Matrenin dvor summary with quotes. Solzhenitsyn "Matrenin Dvor" - full text

Consider the work that Solzhenitsyn created in 1959. We are interested in him summary. "Matrenin dvor"- a story that was first published in the magazine" New world"in 1963.

The author begins his story with the story that at 184 km from Moscow, following the Ryazan railway, trains slowed down for another six months after one event. After reading the summary of the book "Matrenin's Dvor", you will find out what happened at this place. Passengers looked out the windows for a long time, wanting to see with their own eyes the reason, which was known only to the drivers.

The beginning of the first chapter

The next events begin the first chapter, its summary. "Matrenin's Dvor" consists of three chapters.

Ignatich, the storyteller, returned to Russia in the summer of 1956 from sultry Kazakhstan, not yet determining exactly where he would go. He was not expected anywhere.

How the narrator ended up in the village of Talnovo

He could do, a year before the events described in the work, perhaps the most unskilled job. He would hardly have been hired even as an electrician for a decent construction. And the narrator "wanted to teach." Now he timidly entered the Vladimir Oblono and asked if a mathematics teacher was needed in the very outback? I was very surprised by this statement of local officials, since everyone wanted to work closer to the city. The storyteller from the work "Matrynin's Dvor" was sent to Vysokoe Pole. It is better to make a summary, analysis of this story, mentioning that he did not immediately settle in the village of Talnovo.

Apart from the beautiful name, there was nothing in the High Field. He refused this work, because it was necessary to eat something. Then he was offered to go to the Torfoprodukt station. This plain village consisted of houses and barracks. There was no forest here at all. This place turned out to be rather dull, but did not have to choose. Ignatich, having spent the night at the station, learned that the nearest village was Talnovo, followed by Spudni, Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Shevertni, who were away from the railway tracks. This interested our hero, he decided to find housing here.

Ignatic's new residence - Matrenin Dvor

A summary of parts of further events will be described by us in sequence. It became clear shortly after the narrator arrived at the site that it was not so easy to find a place to live. Despite the fact that the teacher was a profitable tenant (the school promised him a car of peat in excess of the rent for the winter), all the huts here were overcrowded. Only on the outskirts of Ignatich found himself an unprepossessing shelter - Matrenin's yard. Summary, analysis of works - all these are just auxiliary materials. For a holistic understanding of the story, you should familiarize yourself with the author's original.

Matryona's house was large, but unkempt and dilapidated. It was built soundly and long ago, for a large family, but now only a single woman of about 60 years old lived here. Matryona was not well. She complained of "black ailment" and was lying on the stove. The hostess did not show much joy at the sight of Ignatich, but he realized immediately that he was destined to settle here.

Life in Matryona's hut

Most of her time Matryona spent on the stove, giving the best place to numerous ficuses. The corner by the window was reserved for the guest. Here he put a table, a folding bed, books, fenced off from the main space with ficuses.

In addition to Matryona Vasilievna, cockroaches, mice and a bumpy cat lived in the hut. Cockroaches escaped from the cat behind the wallpaper pasted in several layers. Soon the guest got used to his new life. At 4 o'clock in the morning, the hostess got up, milked the goat, and then cooked potatoes in 3 potatoes: for the goat, for herself and for the guest. The food was monotonous: either "flaky kart", or barley porridge, or "cardboard soup" (as everyone in the village called it). However, Ignatic was pleased with this too, since life had taught him to find the meaning of life not in food.

How Matryona Vasilievna was busy with her pension

The summary of the story "Matrenin's Dvor" further acquaints the reader in more detail with the hostess with whom Ignatich settled. Matryona had many grievances that fall. A new pension law was issued at that time. Her neighbors advised her to seek a pension, the right to which the woman “did not deserve,” since she worked for 25 years on a collective farm for work, not for money. Now Matryona was sick, but she was not considered disabled for the same reason. It was also necessary to seek a pension for her husband, for the loss of a breadwinner. However, he had not been there for 15 years, from the very beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to get information from different places about his experience and earnings. Several times I had to rewrite these papers, correct them, then refer them to the social security service, and he was 20 km from Talnov. The village council was located 10 km away in the other direction, and an hour's walk in the third was the village council.

Matryona is forced to steal peat

Having walked fruitlessly for 2 months, the old woman, the heroine, who was created in the work by Solzhenitsin ("Matrynin's yard"), was exhausted. The summary, unfortunately, does not allow for an exhaustive description of it. She complained of harassment. After these senseless walks Matryona got down to work: she dug potatoes or went for peat and came back tired and enlightened. Ignatich asked her if the peat machine allocated by the school would not be enough? But Matryona assured him that it was necessary to stock up on three cars for the winter. Officially, the inhabitants were not entitled to peat, but they caught it and tried it for theft. The chairman of the collective farm walked around the village, dimly and demanding or innocently looked into the eyes and talked about everything except fuel, because he had stocked up himself. They pulled peat from the trust. It was possible to carry away a bag of 2 poods at a time. It was enough for one fire.

Labor-intensive everyday life of Matryona Vasilievna

Matryona's working days are important component works. Their description cannot be dispensed with when composing a summary of Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin's Dvor". Matryona walked 5-6 times a day, hiding the stolen peat so that it would not be taken away. The patrol often caught women at the entrance to the village, and also searched the courtyards. However, the approach of winter was inevitable, and people had to overcome fear. Let's note this, making up a summary. "Matrenin Dvor" acquaints us further with the observations of Ignatich. He noticed that her mistress's day was filled with many things to do. The woman carried peat, stored lingonberries for the winter, hay for the goat, and dug "kart". It was necessary to mow through the swamps, since the collective farm cut off plots for the disabled, although it was necessary to work out for 15 acres at the local collective farm, where there were not enough hands. When the mistress of Ignatich was summoned to collective farm work, the woman did not deny, she obediently agreed upon learning about the time of the collection. Often called to help Matryona and neighbors - to plow a garden or dig potatoes. The woman dropped everything and went to help the petitioner. She did it completely free of charge, considering it a debt.

She also had a job when she had to feed the goat herders once every 1.5 months. The woman went to the general store and bought products that she did not eat herself: sugar, butter, canned fish. The hostesses did their best in front of each other, trying to feed the shepherds better, as they would be exalted throughout the village if something went wrong.

From time to time, Matryona had an illness. Then the woman lay, practically not moving, wanting nothing but peace. At this time, Masha, her close friend from an early age, came to help with the housework.

Matryona Timofeevna's life is getting better

However, affairs called Matryona to life, and, after lying down for a while, she got up, paced slowly, then began to move more lively. She told Ignatic that she was brave and strong in her youth. Now Matryona was afraid of a fire, and trains - most of all.

Matryona Vasilievna’s life was getting better for the winter. They began to pay her a pension of 80 rubles, and the school allocated 100 rubles for a guest. Neighbors envied Matryona. And she, having sewn 200 rubles into the lining of her coat for her funeral, said that now she too had seen a little peace. Even relatives showed up - 3 sisters, who were afraid before that the woman would ask them for help.

Chapter two

Matryona tells Ignatich about herself

Ignatic eventually told about himself. He said that he spent a long time in prison. The old woman nodded her head in silence, as if she had suspected it before. He also learned that Matryona had married before the revolution and immediately settled in this hut. She had 6 children, but they all died when they were young. The husband did not return from the war, he disappeared without a trace. Kira's pupil lived with Matryona. And once returning from school, Ignatic found a tall black old man in a hut. His face was overgrown with a black beard. It turned out to be Faddey Mironovich, Matryona's brother-in-law. He came to ask for Anton Grigoriev, his negligent son, who studied in the 8th "G" class. Matryona Vasilievna told in the evening that she almost married him in her youth.

Faddey Mironovich

Faddey Mironovich wooed her first, before Yefim. She was 19 and he was 23. However, war broke out, and Thaddeus was taken to the front. Matryona had been waiting for him for 3 years, but not a single news came. The revolutions were over, and Efim wooed. On July 12, on Peter's day, they got married, and on October 14, on Pokrov, Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. If not for his brother, Thaddeus would have killed both Matryona and Efim. He said later that he would look for a wife with the same name. And so Thaddeus brought the "second Matryona" to a new hut. He often beat his wife, and she ran to complain about him to Matryona Vasilyevna.

Kira in Matryona's life

What, it would seem, to regret Thaddeus? His wife gave birth to 6 children, they all survived. And the children of Matryona Vasilyevna died before they even lived to 3 months. The woman believed that she was damaged. In 1941, Thaddeus was not taken to the front due to blindness, but Yefim went to war and disappeared without a trace. Matryona Vasilievna begged Kira, the youngest daughter, from the "second Matryona", and raised her for 10 years, after which she married a driver from Cherusti. At the same time, suffering from illness and awaiting her death, Matryona announced her will - to give after death a separate log house in the inheritance of Kira. She did not say anything about the hut itself, which her three more sisters were planning to receive.

Matryona's hut was broken

Let's describe how Matryona's hut was broken, continuing the summary. "Matryona's Dvor" is a story in which Solzhenitsyn tells us further that Kira, shortly after the narrator's frank conversation with her mistress, came to Matryona from Cherusty, and the old man Thaddeus became worried. It turned out that in Cherusty, the young were offered a plot of land for building a house, so Kira needed Matryona's room. Faddey, who was on fire to seize the plot in Cherusty, often visited Matryona Vasilyevna, demanding from her the promised room. The woman did not sleep for 2 nights, it was not easy for her to decide to break the roof, under which she lived for 40 years. This meant the end of her life for Matryona. Thaddeus once appeared in February with 5 sons, and they earned 5 axes. While the men were breaking the hut, the women were preparing moonshine for the day of loading. A son-in-law, a machinist with a tractor driver, came from Cherustia. However, the weather changed dramatically, and for 2 weeks the tractor was not given a broken room.

Fatal event

During this time Matryona gave up very much. She was scolded by her sisters for giving Kira the upper room, the cat disappeared somewhere ... The road was finally established, a tractor arrived with a large sleigh, then the second ones were hastily knocked down. They began to argue about how to take them - together or separately. The driver's son-in-law and Thaddeus were afraid that two sledges would not be pulled by the tractor, and the tractor driver did not want to make two trips. He did not have time to make them overnight, and the tractor must be in the garage by morning. The men, having loaded the upper room, sat down at the table, but not for long - the darkness made them hurry. Matryona jumped out after the men, complaining that one tractor was not enough. Matryona did not return either in an hour or 4 hours. At one o'clock in the morning, 4 railroad workers knocked on the hut and entered. They asked if the workers and the tractor driver had drunk before leaving. Ignatich blocked the entrance to the kitchen, and they noticed with annoyance that there was no drinking bout in the hut. Leaving, one of them said that everyone was "turned around", and the fast train almost went off the rails.

Details of what happened

Let us include some details of this tragic event in the summary of the story "Matrenin's Dvor", which we have compiled. Matryona's friend, Masha, who came with the workers, said that a tractor with the first sledges crossed the crossing, but the second, homemade ones, got stuck, as the cable that pulled them had burst. The tractor tried to pull them out, the son of Thaddeus and the tractor driver got along with the cable, and Matryona also began to help them. The driver made sure that the train from Cherusty did not descend. And then a shunting locomotive, moving without lights, was handed backwards, and he crushed them three. The tractor was working, so the locomotive was not heard. What happened to the heroes of the work? The summary of Solzhenitsyn's story "Matrenin Dvor" provides an answer to this question. The machinists survived and immediately rushed to brake the ambulance. They barely made it. The witnesses scattered. Kira's husband almost hanged himself, he was pulled out of the noose. After all, because of him, his wife's aunt and brother died. Then Kira's husband went to surrender to the authorities.

Chapter Three

The summary of the story "Matrenin's yard" continues with the description of the third chapter of the work. In the morning the remains of Matryona were brought in a sack. Her three sisters came, locked the chest, seized the property. They wept, reproaching the woman that she died, not listening to them, allowing them to break the upper room. Approaching the coffin, the ancient old woman strictly said that there are two riddles in the world: a person does not remember how he was born and does not know how he will die.

What happened after the railroad event

The summary of the story "Matrenin's Dvor" by chapters cannot be described without telling about what happened after the fatal event on the railway. The tractor driver left the human court. The management of the road was to blame for the fact that the busy crossing was not guarded, that the locomotive "raft" was going without lights. That is why they wanted to blame everything on drunkenness, and when it did not work out, they decided to hush up the trial. The repair of the broken paths took 3 days. Freezing workers burned gratuitous logs. Thaddeus rushed about, trying to save the remnants of the upper room. He did not grieve about the woman he once loved and his son killed. Gathering his relatives, he took the upper room on a detour through 3 villages to his courtyard. Those who died at the crossing were buried in the morning. Thaddeus came after the funeral, dressed up for property with Matryona's sisters. In addition to the upper room, he was given a barn in which the goat lived, as well as the entire internal fence. He took everything with his sons to his yard.

The story that Solzhenitsyn wrote ("Matrenin's Dvor") is coming to an end. A summary of the final events of this work is as follows. They boarded up Matryona's hut. Ignatic moved to her sister-in-law. She tried in every possible way to humiliate his former mistress, saying that she helped everyone disinterestedly, was dirty and inept. And only then the image of Matryona surfaced before the narrator, with whom he lived side by side, not understanding her. This woman was not exhausted in order to buy things and then take care of them. more life, she did not pursue outfits that embellish villains and freaks. Not appreciated or understood by anyone, she was that righteous person, without whom no village, no city is worth. Our whole land does not stand without him, as Solzhenitsyn believes. "Matrenin Dvor", a summary of which was presented in this article, is one of the most famous and best works this author. Andrei Sinyavsky called it the "fundamental thing" of "village literature" in our country. Of course, the brief content does not convey the artistic value of the work. We have described "Matrenin Dvor" (Solzhenitsyn) chapter by chapter in order to acquaint the reader with the plot of the story.

Surely you will be interested to know that the work is based on real events. In reality, the heroine of the story was called Zakharova Matryona Vasilyevna. In the village of Miltsevo, the events described in the story actually took place. We have presented only a brief summary of it. "Matrenin Dvor" (Solzhenitsyn), described in chapters in this article, acquaints the reader with village life in Soviet time, with the type of a righteous man, without whom no village is worth.

In the summer of 1956, a passenger disembarked at the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the railway line to Murom and Kazan. This is a storyteller, whose fate resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn himself (he fought, but from the front "he was delayed with the return of ten years," documents "groped"). 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 Vysokoe Pole, because they didn't bake bread and sell anything edible there. And then he is transferred to a village with a monstrous name for his hearing Peatproduct. However, it turns out that "not everything is around peat extraction" and there are also villages with the names of Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudnya, Shevertni, Shestimirovo ...

This reconciles the narrator with his share, for it promises him a "perfect Russia." He settled in one of the villages called Talnovo. The owner of the hut in which the narrator lives is called Matryona Ignatievna Grigorieva or simply Matryona.

The fate of Matryona, about which she did not immediately, not considering it interesting for a "cultured" person, sometimes in the evenings tells the guest, bewitches and at the same time stuns him. He sees in her fate a special meaning, which Matryona's fellow villagers and relatives do not notice. The 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 Matryona herself hardly loved him. She was 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 the Thaddeus family, she married her younger brother, Efim. And then suddenly Thaddeus returned, who was in Hungarian captivity. According to him, he did not cut Matryona and her husband with an ax only because Yefim 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 of Yefim's children (also six) dying before they even lived three months. The whole village decided that Matryona was “spoiled,” and she herself believed it. Then she took up the daughter of the "second Matryona" - Kira, raised her for ten years, until she got married and left for the village of Cherusti.

Matryona lived her whole life as if not for herself. She constantly works for someone: for a collective farm, for neighbors, while doing "muzhik" work, and never asks for money for her. Matryona has tremendous inner strength. For example, she is able to stop a rushing horse on the run, which cannot be stopped by men.

Gradually, the narrator realizes that it is precisely on people like Matryona, who give themselves to others without a trace, that the whole village and the entire Russian land still rests. But this discovery hardly pleases him. If Russia rests only on selfless old women, what will happen to her next?

Hence - the absurdly tragic end of the story. Matryona dies, helping Thaddeus and his sons to drag a part of their own hut, bequeathed to Kira, across the railway on a sleigh. Thaddeus did not want to wait for Matryona's death and decided to take the inheritance for the young during her lifetime. Thus, he unwittingly provoked her death. When relatives bury Matryona, they cry, rather out of duty than heartily, and think only about the final division of Matryona's property.

Thaddeus doesn't even come to the commemoration.

Solzhenitsyn's "Matrenin Dvor" - a story about tragic fate Matryona's open woman, unlike her fellow villagers. Published for the first time in the magazine "New World" in 1963.

The story is told in the first person. The main character becomes a tenant of Matryona and tells about her amazing fate. The first title of the story "A Village Is Not Worth It Without a Righteous Man" well conveyed the idea of ​​a work about a pure, unselfish soul, but was replaced in order to avoid problems with censorship.

main characters

The narrator- a middle-aged man who served lines in prison and wants a quiet, calm life in the Russian outback. He settled with Matryona and tells about the fate of the heroine.

Matryona Is a single woman in her sixties. She lives alone in her hut and is often sick.

Other characters

Thaddeus- Matryona's former lover, a tenacious, greedy old man.

Sisters Matryona- women who are looking for their benefit in everything, treat Matryona as a consumer.

One hundred and eighty four kilometers from Moscow, on the road to Kazan and Murom, train passengers were always surprised by a serious decrease in speed. People rushed to the windows and talked about possible repairs ways. Passing this section, the train again picked up the previous speed. And the reason for the slowdown was known only to the machinists and the author.

Chapter 1

In the summer of 1956, the author returned from the "blazing desert just at random to Russia." His return "dragged on for ten years," and he had no hurry to where or to anyone. The narrator wanted to go somewhere in the Russian outback with forests and fields.

He dreamed of "teaching" away from the bustle of the city, and he was sent to a town with the poetic name of Vysokoe Pole. The author did not like it there, and he asked to be redirected to a place with the creepy name "Peatproduct". Upon arrival in the village, the narrator understands that it is "easier to come here than to leave later."

In addition to the hostess, the hut was inhabited by mice, cockroaches, and out of pity a lame cat that was picked up.

Every morning, the hostess woke up at 5 in the morning, fearing to oversleep, as she did not really trust her watch, which had been going on for 27 years. She fed her "dirty white crooked goat" and cooked a simple breakfast for the guest.

Somehow Matryona learned from rural women that "a new pension law has been issued." And Matryona began to seek a pension, but it was very difficult to get it, the different offices to which the woman was sent were dozens of kilometers from each other, and the day had to be spent because of one signature.

People in the village lived in poverty, despite the fact that peat bogs spread for hundreds of kilometers around Talnovo, the peat from them "belonged to the trust." Rural women had to carry sacks of peat for the winter, hiding from the raids of the guards. The land here was sandy, and the harvest was poor.

People in the village often called Matryona to their garden, and she, leaving her business, went to help them. The Talnovsk women almost lined up to take Matryona to their garden, because she worked for pleasure, rejoicing in someone else's good harvest.

Once every month and a half, the hostess had a turn to feed the shepherds. This dinner "drove Matryona into a big expense," because she had to buy sugar, canned food, butter. The grandmother herself did not allow herself such a luxury even on holidays, living only by what she gave her a miserable vegetable garden.

Matryona once told about the horse Volchok, which got scared and "carried the sleigh into the lake." "The peasants jumped away, but she grabbed the bridle and stopped." At the same time, despite the seeming fearlessness, the hostess was afraid of a fire and, to the point of trembling in her knees, of a train.

By the winter, Matryona was counted as a pension. The neighbors began to envy her. And grandmother finally ordered new felt boots, a coat from an old overcoat, and hid two hundred rubles for the funeral.

One day, three of her younger sisters came to see Matryona for Epiphany evenings. The author was surprised because he had not seen them before. I thought maybe they were afraid that Matryona would ask them for help, so they didn't come.

With the receipt of the pension, my grandmother seemed to come to life, and work was easier for her, and her illness worried less often. Only one event darkened my grandmother's mood: for Epiphany in church, someone took her pot of holy water, and she was left without water and without a pot.

Chapter 2

The Talnovsk women asked Matryona about her guest. And she passed the questions to him. The author told the hostess only that he was in prison. He himself did not ask about the old woman's past, did not think that there was anything interesting there. I only knew that she was married and came to this hut as a mistress. She had six children, but they all died. Later, her pupil Kira was with her. And Matryona's husband did not return from the war.

Once, having come home, the narrator saw an old man - Faddey Mironovich. He came to ask for his son - Antoshka Grigoriev. The author recalls that for this insanely lazy and arrogant boy, who was transferred from class to class only so as not to "spoil the statistics of progress," sometimes Matryona herself asked for some reason. After the petitioner left, the narrator learned from the hostess that it was the brother of her missing husband. On the same evening, she said that she was supposed to marry him. As a nineteen-year-old girl, Matryona loved Thaddeus. But he was taken to the war, where he went missing. Three years later, Thaddeus's mother died, the house was left without a mistress, and the youngest brother of Thaddeus, Efim, came to woo the girl. No longer hoping to see her beloved, Matryona got married in the hot summer and became the mistress of this house, and in winter Thaddeus returned from “Hungarian captivity”. Matryona threw herself at his feet, and he said that "if it had not been for my dear brother, I would have chopped both of you."

He later married "another Matryona" - a girl from a neighboring village, whom he chose as a wife only because of her name.

The author remembered how she came to the hostess and often complained that her husband beats and offends her. She gave birth to six children to Thaddeus. And Matryona's children were born and died almost immediately. It was all the fault of the "spoilage," she thought.

Soon the war began, and Yefim was taken away from where he never returned. Lonely Matryona took little Kira from "Second Matryona" and raised her for 10 years, until the girl married a machinist and left. Since Matryona was very ill, she early took care of the will, in which she awarded the pupil a part of her hut - a wooden extension room.

Kira came to visit and said that in Cherusty (where she lives), in order to get land for the young, it is necessary to build some kind of building. For this purpose, the room bequeathed to Matryona was very suitable. Thaddeus often began to come and persuade the woman to give her away now, during her lifetime. Matryona was not sorry for the upper room, but it was terrible to break the roof of the house. And so, on a cold February day, Thaddeus came with his sons and began to separate the upper room, which he had once built with his father.

For two weeks the room was lying near the house, because a blizzard covered all the roads. And Matryona was not herself, besides, her three sisters came and scolded, for allowing them to give up the upper room. On the same days, "a cat with a bent legged from the yard and disappeared", which greatly upset the hostess.

Once, returning from work, the narrator saw how old Thaddeus drove a tractor and loaded the dismantled room on two makeshift sledges. After that we drank moonshine and, in the dark, drove the hut to Cherusti. Matryona went to see them off, but she never returned. At one o'clock in the morning, the author heard voices in the village. It turned out that the second sleigh, which Thaddeus had attached to the first out of greed, got stuck on flights and crumbled. At that time, a steam locomotive was going, because of the hillock it was not visible, because of the tractor engine it was not audible. He ran into a sleigh, killed one of the machinists, the son of Thaddeus and Matryona. In the middle of the night, Matryona's friend Masha came, told about it, grieved, and then told the author that Matryona bequeathed her "bundle" to her, and she wanted to take it back in memory of her friend.

CHAPTER 3

In the morning they were going to bury Matryona. The narrator describes how the sisters came to say goodbye to her, crying "for the show" and blaming Thaddeus and his family for her death. Only Kira sincerely grieved for the deceased adoptive mother, and "Second Matryona", the wife of Thaddeus. The old man himself was not at the commemoration. When they were transporting the ill-fated room, the first sledges with boards and armor remained standing at the crossing. And, at a time when one of his son died, his son-in-law is under investigation, and his daughter Kira almost loses her mind with grief, he worried only about how to bring the sleigh home, and begged all his acquaintances to help him.

After Matryona's funeral, her hut was “beaten until spring”, and the author moved to “one of her sister-in-law”. The woman often recalled Matryona, but all with condemnation. And in these memories arose completely new image women that were so strikingly different about the people around. Matryona lived with open heart, always helped others, did not refuse to help anyone, even though her health was weak.

AI Solzhenitsyn ends his work with the words: “We all lived next to her, and did not understand that she was the very righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, not a village is worth. Neither the city. Not all our land. "

Conclusion

The work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells about the fate of a sincere Russian woman, who "had fewer sins than a bent-legged cat." The image of the main character is the image of the very righteous person without whom the village does not stand. Matryona devotes her whole life to others, there is not a drop of anger or falsehood in her. The people around take advantage of her kindness, and do not realize how holy and pure this woman's soul is.

Since the short retelling of "Matryona's Dvor" does not convey the original author's speech and the atmosphere of the story, it is worth reading it in full.

Storytelling test

Retelling rating

Average rating: 4.6. Total ratings received: 6677.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Matrenin Dvor. Read by the author

1

In the summer of 1956, from the dusty hot desert, I returned at random - just to Russia. No one at one point was waiting for me and did not call, because I was delayed with a return for ten years. I just wanted to middle lane- without heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to get lost in the interior of Russia - if there was one somewhere, I lived.

A year earlier, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only be hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn't even hire me as an electrician for a decent construction. And I was drawn - to teach. Knowledgeable people told me that there was nothing to spend on a ticket, I wasted driving.

Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

But something was already beginning to fear. When I went up the stairs… and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glazed partition, like in a pharmacy. Nevertheless, I approached the window timidly, bowed and asked:

- Tell me if you need mathematics somewhere far from railroad? I want to settle there forever.

They felt every letter in my documents, walked from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - all day long they ask to go to the city, but larger. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoe Pole. One name made the soul happy.

The name didn't lie. On the hillock between the spoons, and then other hillocks, completely enclosed by a forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Pole was the very place where it would not hurt to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a tree stump and thought that I would heartily not need to have breakfast and dinner every day, just to stay here and listen to the branches rustling on the roof at night - when the radio is not heard from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, no bread was baked there. They did not sell anything edible there. The whole village dragged sacks of food from the regional town.

I went back to the personnel department and prayed in front of the window. At first, they did not want to talk to me. Then they all walked from room to room, rang the bell, creaked and imprinted me in the order: "Torfoproduct."

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that such a thing could be composed in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wooden barrack, there was a strict inscription: "Take the train only from the side of the station!" A nail on the boards was scratched: "And without tickets." And at the box office, with the same melancholic wit, it was forever cut out with a knife: "There are 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, too, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and survived the revolution. Then they were cut down - peat workers and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, brought down a fair amount of hectares of forest to the root and profitably sold to the Odessa region, on which he raised his collective farm.

Between the peaty lowlands, the village was scattered randomly - the monotonous, poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings along the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partitions reaching the ceiling, so I couldn't rent a room with four real walls.

A factory chimney was smoking over the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly, whistling piercingly, dragged along it trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes. Without a mistake, I could have assumed that in the evening a radio tape would burst over the doors of the club, and look drunk along the street - not without that, but poke each other with knives.

This is where the 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 at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.

I could not sleep on the station bench, and as soon as daylight I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny bazaar. Wounded, the only woman was standing there selling milk. I took the bottle and began to drink right there.

I was struck by her speech. She did not speak, but sang sweetly, and her words were the very ones for which longing from Asia pulled me:

- Drink, drink with a desirable soul. Are you a visitor?

- Where are you from? - I brightened.

And I learned that not everything around peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad track, but beyond the hillock, there is a village, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it is here, even when there was a lady-"gypsy" and there was a dashing forest around. And further the whole region goes the villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo - everything is muffled, from the railroad to the lakes.

A wind of calm pulled me from these names. They promised me a perfect Russia.

And I asked my new acquaintance to take me after the bazaar in Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.

I seemed to be a profitable tenant: the school promised me a car of peat for the winter in excess of the fee. The worries were no longer touching on the woman's face. She herself had no place (she and her husband were raising her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But here, too, there was no separate room, it was cramped and spongy.

So we came to a drying, dammed river with a bridge. The miles of this place did not appeal to me in the whole village; two or three willows, the hut was distorted, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came out to the shore, shaking themselves off.

- Well, unless we go to Matryona, - said my guide, already tired of me. - Only her dressing room is not so good, she lives in the start-up, she is ill.

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 under the teremok. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, wood chips drove out, the logs of the log house and the gate, once mighty, turned gray with old age, and their casing thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but put her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple idea against livestock and a stranger. The courtyard was not covered, but there was much in the house under one link. Outside the front door, interior steps climbed up spacious bridges, high with roofs. To the left, there were still steps leading up to the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the basement. And to the right went the hut itself, with an attic and an underground.

It was built long ago and soundly, for a large family, and now a single woman of about sixty lived.

When I entered the hut, she 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 of the window-sill, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs of figs. They filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the north side. In the rest of the light, and, moreover, behind the chimney, the hostess's roundish face seemed to me yellow and sick. And from her clouded eyes it was possible to see that the disease had exhausted her.

Talking to me, she was lying on the stove face down, without a pillow, with her head to the door, and I was standing below. She did not show joy to get a tenant, complained of a black ailment, from an attack of which she was coming out now: the ailment did not hit her every month, but, having flown,

- ... holds two-days and tr and- days, so I won't be in a hurry to get up or serve. And the hut would not mind, live.

And she listed me other housewives, who would be more peaceful and pleasing to me, and sent me to bypass them. But I already saw that my lot was - to settle in this darkish hut with a dull mirror, which was completely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and about the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here that, due to poverty, Matryona did not keep a radio, and alone there was no one to talk to her with.

And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village, and although in my second arrival she refused for a long time:

- Do not know how, do not cook - how are you going? - but she already met me on my feet, and even as if pleasure awakened in her eyes because I returned.

We hit it off about the price and the peat that the school would bring.

It was only later that I learned that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilyevna had not earned a ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid her pension. Relatives helped her little. And on the collective farm she did not work for money - for sticks. For the sticks of workdays in the tainted book of the accountant.

So I settled down with Matryona Vasilievna. We did not share rooms. Her bed was in the door corner by the stove, and I unfolded my cot by the window and, pushing Matryona's favorite ficuses out of the light, put a table by another window. There was electricity in the village - it was pulled up from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers then wrote "Ilyich's bulbs", and the peasants, staring at their eyes, said: "Tsar Fire!"

Maybe, to some of the village, some richer, Matryona's hut did not seem kind, but we were quite good with her that autumn and winter: it did not flow from the rains yet and the chilly winds did not blow the heat out of it right away, only in the morning, especially when the wind blew from the leaky side.

In addition to Matryona and me, there were also cats, mice and cockroaches living in the hut.

The cat was not young, and most importantly - a bent leg. Out of pity, she was picked up by Matryona and took root. Although she walked on four legs, she limped greatly: she took care of one leg, her leg was sore. When the cat jumped from the stove to the floor, the sound of her touching the floor was not soft, like everyone else's, but a strong simultaneous blow of three legs: dumb! - such a strong blow that I did not get used to it at once, shuddered. It was she who substituted three legs at once to protect the fourth.

But it was not because there were mice in the hut because the bumpy cat could not cope with them: she, like lightning, jumped after them into the corner and carried them out in her teeth. And mice were inaccessible for a cat due to the fact that someone once, even after a good life, pasted over Matrenin's hut with corrugated greenish wallpaper, and not just in a layer, but in five layers. The wallpaper stuck together well with each other, but in many places it fell behind the wall - and it turned out, as it were, the inner skin of the hut. Between the logs of the hut and the wallpaper skin of the mouse, they made their own moves and rustled insolently, running along them even under the ceiling. The cat looked angrily after their rustling, but could not get it.

Sometimes the cat and cockroaches ate, but they made her feel bad. The only thing that the cockroaches respected was the line of the partition that separated the mouth of the Russian stove and the kitchenette from the clean hut. They did not crawl into a clean hut. But in the kitchenette they swarmed at night, and if late in the evening, when I went to drink water, I lit a light bulb there - the floor is all over, and the bench is large, and even the wall was almost completely brown and moved. I brought borax from the chemical room, and, mixing with the dough, we poisoned them. The cockroaches were decreasing, but Matryona was afraid to poison the cat with them. We stopped adding poison, and the cockroaches multiplied again.

At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was studying at the table, the rare rapid rustling of mice under the wallpaper was covered with a continuous, uniform, continuous, like the distant sound of the ocean, the rustle of cockroaches behind the partition. But I got used to him, for there was nothing evil in him, there was no lie in him. Their rustling was their life.

And I got used to the rough poster beauty, who from the wall constantly held out Belinsky, Panferov and a stack of some books to me, but she was silent. I got used to everything that was in Matryona's hut.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. The Khodik Matrenin were twenty-seven years old when they were bought in the general store. They always went ahead, and Matryona did not worry - if only they did not lag behind, so as not to be late in the morning. She turned on the light behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, heated the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all her bellies were - this dirty-white crooked goat), walked on the water and cooked in three cast iron pots: one pot - for me , one for myself, one for the goat. She chose the smallest potatoes from the underground for the goat, the smallest for herself, and with egg... Her sandy vegetable garden, which had not been fertilized since the pre-war years and was always planted with potatoes, potatoes and potatoes, did not give large potatoes.

I hardly heard her morning chores. I slept for a long time, woke up in the late winter light and stretched, sticking my head out from under the blanket and sheepskin coat. They, moreover, a camp quilted jacket on my feet, and a sack full of straw underneath kept me warm even on those nights when the cold pushed from the north into our frail windows. Hearing a discreet noise behind the partition, every time I said measuredly:

- Good morning, Matryona Vasilievna!

And always the same benevolent words came to me from behind the partition. They began with some low warm purr, like grandmothers in fairy tales:

- Mmmmm ... you too!

And a little later:

- And the breakfast is ready for you.

She didn’t announce what for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unpeeled carts, or cardboard soup (as everyone in the village used to say), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereals in Peatproduct that year, and battle - as the cheapest pigs were fed and sacks were taken). It was not always salted, as it should, it often burned, and after eating it left a plaque on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

But Matryona was not to blame for that: there was no butter in the Peat product, margarine was snapped up, and only combined fat was free. And the Russian stove, as I looked closely, is inconvenient for cooking: cooking is hidden from the cook, the heat rises to the cast iron from different sides uneven. But therefore, it must have come to our ancestors from the Stone Age itself, because, once warmed to sunshine, it keeps warm food and drink for livestock, food and water for humans all day long. And it's warm to sleep.

I obediently ate everything cooked to me, patiently put it aside if I came across something uncommon: whether a hair, a piece of peat, a cockroach leg. I didn't have the heart to reproach Matryona. In the end, she herself warned me: "If you don't know how, if you don't cook - how are you going to eat?"

“Thank you,” I said quite sincerely.

- On what? On your own good? - she disarmed me with a radiant smile. And, looking innocently with faded blue eyes, she asked: - Well, what should I cook for you?

By the way, it meant - by evening. I ate twice a day, like at the front. What could I order for ugly? All of the same, cartouche or cardboard soup.

I put up with this, because life taught me not in food to find the meaning of everyday existence. This smile of her roundish face was dearer to me, which, having finally earned money for a camera, I tried in vain to capture. Seeing the cold eye of the lens on herself, Matryona took on an expression that was either strained or extremely severe.

Once I captured how she smiled at something, looking out the window at the street.

That autumn Matryona had many grievances. A new pension law came out before that, and her neighbors advised her to seek a pension. She was lonely around, and since she began to be very ill, she was released from the collective farm. There were a lot of wrongs with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she was not at a factory - she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only seek for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But my husband had not been for twelve years, since the beginning of the war, and it was not easy now to get those certificates with different places about him stash and how much he got there. There were troubles - to get these certificates; and that they should still write that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and a certificate to assure that she lives alone and no one helps her; and from what year it is; and then carry it all to the social security; and postpone, correcting what was done wrong; and still wear. And find out if they will give you a pension.

These troubles were all the more difficult because the social security service from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council was ten kilometers to the west, and the village council was to the north, an hour's walk. From office to office, they drove her for two months - now for a point, now for a comma. Each pass is a day. He goes to the village council, but there is no secretary today, just like that, there is no, as it happens in the villages. Tomorrow, then, go again. Now there is a secretary, but he has no seal. The third day, go again. And the fourth day, go because they blindly signed the wrong piece of paper, Matryona's papers were all chipped off in one bundle.

“They are oppressing me, Ignatic,” she complained to me after such fruitless passages. - I was worried.

But her forehead did not remain dark for long. I noticed that she had a sure way to regain her good spirits - work. Immediately, she either grabbed a shovel and dug a map. Or, with a sack under her arm, she followed the peat. And then with a wicker body - berries in a distant forest. And not bowing to the office tables, but to the forest bushes, and having broken her back with a burden, Matryona returned to the hut, already enlightened, contented with everything, with her kind smile.

- Now I put a tooth on, Ignatic, I know where to get it, - she said about peat. - Well, a place, any one!

- Yes Matryona Vasilievna, isn't my peat enough? The car is intact.

- Ugh! your peat! so much more, and even so much - then, it happens, that's enough. Here, as the winter winds and duel through the windows, you do not so much drown as blow out. We were dragging the peat into the peat! Wouldn't I have driven three cars even now? So they catch it. Already one of our women is being dragged through the courts.

Yes, it was like that. The frightening breath of winter was already swirling - and heart ached. We stood around the forest, but there was nowhere to take the furnaces. Excavators roared around in the swamps, but the peat was not sold to the residents, but only carried - to the authorities, and some with the authorities, but by car - to teachers, doctors, factory workers. Fuel was not supposed to - and it was not supposed to ask about it. The collective farm chairman walked around the village, looked demandingly in the eyes, or dimly or innocently, and talked about anything but fuel. Because he himself has stocked up. And winter was not expected.

Well, they used to steal wood from the master, now they pulled peat from the trust. The women gathered in five, ten, to be bolder. We walked in the afternoon. During the summer, peat was dug up everywhere and piled up for drying. This is what peat is good for, that once it is extracted, it cannot be taken away immediately. It dries out until autumn, or even until the snow, if the road does not become or the trust is shaken. It was at this time that the women took him. The infection was carried away in a sack with six peat if they were damp, ten peat if they were dry. One bag of this, sometimes brought in three kilometers (and it weighed two pounds), was enough for one fire. And there are two hundred days in winter. And you have to drown: Russian in the morning, Dutch in the evening.

- Yes, what can I say about it! - Matryona was angry at someone invisible. - As the horses are gone, so what you can't put on yourself, that is not in the house. My back never heals. In winter, the sled on yourself, in the summer bundles on yourself, by God it’s true!

Women walked a day - not just once. V good days Matryona brought six sacks each. She folded my peat openly, hid hers under the bridges, and every evening she filled the manhole with a board.

“The enemies will guess,” she smiled, wiping the sweat from her forehead, “otherwise they won't find it.

What was the trust to do? He was not allowed states to post guards in all the swamps. I had to, probably, showing abundant prey in the reports, then write off - for a crumb, in the rain. Sometimes, in gusts, they gathered a patrol and caught women at the entrance to the village. The women threw their bags and scattered. Sometimes, on a denunciation, they went home with a search, drew up a report on illegal peat and threatened to take them to court. The women stopped wearing for a while, but winter was approaching and again drove them - with sledges at night.

In general, looking closely at Matryona, I noticed that, in addition to cooking and housekeeping, she had some other significant business every day, she kept the logical order of these matters in her head and, waking up in the morning, always knew what her day was. will be busy. In addition to peat, except for collecting old hemp, turned up by a tractor in a swamp, except for lingonberries soaked for the winter in quarters ("Potochki, Ignatich," she treated me), besides digging potatoes, besides running around on a pension business, she should have been somewhere else- then get a senz for his only off-white goat.

- Why don't you keep cows, Matryona Vasilievna?

“Eh-eh, Ignatich,” Matryona explained, standing in an unclean apron in the kitchen door cutout and turning to my table. - I have enough milk and goat. And get a cow, so she herself NS with legs will eat. Do not mow the canvas - there are your own masters, and there is no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and they do not tell me on the collective farm - not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and collective farmers, all the way to the whitest flies, go to the collective farm, and from under the snow - what kind of grass? The herb was considered to be honey ...

For example, it was a great work for Matryona to gather hay for Matryona alone. In the morning she took a sack and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the lines, along the road, along the islets in the swamp. Having stuffed a bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in her yard in a layer. From a sack of grass it turned out dried hay - a filler.

The new, recent chairman, sent from the city, first of all cut off vegetable gardens for all disabled people. Fifteen acres of sand left Matryona, and ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, the collective farm Matryona sipped for fifteen hundred square meters. When there were not enough hands, when the women rejected it very stubbornly, the chairman's wife came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, resolute, with a short gray coat and a menacing look like a military man.

She entered the hut and, without greeting, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona got in the way.

“So-ak,” the chairman’s wife said separately. - Comrade Grigoriev? It will be necessary to help the collective farm! I'll have to go and take out the manure tomorrow!

Matryona's face formed an apologetic half-smile - as if she was ashamed of the chairman's wife that she could not pay her for the work.

“Well then,” she said. - I'm sick, of course. And now I am not attached to your business. - And then she hastily corrected herself: - What time is it to come?

- And take your pitchfork! - instructed the chairwoman and left, rustling her hard skirt.

- How! - Matryona blamed after. - And take your pitchfork! There are no shovels or pitchforks on the collective farm. And I live without a man, who will plant me? ...

And then she pondered all evening:

- What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post, nor to the railing. You will stand, leaning on a shovel, and wait, whether soon from the factory there will be a whistle at twelve. Moreover, women will start, the scores are settled, who went out, who didn’t come out. When, at night, we were working on our own, there was no sound, only oh-oh-oyin-ki, now dinner rolled up, now the evening approached.

Yet in the morning she left with her pitchfork.

But not only a collective farm, but any distant relative or just a neighbor came to Matryona in the evening and said:

- Tomorrow, Matryona, you will come to help me. We will dig up the potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her line of business, went to help her neighbor and, returning, still spoke without a shadow of envy:

- Ah, Ignatich, and she has big potatoes! I dug into the hunt, I didn't want to leave the site, by God it’s true!

Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden could do without Matryona. The Talnovskaya women established exactly that it is more difficult to dig up their own garden with a shovel and take longer than taking a plow and harnessing six of them to plow six gardens on oneself. That's why they called Matryona to help.

- Well, did you pay her? - I had to ask later.

- She doesn't take money. Against your will, you hide it.

Matryona also had a lot of fuss when it was her turn to feed the goat shepherds: one - a hefty, dumb, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This line was a month and a half of roses, but Matryona drove into a big expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, got old and sugar and butter, which she did not eat herself. It turns out that the hostesses laid out in front of each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

“Fear the tailor and the shepherd,” she explained to me. - All over the village you will be denounced if something goes wrong.

And into this life, thick with worries, sometimes a serious illness burst in, Matryona collapsed and lay for a day or two in a layer. She didn’t complain, she didn’t moan, but she didn’t almost move either. On such days, Masha, Matryona's close friend from her youngest years, came to court the goat and heat the stove. Matryona herself did not drink, did not eat, and did not ask for anything. Calling a doctor from the village first-aid post to the house was in Talnov, somehow indecent in front of the neighbors - they say, lady. They called once, she came very angry, told Matryona, as she lay down, to come to the first-aid post herself. Matryona went against her will, took tests, was sent to the regional hospital - and so it died out. There was wine and Matryona herself.

Deeds called to life. Soon Matryona began to get up, at first she moved slowly, and then again alive.

“You haven't seen me before, Ignatic,” she justified. - All my bags were, five poods each and I didn’t think it was jelly. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona! You’ll break your back! ” To me d and vir did not fit to put my end of the log on the front end. The horse was a military one, Volchok, healthy ...

- Why a military man?

- And ours was taken to the war, this wounded man - in return. And he got some poetry. Once, out of fright, I carried the sled into the lake, the men jumped back, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped. The oatmeal was a horse. Our men loved to feed the horses. Which horses are oatmeal, those, etc. and if they do not recognize it.

But Matryona was by no means fearless. She was afraid of the fire, she was afraid of the molon and, and most of all for some reason - trains.

- As I go to Cherusti, the train will get out from Nechaevka, its huge eyes will hatch, the rails are buzzing - it throws me into a fever, my knees are shaking. Honestly true! - She was surprised and shrugged Matryona.

- So, maybe because they don't give tickets, Matryona Vasilievna?

Nevertheless, by that winter, Matryona's life had improved as never before. They began to pay her eighty rubles of pension. She received more than a hundred more from the school and from me.

- Ugh! Now Matryona does not need to die! - some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. - More money for her, old, and nowhere to go.

- And what - a pension? Others objected. - The state is minute. Today, you see, it gave, and tomorrow it will take away.

Matryona ordered herself to roll up new felt boots. I bought a new quilted jacket. And she trimmed her coat out of a worn railway overcoat, which was given to her by the driver from Cherusty, the husband of her former pupil Kira. The village tailor-hunchback put cotton wool under the cloth, and it turned out such a glorious coat that Matryona had not sewn in six decades.

And in the middle of winter, Matryona sewed two hundred rubles into the lining of this coat for her funeral. Cheered up:

- Manenko and I saw calmly, Ignatic.

December passed, January passed - for two months her illness did not visit. More often Matryona began to go to Masha's in the evenings to sit and snap the seeds. She did not invite guests to her house in the evenings, respecting my occupations. Only at baptism, returning from school, I found a dance in the hut and was introduced to Matryona's three sisters, who called Matryona as the eldest - Lyolka or nanny. Until that day, little had been heard about the sisters in our hut - were they afraid that Matryona would ask them for help?

Only one event or omen darkened Matryona this holiday: she went five miles to the church for the blessing of water, put her bowler hat between the others, and when the blessing of water ended and the women rushed, pushing, to disassemble - Matryona did not ripen among the first, and at the end - it was not her bowler hat. And in place of the kettle, no other dishes were left either. The bowler hat disappeared, as the unclean spirit carried it away.

- Grannies! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. - Didn't anyone grab someone else's blessed water with a malaise? in a bowler hat?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys cheered up, there were also boys. Matryona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she was gone.

Not to say, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even more likely she was a pagan, they took the top of the superstition in her: that it was impossible to go into the vegetable garden on Ivan the Postny - there would be no harvest next year; that if a blizzard is spinning, it means that someone has strangled himself somewhere, and if you pinch your foot by the door - to be a guest. As long as I lived with her, I never saw her praying, nor that she crossed herself at least once. And she started every business "with God!" and to me every time "with God!" spoke when I went to school. Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid to oppress me. There was a holy corner in a clean hut, and an icon of Nicholas the Pleasant in the kitchenette. Forget they stood dark, and during the all-night vigil and in the morning on holidays Matryona lit an icon lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her bum-legged cat. That - strangled mice ...

Having wrested a little out of her little household, Matryona began to listen more closely to my radio (I did not fail to set myself up a reconnaissance - that is what Matryona called the socket. My receiver was no longer a scourge for me, because I could turn it off with my own hand at any moment; but, indeed, he came out for me from a remote hut - intelligence). In that year, it was customary to receive, see off and carry two or three foreign delegations a week to many cities, collecting rallies. And every day, the news was full of important messages about banquets, lunches and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned, sighed disapprovingly:

- Drive, drive, run over something.

Hearing that new machines were invented, Matryona grumbled from the kitchen:

- Everything is new, new, they don't want to work at the old ones, where are we going to put the old ones?

Even that year, artificial earth satellites were promised. Matryona shook her head from the stove:

- Oh-oh-oyinki, they will change something, winter or summer.

Chaliapin performed Russian songs. Matryona stood, stood, listened and sentenced decisively:

- They sing wonderful, not in our way.

- What are you, Matryona Vasilievna, but listen!

I also listened. Pursed her lips:

But Matryona rewarded me. Somehow they broadcast a concert from Glinka's romances. And suddenly after the heel of Matryona's chamber romances, holding on to the apron, came out from behind the partition, melted, with a veil of tears in her dim eyes:

“But this is our way…” she whispered.

2

So Matryona got used to me, and I to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening studies, did not annoy me with any questions. She was so lacking in woman's curiosity, or so delicate that she never asked me: was I when I was married? All Talnov women pestered her - to find out about me. She answered them:

- You need - you ask. I know one thing - he is distant.

And when, not long after, I myself told her that I had spent a lot in prison, she only silently nodded her head, as if she had suspected before.

And I, too, saw Matryona today, a lost old woman, and I also did not rage her past, and I did not even suspect that there was anything to look for there.

I knew that Matryona got married even before the revolution, and immediately to this hut, where we now lived with her, and immediately to the stove (that is, there was neither mother-in-law nor older sister-in-law alive, and from the first morning after marriage Matryona took by the grip). I knew that she had six children and one after the other they all died very early, so that two did not live right away. Then there was some kind of pupil Cyrus. And Matryona's husband did not return from this war. There was no funeral either. The villagers who were with him in the company said that either he was captured or died, but only the bodies were not found. For eleven post-war years, Matryona herself decided that he was not alive. And it's good that I thought so. Even though he would be alive now, he is married somewhere in Brazil or in Australia. Both the village of Talnovo and the Russian language are being erased from his memory ...

Once, when I came home from school, I found a guest in our hut. A tall black old man, with his hat off on his knees, was sitting on a chair which Matryona had put for him in the middle of the room, by the Dutch stove. His whole face was covered with thick black hair, almost untouched by gray hair: a thick black mustache merged with a thick black beard, so that his mouth was barely visible; and the continuous black buoys, barely showing their ears, rose to the black hairs hanging from the crown of the head; and still wide black eyebrows were thrown towards each other with bridges. And only the forehead left a bald dome in a bald spacious dome. In all the appearance of the old man, it seemed to me a lot of knowledge and dignity. He sat straight, with his hands folded on the staff, the staff resting vertically on the floor - he sat in a position of patient waiting and, apparently, did not talk much with Matryona, who was busy behind the partition.

When I arrived, he smoothly turned his stately head towards me and suddenly called me:

- Father! ... I see you badly. My son is learning from you. Grigoriev Antoshka ...

He might not have spoken further ... With all my impulse to help this venerable old man, I knew in advance and rejected all that useless that the old man would say now. Grigoriev Antoshka was a round, ruddy kid from the 8th "G", who looked like a cat after pancakes. He came to school as if to rest, sat at his desk and smiled lazily. Moreover, he never prepared lessons at home. But, most importantly, fighting for that high percent The schools of our region, our region and neighboring regions were famous for his academic performance - he was translated from year to year, and he clearly learned that, no matter how threatened the teachers, they will transfer at the end of the year, and there is no need to study for this. He just laughed at us. He was in the 8th grade, but he did not know fractions and did not distinguish what triangles are. In the first quarters, he was in the tenacious grip of my twos - and the same was in store for him in the third quarter.

But to this half-blind old man, fit Antoshka not to fathers, but to grandfathers and who came to me to bow humiliatedly - how could I say now that year after year the school deceived him, then I cannot deceive, otherwise I will ruin the whole class, and turn into a balabolka, and I will not give a damn about all my work and my title?

And now I patiently explained to him that my son was very neglected, and he was lying at school and at home, he had to check his diary more often and take it cool from both sides.

- Yes, how cool it is, father, - the guest assured me. - Beat him now that a week. And my hand is heavy.

In the conversation, I remembered that once Matryona herself, for some reason, interceded for Antoshka Grigoriev, but I did not ask what kind of relative he was to her, and then refused too. Matryona has now become a wordless supplicant at the door of the kitchenette. And when Faddey Mironovich left me with the fact that he would come in - to find out, I asked:

- I don’t understand, Matryona Vasilievna, how do you have to do with this Antoshka?

“Divirya is my son,” Matryona answered dryly and went off to milk the goat.

Having disregarded, I realized that this black persistent old man was the brother of her husband, who had gone missing.

And the long evening passed - Matryona did not touch upon this conversation anymore. Only late in the evening, when I forgot about the old man and worked in the silence of the hut amid the rustle of cockroaches and the sound of walkers, Matryona suddenly said from her dark corner:

- I, Ignatich, once almost married him.

I had forgotten about Matryona herself that she was here, I had not heard her, but she said it so excitedly out of the darkness, as if even now that old man was harassing her.

Apparently, all the evening Matryona thought only about that.

She got up from the shabby rag bed and slowly walked out to me, as if following her words. I leaned back - and for the first time I saw Matryona in a completely new way.

The upper light was not in our big room, like a forest cluttered with figs. From the table lamp, the light fell all around only on my notebooks - and throughout the room, to the eyes, which had detached themselves from the light, it seemed a twilight with a pink tint. And Matryona stepped out of it. And her cheeks seemed to me not yellow, as always, but also pink.

- He first wooed me ... before Yefim ... He was a brother - the eldest ... I was nineteen, Thaddeus - twenty-three ... They lived in this very house then. Theirs was home. Built by their father.

I involuntarily looked around. This old gray decaying house suddenly, through the faded green skin of the wallpaper, under which the mice were running, appeared to me with young, not yet darkened, shaved logs and a cheerful resinous smell.

- And you ...? And what?…

“That summer… we went to sit in the grove with him,” she whispered. - There was a grove, where is now the horse yard, they cut it down ... Almost did not come out, Ignatich. The German war began. They took Thaddeus to the war.

She dropped it and flashed before me blue, white and yellow July of the fourteenth year: still peaceful sky, floating clouds and people boiling with ripe stubble. I presented them side by side: a resinous hero with a scythe across his back; her, ruddy, embracing a sheaf. And - a song, a song under the sky, which the village has long lagged behind to sing, and you cannot sing with mechanisms.

- He went to war - he disappeared ... For three years I hid, waited. And not a word, and not a bone ...

Tied with an old, faded handkerchief, Matryona's round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp - as if freed from wrinkles, from everyday careless attire - frightened, girlish, before a terrible choice.

Yes. Yes ... I understand ... Leaves flew around, snow fell - and then melted. They plowed again, sowed again, reaped again. And again the leaves flew around, and again the snow fell. And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole light turned over.

- Their mother died - and Efim took hold of me. Like, you wanted to go to our hut, to ours and go. Yefim was a year younger than me. They say here: the clever one comes out after the Intercession, and the fool - after Petrov. They lacked hands. I went ... They got married on Peter's day, and returned to Mikola's winter ... Thaddeus ... from Hungarian captivity.

Matryona closed her eyes.

I was silent.

She turned to the door as if alive:

- Became on the threshold. How will I scream! I would have thrown myself into his knees! ... It is impossible ... Well, he says, if it were not for my brother, I would have chopped both of you!

I shuddered. From her anguish or fear, I vividly imagined him standing there, black, in dark doors and swung an ax at Matryona.

But she calmed down, leaned on the back of a chair in front of her and recited melodiously:

- Oh-oh-oyinki, poor little head! How many brides were in the village - did not marry. He said: I will look for your name, the second Matryona. And he brought himself Matryona from Lipovka, they cut down a separate hut, where they live now, you go to school by them every day.

Ah, that's it! Now I realized that I had seen that second Matryona more than once. I didn’t love her: she always came to my Matryona to complain that her husband was beating her, and her husband was stingy, pulling the veins out of her, and cried here for a long time, and her voice was always in a tear.

But it turned out that there was nothing to regret for my Matryona - so Thaddeus beat his Matryona all his life and to this day and so he squeezed the whole house.

“I never beat me myself,” she told about Yefim. - He ran to the peasants with his fists down the street, but he never ran about me ... That is, there was one time - I quarreled with my sister-in-law, he smashed a spoon on my forehead. I jumped up from the table: "You should choke, choke, drones!" And she went into the forest. Didn't touch it anymore.

It seems that Thaddeus had nothing to regret: the second Matryona also gave birth to six children (among them, my Antoshka, the youngest, scrubbed) - and all survived, but Matryona and Yefim did not have children: they did not live up to three months and did not sick with nothing, everyone died.

- One daughter, Elena, was just born, they washed her alive - then she died. So I didn't have to wash the dead ... As my wedding was on Peter's day, so she buried her sixth child, Alexander, on Peter's day.

And the whole village decided that there was damage in Matryona.

- Portia in me! - Matryona was nodding with conviction even now. - They took me to a former nun to be treated, she made me cough - she waited for the portion to be thrown out of me like a frog. Well, I didn't throw myself out ...

And the years passed, as the water floated ... In 1941, Thaddeus was not taken to the war because of blindness, but Efim was taken. And like the elder brother in the first war, so the younger one disappeared without a trace in the second. But this one never came back. The once noisy, but now deserted hut was rotting and aging - and the unclothed Matryona was getting old in it.

And she asked that second downtrodden Matryona - the womb of her snatches (or the blood of Thaddeus?) - their youngest girl, Kira.

For ten years she raised her here as her own, instead of her unstable ones. And shortly before me, she passed off as a young machinist in Cherusti. Only from there, help oozed out to her: sometimes sugar, when the pig was slaughtered - lard.

Suffering from ailments and tea a near death, then Matryona announced her will: a separate log cabin of the upper room, located under a common connection with the hut, after death, should be given to Kira as an inheritance. She said nothing about the hut itself. Three more sisters wanted to get this hut.

So that evening Matryona opened up to me in full. And, as it happens, the connection and the meaning of her life, barely becoming visible to me, - in the same days, began to move. Kira came from Cherusti, old man Thaddeus worried: in Cherusty, in order to get and keep a piece of land, the young had to build some kind of structure. Matryona's room was quite suitable for this. And there was nothing else to put, there was nowhere to take the forest. And not so Kira herself, and not so much her husband, as for them old Thaddeus fired up to seize this site in Cherusty.

And so he began to visit us often, came once, again, spoke edifyingly with Matryona and demanded that she give the upper room now, during her lifetime. In these parishes, he did not seem to me to be that old man leaning on a staff, who is about to fall apart from a push or a rude word. Although hunched over with a sore lower back, he was still stately, over sixty with a luscious, youthful blackness in his hair, he pressed with fervor.

Matryona did not sleep for two nights. It was not easy for her to make up her mind. It was not a pity for the upper room itself, which stood idle, no matter how much Matryona ever spared neither work nor her good. And this room was bequeathed to Kira all the same. But it was terrifying for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. Even for me, the guest, it was painful that they would begin to tear off the boards and turn out the logs at home. And for Matryona it was the end of her whole life.

But those who insisted knew that her house could be broken in her lifetime.

And Thaddeus with his sons and sons-in-law came one February morning and knocked on five axes, screeched and creaked with the boards being torn off. Thaddeus' own eyes gleamed busily. In spite of the fact that his back was not straightened all out, he deftly climbed under the rafters and fussed briskly below, shouting at the assistants. As a boy, he himself built this hut with his father; this room for him, the eldest son, was cut down so that he could live here with the young one. And now he furiously took it apart by the ribs in order to take it away from someone else's yard.

Having marked with numbers the crowns of the log house and the boards of the ceiling flooring, the upper room with the basement was dismantled, and the hut itself with shortened bridges was cut off with a temporary board wall. They left the cracks in the wall, and everything showed that the breakers were not builders and did not expect Matryona to live here for a long time.

And while the men were breaking, the women were preparing moonshine for the day of loading: vodka would have cost too much. Kira brought a pood of sugar from the Moscow region, Matryona Vasilyevna, under cover of night, carried that sugar and bottles to the moonshiner.

The logs in front of the gate were taken out and stacked, the driver's son-in-law went to Cherusti to fetch the tractor.

But on the same day, a blizzard began - duel, in matrenin's way. She drank and circled for two days and covered the road with exorbitant snowdrifts. Then, a little bit the road was slowed down, a truck or two passed - suddenly it got warmer, one day it dissolved at once, there were damp fogs, streams bursting in the snow murmured, and the leg in the boot tied up all the way to the boot.

A broken room was not given to the tractor for two weeks! These two weeks Matryona walked like a lost one. That was why it was especially difficult for her that her three sisters came, all together scolded her as a fool for giving up the upper room, said that they did not want to see her anymore, and left.

And on the same days, the cat-footed cat shaved off the yard - and disappeared. One to one. It also hit Matryona.

Finally, the flooded road was gripped by frost. A sunny day came, and my soul became more cheerful. Matryona dreamed something kind on that day. In the morning she found out that I wanted to photograph someone behind an old weaving mill (there were still two of these in two huts, rough rugs were being woven on them), and she grinned shyly:

- Yes, wait a minute, Ignatich, for a couple of days, here's the upper room, it happens, I will send - I will lay down my camp, because I am whole - and then you will take it off. Honestly true!

Apparently, she was attracted to portray herself in the old days. From the red frosty sun, the frozen window of the canopy, now shortened, turned a little pink, and this reflection warmed Matryona's face. Those people always have good faces, who are in harmony with their consciences.

Before dusk, returning from school, I saw movement near our house. The large new tractor sleds were already loaded with logs, but much did not fit yet - both the family of grandfather Thaddeus and those invited to help finished knocking down another sled, homemade. Everyone worked like mad, in the ferocity that people get when they smell like big money or expect a big treat. They shouted at each other, argued.

The dispute was about how to carry the sleigh - separately or together. One son of Thaddeus, a lame one, and his son-in-law, the machinist, were interpreting that it was impossible to pull the sled right away, the tractor would not pull it down. The tractor driver, a self-confident fat-faced big guy, wheezed that he knew better that he was a driver and would carry the sled together. His calculation was clear: by agreement, the driver paid him for the transportation of the room, and not for the flights. Two flights a night - twenty-five kilometers and once back - he would not have made it. And by morning he had to be with the tractor already in the garage, from where he secretly took him away for the left.

Old man Thaddeus was impatient to take away the whole room today - and he nodded to his own to yield. The second, hastily put together, the sled was hooked up behind the strong first.

Matryona ran among the men, fussed about and helped roll the logs onto the sledges. Then I noticed that she was in my quilted jacket, had already smeared her sleeves on the icy mud of the logs, and told her about it with displeasure. This jacket was my memory, it warmed me in difficult years.

So for the first time I got angry with Matryona Vasilievna.

- Oh-oh-oyinki, poor little head! She asked, puzzled. - After all, I caught her begma, and I forgot that it was yours. Sorry, Ignatic. - And took off, hung up to dry.

The loading was over, and everyone who worked, up to ten men, thundered past my table and ducked under the curtain into the kitchenette. From there, glasses clattered dully, sometimes a bottle jingled, voices grew louder, boast - more fervent. The tractor driver especially boasted. The heavy smell of moonshine came to me. But they did not drink for long - the darkness made them hurry. They began to leave. Smug, with a cruel face, the tractor driver came out. The driver's son-in-law, the lame son of Thaddeus and one nephew went to escort the sled to Cherusty. The rest went home. Thaddeus, waving a stick, was catching up with someone, in a hurry to explain something. The lame son lingered at my table to light a cigarette and suddenly began to speak, how he loved Aunt Matryona, and that he had recently married, and now his son had just been born. Then they shouted to him, he left. A tractor growled outside the window.

The last one hurriedly jumped out from behind the partition Matryona. She shook her head anxiously after the departed. She put on a quilted jacket, put on a handkerchief. At the door she said to me:

- And what was two not to pair? One tractor would get sick - the other pulled up. And now what will happen - God knows! ...

And she ran after everyone.

After drinking, arguing and walking, it became especially quiet in the abandoned hut, chilled out by the frequent opening of the doors. It was already completely dark outside the windows. I, too, got into my quilted jacket and sat down at the table. The tractor died down in the distance.

An hour passed, then another. And the third one. Matryona did not return, but I was not surprised: after seeing off the sleigh, she must have gone to her Masha.

And another hour passed. And further. Not only darkness, but some kind of deep silence descended on the village. I could not understand then why there was silence - because it turned out that during the whole evening not a single train passed along the line half a mile away from us. My receiver was silent, and I noticed that the mice were running around very much as never before: they ran more and more insolently, more and more noisily under the wallpaper, scraping and squeaking.

I woke up. It was early in the morning, and Matryona did not return.

Suddenly I heard several loud voices in the village. They were still far away, but how it pushed me that it was for us. Indeed, soon there was a sharp knock at the gate. An alien imperious voice shouted to open it. I went out with an electric flashlight into the dense darkness. The whole village was asleep, the windows did not shine, and the snow melted in a week and did not shine either. I unscrewed the bottom wrapper and let it in. Four in greatcoats walked to the hut. It is very unpleasant when at night they come to you loudly and in greatcoats.

In the light I looked around, however, that two of them had railway coats. The older one, fat, with the same face as that of the tractor driver, asked:

- Where is the hostess?

- I do not know.

- Did the tractor and sleigh leave this yard?

- From this.

- They drank here before leaving?

All four squinted, looked around in the semi-darkness from the table lamp. I understand that someone was arrested or wanted to arrest.

- So what happened?

- Answer that you are asked!

- Let's go drunk?

- Did they drink here?

Has anyone killed whom? Or was it impossible to transport the upper rooms? They were very much pressing on me. But one thing was clear: what kind of moonshine Matryona could be given a time limit.

I retreated to the kitchen door and so blocked it with myself.

- Really, I did not notice. It was not visible.

(I really couldn't see it, only heard it.)

And, as if with a confused gesture, I passed my hand, showing the surroundings of the hut: a peaceful table light over books and notebooks; a crowd of frightened ficuses; the austere hermit's bed. No trace of binge.

They themselves noticed with annoyance that there was no drinking bout here. And they turned to the exit, saying to each other that it meant that the booze was not in this hut, but it would be nice to grab what was. I accompanied them and asked what had happened. And only at the gate one muttered to me:

- Took them all apart. You will not collect.

- What is that! The twenty-first fast almost went off the rails, that would be.

And they quickly left.

Whom - theirs? Whom - all? Where is Matryona?

I quickly returned to the hut, pulled back the curtains and went into the kitchenette. The moonshine stench hit me. It was a frozen carnage - unloaded stools and benches, empty lying bottles and one unfinished glass, half-eaten herring, onions and shredded bacon.

Everything was dead. And only the cockroaches quietly crawled across the battlefield.

I rushed to clean everything up. I rinsed bottles, cleaned up food, handed out chairs, and hid the rest of the moonshine away in a dark underground.

And only when I did all this, I got up with a stump in the middle of an empty hut: something was said about the twenty-first ambulance. Why? ... Maybe you should have shown all this to them? I already doubted. But what a damned manner - not to explain anything to an innocent person?

And suddenly our gate creaked. I quickly walked out onto the bridges:

- Matryona Vasilievna?

Her friend Masha staggered into the hut:

- Matryona, something ... Matryona is ours, Ignatich ...

I sat her down, and, stirring with tears, she told.

At the crossing there is a slide, the entrance is steep. There is no barrier. With the first sledges, the tractor overcame, and the cable burst, and the second sledges, home-made, got stuck at the crossing and began to fall apart - Thaddeus did not give them good things for the forest, for the second sledges. They took a little of the first - for the second they came back, the cable got along - the tractor driver and Thaddeus's son was lame, and Matryona was carried there, between the tractor and the sleigh. What could she do there to help the peasants? She always got in the way of peasant affairs. And the horse once almost knocked her into the lake, under the ice-hole. And why did the damned go to the crossing? - gave the room, and all her debt, paid off ... The driver kept watch so that the train would not come from Cherusty, his lights would be far away, and on the other hand, from our station, two steam locomotives were coupled - without lights and backwards. Why without lights - no one knows, but when the locomotive goes backwards - it pours coal dust into the eyes of the driver from the tender, it's bad to look. They flew - and flattened the meat of those three, who were between the tractor and the sleigh. The tractor was mutilated, the sled was splintered, the rails were bumped, and the locomotives were both sideways.

- But how did they not hear that the locomotives were coming?

- Yes, the tractor is running yelling.

- And what about the corpses?

- They are not allowed. They cordoned off.

- And what did I hear about the ambulance ... as if the ambulance? ...

- A fast ten o'clock - our station on the move, and also to move. But when the locomotives collapsed - two machinists survived, jumped down and ran back, and waving their hands, they stood on the rails - and managed to stop the train ... The nephew was also crippled by a log. He is hiding now at Klavka, so they don't know that he was at the move. Otherwise, they are dragging it out as a witness! ... Dunno lies on the stove, and they lead the knowledge on a string ... And Kirkin's husband - not a scratch. I wanted to hang myself, they took it out of the noose. Because of me, they say, my aunt died and my brother. Now he went himself and was arrested. Yes, he is now not in jail, his house is insane. Ah, Matryona-Matryonushka! ...

There is no Matryona. Killed native person... And on the last day, I reproached her for her quilted jacket.

The painted red and yellow woman from the book poster smiled happily.

Aunt Masha sat still and cried. And already got up to go. And suddenly she asked:

- Ignatic! Do you remember ... in I am Matryona had a gray edge ... She read it to my Tanya after her death, didn't she?

And with hope she looked at me in the semi-darkness - have I really forgotten?

But I remembered:

- I read it, right.

- So listen, maybe let me take her now? In the morning, relatives will fly in here, I won't get it later.

And again she looked at me with prayer and hope - her half-century friend, the only one who sincerely loved Matryona in this village ...

Probably, it should have been so.

- Of course ... Take ... - I confirmed.

Ono opened the chest, took out a bundle, put it under the floor and left ...

The mice were seized by some kind of madness, they walked along the walls, and green wallpaper rolled over the mouse backs in almost visible waves.

I had nowhere to go. They will also come to me and interrogate me. School was waiting for me in the morning. It was three o'clock in the morning. And there was a way out: to lock up and go to bed.

Lock up, because Matryona will not come.

I lay down leaving the light. The mice squeaked, almost moaned, and everyone ran and ran. It was impossible to get rid of the involuntary trembling with a tired incoherent head - as if Matryona was invisibly rushing about and saying goodbye here, with her hut.

And suddenly in the entrance doors, on the threshold, I imagined a black young Thaddeus with an ax brought up: "If it had not been for my dear brother, I would have chopped both of you!"

For forty years his threat lay in the corner, like an old cleaver - but it struck ...

3

At dawn, the women were brought from the crossing on a sled under a dirty sack thrown over - all that was left of Matryona. Threw off the bag to wash. Everything was mess - no legs, no half of the body, no left arm. One woman crossed herself and said:

- The right handle was left to her by the Lord. There will be God to pray ...

And now the whole crowd of ficuses, which Matryona loved so much that, waking up one night in the smoke, she did not rush to save the hut, but to throw the ficuses on the floor (they would not suffocate from the smoke) - the ficuses were taken out of the hut. The floors were cleaned. Matryona's dull mirror was hung with a wide towel of an old household outlet. They took down idle posters from the wall. Moved my desk. And to the windows, under the icon, they put a coffin on stools, knocked together without any fancy.

And Matryona lay in the coffin. Her absent, disfigured body was covered with a clean sheet, and her head was covered with a white kerchief, but her face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.

The villagers came to stand and look. Women also brought small children to look at the dead. And if crying began, all the women, even if they entered the hut out of empty curiosity, all necessarily wept from the door and from the walls, as if accompanied by a chorus. And the men stood at attention in silence, taking off their hats.

The very same cry went to the relatives. In crying, I noticed a coldly thought out, time immemorial routine. Those who submitted, approached the coffin for a short while and began to lament softly near the coffin. Those who considered themselves dearer to the deceased began to cry from the doorway, and upon reaching the coffin, they bent down to wail over the very face of the deceased. Every mourner had an amateur melody. And their own thoughts and feelings were expounded.

Then I learned that crying over the deceased is not just crying, but a kind of politics. Three of Matryona's sisters flew together, seized the hut, a goat and a stove, locked her chest with a lock, gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat, and told everyone that they were the only ones close to Matryona. And they cried over the coffin like this:

- Ah, nanny-nanny! Oh, lyolka-lyolka! And you're our only one! And you would live quietly and peacefully! And we would always caress you! And your room ruined you! And she finished you off, damned! And why did you break it? And why didn't you listen to us?

So the cries of the sisters were accusatory cries against her husband's relatives: there was no need to force Matryona to break the upper room. (And the latent meaning was: you took the upper room, we won’t give you the huts ourselves!)

Husband's relatives - Matryona's sister-in-law, sisters of Efim and Thaddeus, and also different nieces came and cried like this:

- Ah, auntie! And how could you not take care of yourself! And, probably, now they are offended by us! And you are our darling, and all your fault! And the upper room has nothing to do with it. And why did you go to the place where death guarded you? And no one invited you there! And how you died - I did not think! And why didn't you obey us? ...

(And out of all these lamentations, he stuck out the answer: we are not to blame for her death, but we will talk about the hut again!)

But the broad-faced, coarse "second" Matryona - that dummy Matryona whom Thaddeus once took one name at a time - strayed from this policy and simply yelled, straining over the coffin:

- You're my little sister! Are you really going to be offended by me? Oh-ma! ... Yes, we’ve been talking and talking! And forgive me, miserable! Oh-ma! ... And you went to your mother, and, probably, you will pick me up! Oh-ma-ah! ...

On this "oh-ma-a-a" she seemed to give off all her spirit - and beat, beat her chest against the wall of the coffin. And when her crying crossed the ritual norms, the women, as if recognizing that the cry was quite a success, everyone said in unison:

- Leave me alone! Leave me alone!

Matryona lagged behind, but then she came again and sobbed even more violently. Then an old woman came out of the corner and, putting her hand on Matryona's shoulder, said sternly:

- There are two mysteries in the world: how I was born - I don't remember how I will die - I don't know.

And Matryona immediately fell silent, and everyone fell silent until complete silence.

But this old woman herself, much older than all the old women here and as if even Matryona was a stranger at all, after a while also cried:

- Oh you, my disease! Oh you, my Vasilievna! Oh, I'm tired of seeing you off!

And it is not at all ritualistic - with a simple sob of our century, not poor in them, the ill-fated Matrenina's adopted daughter sobbed - that Kira from Cherustey, for whom this room was taken and broken. Her curled locks were pitifully disheveled. The eyes were red as bloodshed. She did not notice how her handkerchief was getting lost in the cold, or she put on her coat past the sleeve. She went insane from the coffin of her adoptive mother in one house to the coffin of her brother in another, and they still feared for her reason, because they had to judge her husband.

It acted so that her husband was doubly guilty: he not only drove the room, but was a railway driver, knew the rules of unguarded crossings well - and had to go to the station, warn about the tractor. That night in the Urals, a thousand lives of people who were peacefully sleeping on the first and second shelves with the half-light of the train lamps should have been cut off. Due to the greed of several people: to seize a piece of land or not to make a second trip with a tractor.

Because of the room, on which the curse fell since Thaddeus's hands grabbed to break it.

However, the tractor driver has already left the human court. And the road management itself was guilty of the fact that the busy crossing was not guarded, and the fact that the locomotive raft went without lanterns. That is why they at first tried to blame everything on drunkenness, and now hush up the trial itself.

The rails and the canvas were so twisted that for three days, while the coffins were in the houses, the trains did not go - they were wrapped in another branch. All Friday, Saturday and Sunday - from the end of the investigation to the funeral - the track was being repaired at the crossing day and night. The repairmen were freezing both for heating, and at night and for light they made fires from free boards and logs from the second sleigh scattered near the crossing.

And the first sledges, loaded, intact, and stood not far behind the crossing.

And it was precisely this - that some of the sledges were teasing, they were waiting with a ready-made cable, while the second could still be snatched from the fire - that was what tormented the soul of the black-bearded Thaddeus all Friday and all Saturday. His daughter was moved by reason, judgment hung over his son-in-law, in own home his son was lying, killed by him, on the same street - the woman he had killed, whom he once loved - Thaddeus only came to stand at the coffins for a short while, holding on to his beard. His high forehead was overshadowed by a heavy thought, but this thought was to save the logs of the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of Matryona's sisters.

After going through the Talnovskys, I realized that Thaddeus was not the only one in the village.

What is our good, folk or mine, the language calls our property strange. And losing it is considered shameful and stupid before people.

Thaddeus, without sitting down, rushed now to the village, now to the station, from the authorities to the authorities, and with an unbending back, leaning on a staff, he asked everyone to condescend to his old age and give permission to return the upper room.

And someone gave such permission. And Thaddeus gathered his surviving sons, sons-in-law and nephews, and got horses from the collective farm - and from that side of the torn-up crossing, in a roundabout way through three villages, he drove the remains of the upper room to his yard. He finished it Saturday night.

And on Sunday afternoon, they were buried. Two coffins came together in the middle of the village, relatives argued which coffin was ahead. Then they put them on the same sledge side by side, aunt and nephew, and in February, again damp crust under a cloudy sky, they took the dead to the church cemetery two villages away from us. The weather was windy, uncomfortable, and the priest and the deacon were waiting in the church, did not come out to meet Talnovo.

People walked slowly to the outskirts and sang in chorus. Then I fell behind.

Even on Sunday, the woman's bustle in our hut did not subside: the old woman was purring a psalter at the coffin, Matryona's sisters scurried around the Russian stove with a grip, from the forehead of the stove blazing with heat from red-hot peat - from those that Matryona carried in a sack from a distant swamp. Bad flour was used to bake tasteless pies.

On Sunday, when they returned from the funeral, and it was already in the evening, they gathered for the commemoration. The tables, arranged in one long one, captured the place where the coffin had stood in the morning. First, everyone stood around the table, and the old man, his brother-in-law's husband, read Our Father. Then they poured each one to the very bottom of a bowl - full of honey. For the sake of our souls, we gulped her down with spoons, without anything. Then they ate something and drank vodka, and the conversations became livelier. Everyone stood up in front of the jelly and sang "Eternal Memory" (and they explained to me that they sing it - before jelly it is obligatory). They drank again. And they spoke even louder, not at all about Matryona. Zolovkin's husband boasted:

- Have you noticed, Orthodox Christians, that the funeral was slow today? This is because Father Mikhail noticed me. Knows that I know the service. Otherwise, help with the saints, around the leg - that's all.

Finally the supper was over. They all got up again. They sang "It Is Worthy". And again, with a triple repetition: eternal memory! everlasting memory! everlasting memory! But the voices were hoarse, rosy, their faces were drunk, and no one put feelings into this eternal memory.

Then the main guests dispersed, the closest ones remained, pulled out cigarettes, lit a cigarette, jokes and laughter were heard. He touched Matryona's missing husband, and the sister-in-law's husband, beating himself in the chest, argued to me and to the shoemaker, the husband of one of Matryona's sisters:

- He died, Efim, died! How could he not come back? Yes, if I knew that they would even hang me at home, I would still return!

The shoemaker nodded in agreement. He was a deserter and did not part with his homeland at all: throughout the war he hid with his mother underground.

High on the stove sat that strict, silent old woman, who was older than all the ancients, who had remained for the night. From above she looked mutely, condemningly at the obscenely lively fifty - and sixty-year-old youth.

And only the unfortunate adopted daughter, who grew up within these walls, went behind the partition and cried there.

Thaddeus did not come to Matryona's funeral - perhaps because he remembered his son. But in the next few days he twice came to this hut with hostility to negotiate with Matryona's sisters and with the deserter shoemaker.

The dispute was about the hut: who is she - sister or adopted daughter. Already the case rested against writing to the court, but they reconciled, judging that the court would give the hut not to one or the other, but to the village council. The deal went through. The goat was taken by one sister, the hut was taken by a shoemaker with his wife, and to offset Faddeeva's share, that he “took over every log here with his own hands”, the upper room was already brought, and they also gave him the barn where the goat lived, and the entire internal fence, between the yard and a vegetable garden.

And again, overcoming weakness and aches, the insatiable old man revived and rejuvenated. Again he gathered the surviving sons and sons-in-law, they dismantled the shed and the fence, and he himself drove the logs on sleds, on sleds, in the end, only with his Antoshka from 8th G, who was not lazy here.

Matryona's hut was beaten until spring, and I moved to one of her sister-in-law, nearby. This sister-in-law later, on various occasions, recalled something about Matryona and somehow with new side illuminated the deceased for me.

- Yefim did not love her. He said: I like to dress culturally, but she - somehow, all in a country style. And once we went to the city with him, to work, so he got himself a madman there, and did not want to return to Matryona.

All her comments about Matryona were disapproving: and she was unscrupulous; and did not pursue the acquisition; and not careful; and didn't even keep a piglet, for some reason did not like to feed it; and, stupid, she helped strangers for free (and the very reason to remember Matryona fell out - there was no one to call the garden to plow with a plow).

And even about Matryona's cordiality and simplicity, which her sister-in-law recognized for her, she spoke with contemptuous regret.

And only then - from these disapproving reviews of my sister-in-law - an image of Matryona emerged in front of me, which I did not understand her, even living side by side with her.

Indeed! - after all, there is a pig in every hut! But she didn't. What could be easier - to feed a greedy pig, who does not recognize anything in the world except food! Cook for him three times a day, live for him - and then slaughter and have bacon.

And she didn't have ...

I didn’t chase after the purchase ... I didn’t get out to buy things and then take care of them more than my life.

Didn't chase outfits. For clothes that embellish freaks and villains.

Not understood and abandoned even by her husband, burying six children, but not having a sociable disposition, a stranger to her sisters, sister-in-law, funny, foolishly working for others for free - she did not save up property to death. A dirty white goat, a bumpy cat, ficuses ...

We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous person, without whom, according to the proverb, the village is not worth it.

Neither the city.

Not all the land is ours.

1959-60 Ak-Mosque - Ryazan

The storyteller's fate is similar to the fate of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn himself - he is also a front-line soldier. And also his return from the front was delayed by "ten years." That is, I had to serve nothing for anything - like half of the country, if not more, was then in the camps.

The hero dreams of working as a teacher in the rural outback - away from civilization. He left the link "in the dusty hot desert" - and now he is irresistibly drawn to the middle zone of his beloved Russia.

In 1956, Ignatyich was rehabilitated and in the summer he got off the train one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometers from Moscow.

At first he wanted to live in the village of Vysokoe Pole, but only there were interruptions with bread. Not bad with food in another village - but the hero is sickened by its terrible Soviet name "Torfoprodukt". However, not the same peat bogs around ... The teacher settles in the village of Talnovo, where he teaches mathematics at school. Matryona Vasilyevna Grigorieva takes him to an apartment (or rather, to a hut). They live in the same room, but the old woman (she is sixty years old) is so quiet and helpful that no conflicts arise, except that the hero, out of camp habit, got excited that the woman somehow mistakenly put on his quilted jacket. Moreover, the loudspeaker is very annoying to Ignatyich - he generally cannot stand the noise, and especially the cheerful radio.

Matryona's hut is old. The best part of her - by the window - is occupied by stools and benches with her favorite figs and other plants. This shows Matryona's kindness, her love for all living things. She is a completely disinterested person - she never "chased after a plant," she did not save up any good for herself, she helped strangers. Of all Matryona's goodness is only a lame kitty, picked up out of pity, and a dirty white goat with crooked horns. Well, more mice and cockroaches ...

Gradually Matryona tells the tenant about her life. She got married early, because her mother died and she had to somehow arrange her life. She liked one young man - Thaddeus. Yes, he went to the front (this was before the revolution, in the First World War) and disappeared. Three years waiting for him - "no news, no bone." Received an offer from the younger brother of Thaddeus - Efim. Agreed, got married. And after a short time, Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. He loved Matryona very much - almost out of jealousy he chopped down his brother and ex-bride with an ax. But nothing, settled down.

Thaddeus eventually got married, he also took his wife Matryona, not otherwise - in memory of his first love. "Second Matryona" gave birth to six children to Thaddeus, all are alive. But Matryona, although she gave birth to children, they "did not stand" with her - did not live up to three months. The village decided that it was "spoiled". Then Matryona took Faddey's daughter Kira into education and raised her for a long time - until she got married and moved to a neighboring village to live with her husband.

The fact that Matryona has no good does not speak of her laziness - she gets up every day at four or five in the morning, there is plenty to do. She is always ready to help her neighbor dig potatoes or run at the call of the chairman's wife to help in collective farm affairs. She does not take money from anyone - which is why they consider her stupid.

Matryona did not receive a pension, although she could receive due to age and illness. She worked half of her life on a collective farm for the "sticks" of workdays. And everything got in the way of "peasant work": even, like a Nekrasov heroine, she stopped a galloping horse, and he almost knocked it into the hole!

Matryona's unselfishness is so great, and her love for her neighbors is so strong, that during her lifetime she decides to give half of her hut and property to her adopted daughter Kira. Thaddeus supports her decision: and loads parts of the house and belongings on the sled. Together with his sons, he drags the goods of his former beloved across the railroad tracks. Matryona helped them and died, lingering beside the sleigh.

The villagers cannot appreciate Matryona's nobility. There is a cry over the coffin - but, rather, out of duty and decency. Soon, the division of property begins, in which the greedy sisters of the deceased and her best friend Masha take part. And Thaddeus, in general, the involuntary culprit of the death of his former beloved, did not even appear at the commemoration.

And only the teacher, Matrenin's guest, clearly understands that Matryona is the righteous man without whom “the village is not worth it”.

"A village is not worth a righteous man" - this is how the story "Matrenin's yard" was originally supposed to be called