Summary of "Matrenin Yard", a story by A. Solzhenitsyn

Even the brief content of the story "Matrenin Dvor", written by A. Solzhenitsyn in 1963, is able to give the reader an idea of the patriarchal life of the Russian countryside.

Summary of Matrenin Yard (introduction)

On the way from Moscow, at 184 kilometers along the Murom and Kazan branches, even half a year after the events described, the train reluctantly slowed down. For a reason known only to the narrator and the machinists.

Summary of Matrenin Yard (part 1)

The narrator, returning from Asia in 1956, after a long absence (fought, but did not immediately return from the war, received 10 years of camps), got a job as a mathematics teacher at a village secondary school in the Russian remote area. Not wanting to live in the settlement barracks of "Peat products", he was looking for a corner in a rural house. In the village of Talnevo, the lodger was brought to Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva, a lonely woman of about sixty.

Matryona's hut was old and sound, built for a large family. The spacious room was dusky, the ficuses were silently "crowded" in the pots and pots in the window - the favorites of the hostess. In the house there lived a lame cat, mice, and in a tiny kitchenette - cockroaches.

Matryona Vasilyevna was ill, but she was not given disability, and she did not receive pensions, not having any relation to the working class. On the collective farm worked for the workday, that is, there was no money.

Matrena herself ate and fed Ignatich - the teacher-lodger - scantily: small potatoes and porridge from the cheapest cereal. Fuel villagers were forced to steal from the trust, for which they could be planted. Although peat was produced in the area, local residents were not supposed to be sold.

The difficult life of Matryona consisted of various activities: the collection of peat and dry hemp, as well as cowberry in the marshes, running around the offices for certificates for retirement, secret hay for goats, and relatives and neighbors. But this winter, life is a little bit settled - let go of the disease, and began to pay her for a tenant and a tiny pension. She was happy that she could order new felt boots, sew an old railway overcoat in a coat and buy a new quilted jacket.

Summary of Matrenin Yard (part 2)

Once the teacher found himself in the hut of a black, bearded old man, Faddei Grigoriev, who had come to ask for his son-in-law. It turned out that for Faddey Matryona had to get married, but he was taken to the war, and three years from him there was no news. Efim, his younger brother (after the death of the mother in the family did not have enough), went to her, and she married him in a cottage built by their father, where she lived to this day.

Thaddeus, returning from captivity, did not chop them off only because he regretted his brother. He married, also choosing Matryona, he cut down a new house, where he now lived with his wife and six children. That, another Matryona, often after beatings resorted to complaining about the greed and cruelty of her husband.

Matryona Vasilyevna had no children of her own, she buried six of her newborns before the war. Yefim was taken to the war, and he disappeared without a trace.

Then she asked Matryona for her namesake baby for education. She brought up a girl, Kira, as her own, she married successfully - for a young machinist in a neighboring village, where she was sometimes sent help. Often sick, the woman decided to leave part of the cottage Kira, although three Matrenina sisters were counting on her.

Kira asked her inheritance to build a house with time. Old Thaddeus demanded that the cottage be given to Matrena during her lifetime, although she was sorry to break the house in which she lived for forty years.

He gathered his relatives to make out the room, and then once more to assemble, he used to build a cottage for a couple with his father for himself and the first Matryona. While the axes of men were tapping, the women were preparing a moonshine and a snack.

When transporting the hut at the railway crossing, a sledge with boards was jammed. Under the wheels of the locomotive three people died, including Matryona.

Summary of Matrenin Yard (part 3)

At the village funeral, the funeral service was more like reconciling accounts. Sisters Matryona, lamenting over the coffin, stated their thoughts - they defended the rights to her inheritance, and the relatives of the deceased husband did not agree. The insatiable Thaddeus dragged the logs of the gifted room up to him in the courtyard with untruthful crooks: it was indecent and embarrassing to lose good.

Listening to the opinions of fellow villagers about Matryona, the teacher realized that she did not fit into the usual framework of peasant ideas about happiness: she did not keep the pig, did not seek to acquire good and dresses, concealing all the vices and ugliness of the soul. Grief from the loss of children and her husband did not make her wicked and heartless: she still helped everyone for free and rejoiced at all the good that she had met in her life. And I got all the ficus, a lame cat and a dirty white goat. All those who lived side by side did not understand that she was the true righteous man, without whom neither the village, nor the city, nor our land.

In his story Solzhenitsyn (Matrenin Dvor), the summary does not include this episode, writes that Matryona believed fiercely, she was more of a pagan. But it turned out that in her life she did not avert an iota of the rules of Christian morality and morality.