a man - "by the ribs". Matryona dies along with the chambermaid. With part of her house. The hostess dies - the house is completely destroyed. Matrona's hut was filled up until spring, like a coffin - buried.

Conclusion:

The righteous Matryona is the moral ideal of the writer, on which, in his opinion, the life of society should be based.

The folk wisdom that the writer put into the original title of the story accurately conveys this author's thought. Matryonin's yard is a kind of island in the middle of an ocean of lies, which keeps the treasure of the national spirit. The death of Matrena, the destruction of her yard and hut is a formidable warning of a catastrophe that can happen to a society that has lost its moral guidelines. However, despite all the tragedy of the work, the story is imbued with the author's faith in the resilience of Russia. Solzhenitsyn sees the source of this resilience not in the political system, not in state power, not in the power of arms, but in the simple hearts of the unnoticed, humiliated, most often lonely righteous people who oppose the world of lies.)

A. N. Solzhenitsyn, returning from exile, worked as a teacher at the Miltsev school. He lived in an apartment with Matrena Vasilievna Zakharova. All events described by the author were real. Solzhenitsyn's story "Matryona's Dvor" describes the difficult life of a collective farm Russian village. We offer for review an analysis of the story according to the plan, this information can be used to work in literature lessons in grade 9, as well as in preparation for the exam.

Brief analysis

Year of writing– 1959

History of creation– The writer began work on his work on the problems of the Russian village in the summer of 1959 on the Crimean coast, where he was visiting his friends in exile. Being wary of censorship, it was recommended to change the title "A village without a righteous man" and, on the advice of Tvardovsky, the writer's story was called "Matryona's Dvor".

Subject- The main theme of this work is the life and life of the Russian hinterland, the problems of the relationship of an ordinary person with power, moral problems.

Composition- The narration is on behalf of the narrator, as if through the eyes of an outside observer. The features of the composition allow us to understand the very essence of the story, where the characters will come to the realization that the meaning of life is not only (and not so much) in enrichment, material values, but in moral values, and this problem is universal, and not a single village.

Genre– The genre of the work is defined as “monumental story”.

Direction- Realism.

History of creation

The writer's story is autobiographical; indeed, after his exile, he taught in the village of Miltsevo, which in the story is called Talnovo, and rented a room from Zakharova Matrena Vasilievna. In his short story, the writer depicted not only the fate of one hero, but also the entire epoch-making idea of ​​the country's formation, all its problems and moral principles.

Myself the meaning of the name"Matryona's Yard" is a reflection of the main idea of ​​the work, where the boundaries of her court expand to the scale of the whole country, and the idea of ​​morality turns into universal problems. From this we can conclude that the history of the creation of the "Matryona Dvor" does not include a separate village, but the history of the creation of a new outlook on life, and on the power that governs the people.

Subject

After analyzing the work in Matrenin Dvor, it is necessary to determine main theme story, to find out what the autobiographical essay teaches not only the author himself, but, by and large, the whole country.

The life and work of the Russian people, their relationship with the authorities are deeply illuminated. A person works all his life, losing his personal life and interests in work. Your health, after all, without getting anything. Using the example of Matrena, it is shown that she worked all her life, without any official documents about her work, and did not even earn a pension.

All the last months of its existence were spent on collecting different pieces of paper, and the red tape and bureaucracy of the authorities also led to the fact that one and the same piece of paper had to go to get more than once. Indifferent people sitting at tables in offices can easily put the wrong seal, signature, stamp, they do not care about people's problems. So Matryona, in order to achieve a pension, more than once bypasses all instances, somehow achieving a result.

Villagers think only about their own enrichment, for them there are no moral values. Faddey Mironovich, her husband's brother, forced Matryona to give the promised part of the house to her adopted daughter, Kira, during her lifetime. Matryona agreed, and when, out of greed, two sledges were hooked to one tractor, the cart fell under the train, and Matryona died along with her nephew and the tractor driver. Human greed is above all, that very evening, her only friend, Aunt Masha, came to her house to pick up the little thing promised to her, until Matryona's sisters stole it.

And Faddey Mironovich, who also had a coffin with his dead son in his house, still managed to bring the logs abandoned at the crossing before the funeral, and did not even come to pay tribute to the memory of the woman who died a terrible death because of his irrepressible greed. Matrena's sisters, first of all, took away her funeral money, and began to divide the remains of the house, crying over her sister's coffin not from grief and sympathy, but because it was supposed to be.

In fact, humanly, no one took pity on Matryona. Greed and greed blinded the eyes of fellow villagers, and people will never understand Matryona that with her spiritual development a woman stands at an unattainable height from them. She is truly righteous.

Composition

The events of that time are described from the perspective of an outsider, a lodger who lived in Matryona's house.

Narrator starts his narrative from the time he was looking for a job as a teacher, trying to find a remote village to live. By the will of fate, he ended up in the village where Matryona lived, and decided to stay with her.

In the second part, the narrator describes the difficult fate of Matryona, who has not seen happiness since her youth. Her life was hard, in everyday work and worries. She had to bury all her six children born. Matryona endured a lot of torment and grief, but she did not become embittered, and her soul did not harden. She is still hardworking and disinterested, benevolent and peaceful. She never condemns anyone, she treats everyone evenly and kindly, as before, she works in her farmstead. She died trying to help her relatives move her own part of the house.

In the third part, the narrator describes the events after the death of Matryona, all the same soullessness of people, relatives and relatives of the woman who, after the death of the woman, swooped like crows into the remains of her yard, trying to quickly take everything apart and plunder, condemning Matryona for her righteous life.

Main characters

Genre

The publication of Matryona Dvor caused much controversy among Soviet critics. Tvardovsky wrote in his notes that Solzhenitsyn is the only writer who expresses his opinion without regard to the authorities and the opinion of critics.

Everyone unequivocally came to the conclusion that the work of the writer belongs to "monumental story", so in a high spiritual genre the description of a simple Russian woman, personifying universal human values, is given.

Artwork test

Analysis Rating

Average rating: 4.7. Total ratings received: 1601.

In the summer of 1956, the hero of the story, Ignatich, returns to central Russia from Asian camps. In the story, he is endowed with the function of the narrator. The hero works as a teacher in a rural school and settles in the village of Talnovo in the hut of sixty-year-old Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva. The tenant and the hostess turn out to be people who are spiritually close to each other. In Ignatich's story about Matrena's everyday life, in the assessments of the people around her, in her actions, judgments and memories of what she experienced, the fate of the heroine and her inner world are revealed to the reader. The fate of Matrena, her image becomes for the hero a symbol of fate and the image of Russia itself.

In winter, Matrena's husband's relatives take part of the house - the upper room - from the heroine. While transporting a dismantled room, Matryona Vasilievna dies at a railway crossing under the wheels of a steam locomotive, trying to help the men to take out the stuck sleigh with logs from the crossing. Matryona appears in the story as a moral ideal, as the embodiment of the lofty spiritual and moral principles of the people's life that are forced out by the course of history. She - in the eyes of the hero-narrator - is one of those righteous people on whom the world stands.

With its genre features, Solzhenitsyn's story approaches the essay and goes back to the Turgenev tradition of the Hunter's Notes. Along with this, Matrenin Dvor, as it were, continues the tradition of Leskov's stories about the Russian righteous. In the author's version, the story was called "The Village Doesn't Stand Without a Righteous Man", but it was first published under the title "Matryona Dvor".

The fate of the hero-narrator of Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin Dvor" is correlated with the fate of the heroes of the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Ignatich, as it were, continues the fate of Shukhov and his camp comrades. His story tells what awaits the prisoners in life after release. Therefore, the first important problem in the story becomes the problem of choosing the hero of his place in the world.

Ignatich, who spent ten years in prison and camp, after living in exile in the "dusty hot desert", seeks to settle in a quiet corner of Russia, "where it would not be a shame to live and die." The hero wants to find a place in his native land that would preserve the original features and signs of folk life unchanged. Ignatich hopes to find spiritual and moral support, peace of mind in the traditional national way of life, which has withstood the destructive influence of the inexorable course of history. He finds it in the village of Talnovo, settling in the hut of Matryona Vasilievna.

What explains this choice of hero?

The hero of the story refuses to accept the terrible inhuman absurdity of existence, which has become the norm of life of contemporaries and has multiple manifestations in the daily way of life of people. Solzhenitsyn shows this with the ruthlessness of a publicist in the story "Matryona's Dvor". One example is the careless, nature-destroying actions of the chairman of the collective farm, who received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for the successful destruction of centuries-old forests.

The consequence of the abnormal course of history, the illogical way of life is the tragic fate of the hero. The absurdity and unnaturalness of the new way of life is especially noticeable in cities and industrial towns. Therefore, the hero aspires to the outback of Russia, wants to "settle ... forever" "somewhere away from the railway." The railway is a traditional symbol for Russian classical literature of a soulless modern civilization that brings destruction and death to man. In this sense, the railway appears in Solzhenitsyn's story.

At first, the hero's wish seems impossible. He bitterly notices both in the life of the village of Vysokoye Pole and in the village of Torfoprodukt (“Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such things in Russian!” the narrator says about the name of the village) the terrible realities of the new way of life. Therefore, the village of Talnovo, Matryona's house and she herself become the last hope for the hero, the last opportunity to fulfill his dream. Matryona's yard becomes for the hero the desired embodiment of that Russia, which was so important to him to find.

In Matryona, Ignatich sees the spiritual and moral ideal of a Russian person. What character traits, personality traits of Matryona allow us to see in her the embodiment of the high spiritual and moral principles of the people's life that have been supplanted by the course of history? What narrative techniques are used to create the image of the heroine in the story?

First of all, we see Matryona in an everyday environment, in a series of daily worries and affairs. Describing the actions of the heroine, the narrator seeks to penetrate into their hidden meaning, to understand their motives.

In the story about the first meeting between Ignatich and Matryona, we see the sincerity, simplicity, unselfishness of the heroine. “It was only later that I found out,” says the narrator, “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. But Matrena does not seek to get a profitable tenant. She fears that she will not be able to please a new person, that he will not like it in her house, which she directly tells the hero about. But Matryona is pleased when Ignatich still stays with her, because with a new person her loneliness comes to an end.

Matryona has inner tact and delicacy. Getting up long before the guest, she “quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, stoked the Russian stove, went to milk the goat,” “she didn’t invite guests to her place in the evenings, respecting my work,” says Ignatich. In Matryona there is no "woman's curiosity", she "did not annoy with any questions" to the hero. Ignatich is especially captivated by the benevolence of Matrena, her kindness is revealed in a disarming "radiant smile" that transforms the whole appearance of the heroine. “Those people always have good faces who are at odds with their conscience,” concludes the narrator.

“Deeds called to life,” says the narrator about Matryona. Work becomes for the heroine and a way to restore peace in her soul. “She had a sure way to regain her good mood - work,” the narrator notes.

Working on a collective farm, Matrena did not receive anything for her work, helping her fellow villagers, she refused money. Her work is selfless. Working for Matryona is as natural as breathing. Therefore, the heroine considers it inconvenient and impossible to take money for her work.

A new way to create the image of Matryona is the introduction of the heroine's memories into the narrative. They demonstrate new facets of her personality, in which the heroine reveals herself in full.

From the memoirs of Matrena, we learn that in her youth she, like the heroine of Nekrasov, stopped a galloping horse. Matryona is capable of a decisive, even desperate act, but behind this is not a love of risk, not recklessness, but a desire to ward off misfortune. The desire to ward off misfortune, to help people will dictate the behavior of the heroine in the last minutes of her life before her death, when she rushed to help the peasants to pull out the sleigh stuck at the railway crossing. Matryona remains true to herself to the end.

“But Matryona was by no means fearless,” the narrator notes. “She was afraid of the fire, she was afraid of the lightning, and most of all, for some reason, the train.” From one kind of train, Matryona "throws into a fever, her knees are shaking." The panic fear experienced by Matrena from one kind of train, which at first causes a smile, by the end of the story, after the death of the heroine under its wheels, acquires the meaning of a tragically true foreboding.

In the heroine's recollections of the experience, it is revealed that she has self-esteem, cannot bear the insults and resolutely protests when her husband raised his hand against her.

The outbreak of the First World War separates her from her loved one, Thaddeus, and predetermines the entire subsequent tragic course of Matryona's life. For three years, new tragedies have occurred in the life of Russia: “And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned upside down. Matrona's life was also turned upside down. Like the whole country, Matrena faces a “terrible choice”: she must choose her own fate, answer the question: how to live on? The younger brother of Thaddeus, Yefim, wooed Matryona. The heroine married him - started a new life, chose her fate. But the choice was wrong. Six months later, Thaddeus returns from captivity. In the disastrous game of passions that gripped him, Thaddeus is ready to kill Matryona and her chosen one. But Thaddeus is stopped by a moral prohibition that still exists in life - he does not dare to go against his brother.

For the heroine, there is no turning back. The choice of Matryona does not bring her happiness. A new life does not add up, her marriage is fruitless.

In 1941, the world war began again, and in the life of Matryona, the tragedy experienced in the First World War was repeated again. As in the first war Matryona lost her beloved, so in the second she loses her husband. The inexorable course of time dooms Matrenin Dvor to death: “The once noisy hut rotted and grew old, and now it’s a deserted hut - and the homeless Matryona grew old in it.”

Solzhenitsyn reinforces this motif, showing that the terrible inhuman absurdity of existence, which has become the norm of people's lives in a new historical era and from which the hero was looking for salvation in Matryona's house, did not pass the heroine. A new way of life relentlessly invades Matryona's life. The eleven post-war years of collective farm life were marked by the aggressive, inhuman stupidity and cynicism of collective farm practices. It seems that Matryona and her fellow villagers were experimented with for survival: the collective farm was not paid money for labor, they “cut off” personal gardens, did not allocate mowing for livestock, and deprived them of fuel for the winter. A celebration of the absurdity of collective farm life appears in the story as the transfer of the property of Matryona, who worked for many years on the collective farm: “a dirty white goat, a crooked cat, ficuses.” But Matryona managed to overcome all the hardships and hardships and keep the peace of her soul unchanged.

Matrona's house and its mistress appear as opposed to the surrounding world, the illogical and unnatural way of life that has established itself in it. The world of people feels this and cruelly takes revenge on Matryona.

This motif receives plot development in the story of the destruction of Matrenin's yard. Contrary to the fate that doomed her to loneliness, Matrena raised Thaddeus's daughter, Kira, for ten years, and became her second mother. Matryona decided: after her death, half of the house, the upper room, should be inherited by Kira. But Thaddeus, with whom Matryona once wanted to unite her life, decides to take the upper room during the life of her mistress.

In the actions of Thaddeus and his assistants, Solzhenitsyn sees a manifestation of the triumph of a new way of life. The new way of life formed a special attitude to the world, determined the new nature of human relationships. The terrible inhumanity and absurdity of the existence of people is revealed by the author in the substitution of concepts established in the minds of contemporaries, when “our language terribly calls our property” “good”. In the plot of the story, this "good" turns into an all-destroying evil. The pursuit of such “good”, which “losing is considered shameful and stupid before people”, turns into a different, immeasurably greater loss of true and enduring good: the world is losing a good, beautiful person - Matryona, high spiritual and moral principles are lost in life. The desperate and reckless pursuit of "good-property" brings death to the human soul, calls to life the terrible destructive properties of human nature - selfishness, cruelty, greed, aggressiveness, greed, cynicism, pettiness. All these base passions will manifest themselves in the people surrounding Matryona, determining their behavior in the history of the destruction of her home and the death of herself. The soul of Matrena, her inner world is opposed to the souls and inner world of the people around her. The soul of Matryona is beautiful because, according to Solzhenitsyn, the purpose of Matryona's life was not good-property, but good-love.

Matryona's house becomes in Solzhenitsyn's story a symbol of the harmonious traditional way of peasant life, high spiritual and moral values, which Matryona is the guardian of. Therefore, she and the house are inseparable. The heroine intuitively feels this: “it was terrible for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. ... for Matryona it was the end of her whole life, ”concludes the narrator. But Thaddeus and his assistants think otherwise. The fatal passions of the hero are no longer held back - there are no longer moral prohibitions on their way. They "knew that her house could be broken in her lifetime."

Matrenin's Yard, where the hero of the story found spiritual and moral support, becomes the last stronghold of the traditional national way of life, which could not resist the destructive influence of the inexorable course of history.

The destruction of Matrona's house becomes in the story a symbol of the violation of the natural course of historical time, fraught with catastrophic upheavals. Thus, the death of Matrenin's court becomes an accusation of a new historical era.

The final chord in creating the image of the heroine becomes in the finale of the story, after the death of Matryona, a comparison of her with the people around her. The tragic death of Matryona was supposed to shock people, make them think, awaken their souls, shake off the veil from their eyes. But that doesn't happen. The new way of life has devastated the souls of people, their hearts have hardened, they have no place for compassion, empathy, genuine sorrow. This is shown by Solzhenitsyn at the rites of farewell, funeral, commemoration of Matryona. The rites are losing their lofty, mournful, tragic meaning; all that remains of them is a ossified form, mechanically repeated by the participants. The tragedy of death is not able to stop their mercenary and conceited aspirations in people.

The loneliness of Matrena in life after her death takes on a special and new meaning. She is lonely because the spiritual and moral world of Matryona objectively, in addition to the will of the heroine, opposes the values ​​of the world of the people around her. The world of Matrena was alien and incomprehensible to them, it caused irritation and condemnation. So the image of Matryona allows the author to show in the story the moral trouble and spiritual emptiness of modern society.

The narrator's acquaintance with the people surrounding Matryona helps him fully understand her high destiny in the world of people. Matryona, who did not accumulate property, endured cruel trials and withstood her spirit, is “the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand.

Neither city.

Not all our land."