Even a brief summary of the story “Matrenin Dvor”, written by A. Solzhenitsyn in 1963, can give the reader an idea of the patriarchal life of the Russian countryside.
Summary of Matrenin Dvor (introduction)
On the way from Moscow, at 184 km along the Murom and Kazan branches, even six months after the events described, the train involuntarily slowed down. For a reason known only to the narrator and the machinists.
Summary of Matrenin Dvor (Part 1)
The narrator, returning from Asia in 1956, after a long absence (he fought, but did not immediately return from the war, received 10 years of camps), got a job as a mathematics teacher in a village school of the Russian hinterland. Not wanting to live in the village hut "Peat product", he was looking for a corner in a rural house. In the village of Talnovo, a tenant was brought to Matrena Vasilievna Grigorieva, a lonely woman of about sixty.
The hut of Matryona was old and solid, built for a large family. The spacious room was dark, near the window in pots and tubs the Ficus, the darlings of the hostess, silently "crowded". In the house there was still a laced cat, mice, and in a tiny kitchenette - cockroaches.
Matrena Vasilievna was ill, but they did not give disability, and she did not receive pensions, not having to do with the working class. She worked on a collective farm for workdays, that is, there was no money.
Matrena herself ate and fed Ignatich, the guest teacher, sparingly: with small potatoes and porridge from the cheapest cereals. Fuel the villagers were forced to steal from the trust, for which they could be planted. Although peat was mined in the district, locals were not supposed to sell it.
The difficult life of Matryona consisted of different things: collecting peat and dry hemp, as well as lingonberries in swamps, running around offices for information for retirement, secretly haying for goats, as well as relatives and neighbors. But this winter, life was a little better - she let go of the disease, and they began to pay her for a tenant and a tiny pension. She was happy that she was able to order new felt boots, alter the old railway overcoat in a coat and buy a new quilted jacket.
Summary of Matrenin Dvor (Part 2)
Once the teacher found in the hut of a black bearded old man - Faddey Grigoriev, that he had come to ask for a double son. It turned out that Thaddeus Matren was supposed to marry, but he was taken to the war, and for three years there was no news from him. Yefim, his younger brother, wore a hat to her (after the death of his mother, his family didn’t have enough hands), and she married him to the hut built by their father, where she has lived to this day.
Thaddeus, returning from captivity, did not cut them off just because he felt sorry for his brother. He married, choosing Matrena too, cut down a new hut, where he now lived with his wife and six children. That, another Matryona, often after the beatings, ran to complain about her husband's greed and cruelty.
Matrena Vasilievna did not have her children, she buried six newborns before the war. Yefim was taken to the war, and he went missing.
Then I asked Matryona from her namesake baby for education. She brought up, like a native, the girl Kira, whom she successfully married off to a young engineer in a neighboring village, from where help was sometimes sent to her. Often ill, the woman decided to bequeath part of the hut to Kira, although three Matrenins of the sister counted on her.
Kira asked for her inheritance in order to build a house over time. Old Thaddeus demanded that the hut be given during Matrena's life, although she was sorry to death to break the house where she lived for forty years.
He gathered relatives to dismantle the room, and then assemble it again, he was building a house for a couple with his father for himself and the first Matryona. While the axes of men were knocking, women were preparing moonshine and a snack.
When transporting a hut, a sleigh with boards got stuck at a railway crossing . Three people died under the wheels of the engine, including Matron.
Summary of Matrenin Dvor (Part 3)
At a village funeral, the funeral was more like scoring. The Matrena sisters, wailing over the coffin, expressed their thoughts - they defended the rights to her inheritance, and the relatives of the late husband did not agree. The insatiable Thaddeus, by hook or by crook, dragged the logs of the presented chambermaid into his yard: it was indecent and shameful to lose the good.
Listening to the reviews 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 hold a piglet, did not seek to acquire kindness and outfits that hide all her vices and ugliness of her soul under her splendor. The grief of losing her children and her husband did not make her angry and heartless: she still helped everyone for free and rejoiced at all the good things that she had encountered in her life. And I just got ficus, a pygmy cat and a dirty white goat. Everyone who lived nearby did not understand that she was the true righteous one, without whom neither the village, nor the city, nor our land could stand.
In his story Solzhenitsyn (Matrenin Dvor), the summary does not include this episode, writes that Matrena believed vehemently, rather was a pagan. But it turned out that in her life she did not depart one iota from the rules of Christian morality.