On April 22, 1911, an event took place in St. Petersburg, which later many will call the beginning of a new stage in Russian poetry. In the editorial office of the magazine "Apollo" at a meeting of the Society of Zealots artistic word gave the floor to young poets, and among them was Anna Akhmatova. Among the poems she read were this:

I came here, loafer
I don't care where I get bored!
On a hillock, a mill slumbers.
Years can be silent here.

Over dried dodder
The bee floats softly;
I call the mermaid by the pond,
And the mermaid died.

Dragged in rusty mud
The pond is wide, shallowed,
Above the trembling aspen
The light moon shone.

I see everything as new.
Poplars smell damp.
I am silent. Shut up, ready
Be you again, earth.

The poem created a sensation: it caused both admiration and irritation. Both emotions responded to important feature Akhmatova's creativity: the poetics of broken (logical and psychological) links. The source of this poetics was soon discovered: at the same time, a new folklore genre, the ditties, was being discovered in Russian culture.

“Subsequently, Akhmatova many times, and rather with pleasure, noted the similarity of her poems with the poetics of the ditty. Several memoirists remembered the same phrase of hers. When a parody of a ditty appeared on the stage, performed by the appreciated Akhmatova Arkady Raikin - “Fool, fool, I’m a fool, I’m a damned fool, he has four fools, and I’m a fifth fool,” she, Akhmatova, said: “This is about me. This is me and these are my poems.”

Roman Timenchik

The mermaid in the poem also points to another folklore source of Akhmatova's poetics, which also uses skipping links: this is a folk ballad. As the literary critic Lidia Ginzburg noted, Akhmatova builds her complex on doublets: she plays the same plot of female love or misfortune both in the urban, St. Petersburg version, and in the peasant, folklore version.

“Akhmatova has come a long way in literature. If you look at everything that was done to her, then sometimes you wonder how much this, in general, not very healthy woman managed. This is a verbal Gothic cathedral "Poems without a Hero". This is a beautifully composed poem "Requiem". These are remarkable Pushkin works that require great effort, great knowledge, and painstaking analysis. And all this was done by a woman who, when she entered Russian literature, recommended herself as a “loafer.”

Roman Timenchik

Abstract

At the beginning of his literary career, Yesenin spoke with poetry, dressed in an extremely elegant suit. According to the memoirs of Mikhail Babenchikov, “Yesenin himself felt the deliberate“ exotic ”of his kind
and, wanting to hide his embarrassment from me, he cockily threw: “What, I don’t look like a peasant?” Nevertheless, it was in such an "unnatural" attire that he won the fame of a "peasant poet" and conquered Petrograd.

This happened in an era when the theme of the village practically left poetry: after the abolition of serfdom, poets began to live less in the villages and know less about peasant life. The image of the peasant began to become mythologized: a new, religious truth was expected from a native of the village. In the wake of these expectations, public life Rasputin appeared in Russia, and in literature - first Nikolai Klyuev, and then Yesenin.

“He, on the one hand, was this very Russian peasant who carried the religious truth. On the other hand, Yesenin spoke symbolist language, because before that he had lived in Moscow, about which he did not tell anyone in Petrograd, and had mastered the poetic modernist literacy. This is what created his popularity: speaking the modernist language, using sophisticated modernist metaphors, a man with a peasant or pseudo-peasant consciousness.

Oleg Lekmanov

Consider Yesenin's 1914 poem:

Beloved edge! Dreaming of the heart
Stacks of the sun in the waters of the womb.
I would like to get lost
In the greens of your bells.

Along the boundary line
Reseda and riza porridge.
And call the rosary
Willows, meek nuns.

The swamp smokes with a cloud,
Burn in the heavenly yoke.
With a quiet secret for someone
I kept my thoughts in my heart.

I meet everything, I accept everything,
Glad and happy to take out the soul.
I came to this earth
To leave her soon.

Reading the first stanza, the city reader, on the one hand, understands everything, and on the other hand, experiences a slight discomfort, which Yesenin is counting on. For example, the word "green" is both unfamiliar and intuitive at the same time. The second feature of Yesenin's fine work is unobtrusive religious inclusions. The greens are "hundred-belled", that is, they resemble church bell towers.

"Next more directly: And they call the rosary / Willows, meek nuns. Trees become nuns. The space surrounding the poet - the forest, the field - becomes the focus of religious life, which is known to him. He distinguishes nuns in the willows, but you city readers (this is not said, but apparently implied) do not distinguish.

Oleg Lekmanov

While the lines With a quiet secret for someone / I hid thoughts in my heart absolutely modernist: they could easily be found in Alexander Blok or Andrei Bely. In the last lines there is a projection of one's own fate on the fate of Christ, but without the tragedy inherent in modernists.

Yesenin's work with drafts shows that initially religious metaphors were more explicit in these verses, but then the poet smoothed them out. For what?

“So that this religious pantheism, with which all his early poems are full, is assimilated by the reader without tension, not as moralizing, but as a revelation of the new Ivan Tsarevich, who has a riddle that all of you have yet to solve.”

Oleg Lekmanov

Abstract

Gorky's work "Karamor" is included in the book "Stories of 1922-24". Then, in the 1920s, Gorky, finding himself in an ambiguous position - in fact, in exile, although it was said that he allegedly went abroad only for treatment at Lenin's insistence - he was revising his own worldview.

“In an article of 1922 on the Russian peasantry, which was not published in the author’s homeland for the next 80 years, it is said that the Russian revolutionaries did not take into account the true degree of atrocity of the people entrusted to them. They had no idea what kind of razinism and Pugachevism they would have to face. Of course, Gorky's preaching about a saving culture against the backdrop of the nightmares of the Civil War could not save anyone and console anyone. Under these conditions, Gorky begins to think about the original wrongness of human nature.

Dmitry Bykov

The main theme of this collection of short stories is the lack of a person's initial idea of good and evil. And the theme of "Karamora" is the absence of a border between conscience and dishonor. This is demonstrated by the example of a provocateur - the main character named Karamora. It is the provocateur who is the favorite hero of Russian literature of the early 20th century. The prototype of Karamora was Azef, the head of the militant organization of the Social Revolutionaries, who prepared terrorist attacks, sent people to their deaths and at the same time reported this to the police.

“What made him act like that? Gorky does not find an answer to this question, and only towards the end of the story does he come to a striking conclusion. Neither Russian revolutionaries nor Russian counter-revolutionaries have moral truth: all these people are limited, they have a sectarian consciousness. And the truth is behind those who are on both sides, the truth is behind the provocateur. The provocateur is higher because he is not with these and not with those. And to be with these or those means for sure to be with the wrong.

The Russian revolution does not give rise to fighters, because fighters are often devoid of any convictions, and only the will of fate puts them in the ranks of the Reds or Whites. The Russian revolution does not produce ideologists. The Russian revolution gives rise to crowds of provocateurs, people who profit from this revolution, managing to play on both sides. And the whole Russian revolution is one great provocation, as a result of which whole country lost any sense of moral compass."

Dmitry Bykov

This is Gorky's new view of man. Previously, "a man - it sounds proud", now - the absence of an innate moral compass. There is no conscience, there is only a thirst for domination. How did Gorky, having understood this about a person, then return to the USSR and become a Soviet classic?

“Having seen a complete dust inside a person, he believed only in the power methods of reforging him. For Gorky, there was a very simple alternative: if a person does not become a communist, he becomes a fascist. And therefore the USSR is a natural choice for him, and the return is the only answer to what is happening in Europe. Thus, the author of Karamora himself joined the ranks of his own characters, because only a person who has a severely weakened moral sense can return and share this ideology.”

Dmitry Bykov

Abstract

In front of the mirror

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

Me, me, me! What a wild word!
Is that one over there really me?
Did mom love this?
Yellow-gray, semi-gray
And omniscient like a snake?

Is it a boy, in Ostankino in the summer
Dancing at country balls, -
It's me, the one who with every answer
Yellowmouth inspires poets
Disgust, anger and fear?

Is he who in midnight disputes
All the boyish invested agility, -
It's me, the same one
For tragic conversations
Learned to be silent and joke?

However, it is always in the middle.
Fatal earthly path:
From an insignificant cause to a cause,
And you look - lost in the desert,
And their own traces can not be found.

Yes, I'm not panther jumping
Driven to a Parisian attic.
And Virgil is not behind, -
Only there is loneliness - in the frame
Truth-telling glass.

“Before the Mirror” is an indisputable masterpiece of Russian poetry of the 20th century. The poem is preceded by the epigraph "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita", "In the middle of the road of our life" - the first verse of Dante's Divine Comedy.

“The poem is not only and not so much about exile, but about the problem associated with it and with what is called the midlife crisis, which already bothered Dante, the problem of identity. The poet does not recognize himself in the mirror. But it is also a metaverbal conversation about the words: “I, I, I!” What a wild word." It's about not only about "I", but also about the word. The two themes are intertwined. The consciousness of one's own identity is lost, and the meaningfulness of the words themselves is lost. And above all, the word most directly related to identity is the first person pronoun “I”.

Alexander Zholkovsky

Just as a mirror reflects anyone who looks into it, so "I" denotes anyone who utters it. It turns out a kind of synonymy of the mirror and "I". In addition, Khodasevich talks about identity by repeatedly using the specifically Russian words “unless” and “really,” which are difficult to translate into other languages. These words express the speaker's surprised, protesting rejection of what he has to see, realize and say. Alienation from what is said is at the same time the essence of their meaning, their linguistic and national identity.

“Thus, moving from “I” and “mirror” to “really” and “is it”, Khodasevich makes some very correct move. And what is not obvious at first glance, but striking upon discovery: he makes this move based on literary classics, this time Russian and, moreover, prosaic. Of course, the words "unless" and "really" can be found anywhere. But in the context of reflections in front of a mirror about one's own aging, about childhood, about mother, about conversations, silence, truth (the list goes on), they are found in one very influential, although not poetic, text.

Alexander Zholkovsky

This is "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by Tolstoy. It is known that Khodasevich re-read this story and quoted it in an article about Innokenty Annensky. Annensky is also very important for understanding Khodasevich, but that's a completely different story.

Abstract

The classic Soviet play by Vsevolod Vishnevsky, The Optimistic Tragedy, is the only text in Soviet culture designated as a tragedy. Why did it happen?

This is a play about death. Despite the fact that all Soviet history death - in war, from hunger, in camps, and so on - was next to a person, it was difficult and unusual for Soviet culture to write about death.

“Meanwhile, Vsevolod Vishnevsky himself saw death a lot and well. He was a machine gunner on the Volga military flotilla and sailed on the ship "Vanya the Communist". Then he was a machine gunner on an armored train, which was part of the First Cavalry Army. He invented a unique hybrid: remaining a military man, he became quite an influential writer. It is difficult to judge to what extent his artistic talent helped him, and to what extent - military assertiveness, completely impossible for civilian writers. In particular, it is known that when he read his plays, he could jump on a chair or on a table, and in a scene where it was necessary to shoot at the enemy, get his real service pistol and aim at the audience. I don’t know to what extent the people sitting in the hall were ready to criticize the text after that.”

Ilya Venyavkin

The main conflict in The Optimistic Tragedy is between the spontaneous and the conscious: Soviet culture in general was about overcoming the spontaneous and creating a rational state. The action takes place on a ship in civil war. The "elemental" character Leader is opposed by the "rational" hero Commissar.

“The commissar is a young girl, and the plot revolves around this and ideological and sexual tension arises. In particular, as soon as she comes to the ship, the sailors try to rape her. The commissioner takes out a revolver and kills one of the sailors. And then he pronounces the famous phrase: “Well, who else wants to try the commissar’s body?” Then the commissar carries out subtle psychological work, convinces the doubting anarchist sailors of the correctness of the communist ideology, arranges an intrigue against the Leader, and he is eventually shot.

Ilya Venyavkin

Then the detachment dies, but before death, the sailors swear allegiance to the Great October Revolution.

“The last lines of the play are like this. The commissar asks: "Is there death for us?" Sailors: "There is no death for us." On the one hand, from this, according to Vishnevsky, tragedy should have been born, and on the other hand, it was called "Optimistic", because in its pure form tragedy was still impossible in Soviet culture. It was supposed to be a story about overcoming death anyway. After the sailors die, a new regiment takes their place. And on stage, in place of the choir that accompanied the action in the play, a new choir rises.

Ilya Venyavkin

In late Soviet culture, the possibility of tragedy disappeared. Stalin announced that socialism had been built, there was no room left for sharp class conflicts. External aggression or a hidden enemy was possible, but even here there was no room for drama: everyone understood the unconditional value of communism and socialism. All plays based on modern material degenerated into a dispute between the good and the best.

Abstract

Both the beginning and the end of The Matryona Dvor are organized almost like poetry: the paragraphs are drastically shortened. This is no longer simple narrative prose, but marked. The introduction ends with a paragraph-sentence of two ambiguous words: “Yes, I am.” Why is "Yes I" important? Why does this "I" remember what happened on a certain section of the railway?

“Because the guest of Matrena Ignatich is a writer, which is introduced in soft hints. His night studies are described, and not at the first mention of them is reported: "Wrote his own." Actually, this is a story about the meeting of a Russian writer with a Russian province. And the Russian writer is instructed to tell about the Russian righteous woman and her ruined life, thereby resurrecting her.

Andrey Nemzer

The story is oversaturated with references to Russian literary classics. These are Turgenev (the prose poem "Russian Language" and "Singers" from "Notes of a Hunter"), and Nekrasov ("Who should live well in Rus'"), and Lermontov, and Gogol, and Pushkin (" Winter evening"And" Again I visited ... "), and" The Tale of Igor's Campaign ", and epics.

“Such a density of reminiscences is completely uncharacteristic of Solzhenitsyn's stories. As literary markings are not typical for them: such beginnings and endings. Both these literary signs and the density of reminiscences lead us to an extremely important, in my opinion, defining topic for the story - the resurrection of the Russian language, Russian literature and thereby overcoming the death of Matryona, death not only at the railway crossing, but also how she was killed before."

Andrey Nemzer

Matryonin yard

At the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow, along the branch that goes to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that, all the trains slowed down their progress almost, as it were, to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows, went out into the vestibule: they are repairing the tracks, or what? out of schedule?

No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.

Only the machinists knew and remembered why this was all.

In the summer of 1956, from the dusty hot desert, I returned at random - just to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling me at any point, because I was ten years late with the return. I just wanted to go to the middle lane - without heat, with the deciduous rumble of the forest. I wanted to cram in and get lost in the very interior of Russia - if there was such a place somewhere, I lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. Even an electrician for a decent construction would not take me. And I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there was nothing to spend on a ticket, I was wasting my way.

But something was already starting to falter. When I climbed the stairs of the Vladimir oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that frames they no longer sat 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, do you need mathematics? Somewhere away from the railroad? I want to live there forever.

They felt every letter in my documents, walked from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - after all, everyone asks to go to the city, but bigger. And suddenly they gave me a place - High Field. From one name the soul cheered.

The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, completely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would not need to have breakfast and dinner every day, if only to stay here and listen at night to how the branches rustle on the roof - when the radio is nowhere to be heard and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, no bread was baked there. They didn't sell anything edible. The whole village dragged food in bags from the regional city.

I returned to the personnel department and prayed in front of the window. At first they didn't want to talk to me. Then they all walked from room to room, called, creaked and printed in my order: "Peat product."

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wood barrack, hung a stern inscription: “Take the train only from the side of the station!” With a nail on the boards, it was scratched: "And without tickets." And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: "No tickets." The exact meaning of these additions I appreciated later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and stood up to the revolution. Then they were cut down - peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, brought down quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, on which he raised his collective farm, and received a Hero of Socialist Labor for himself.

Between the peat lowlands, a village was randomly scattered - monotonous, poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see a partition that reached the ceiling, so I could not rent a room with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked over the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and the engines, also smoking thickly, whistling piercingly, dragged along it trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes. Without mistake, I could assume that in the evening a radiogram would be torn over the doors of the club, and drunks would wander along the street and stab 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. Such a fresh wind blew there at night and only the vault of stars swung open overhead.

I could not sleep on the station bench, and a little before light I again wandered around the village. Now I saw a tiny bazaar. Porani was the only woman standing there, selling milk. I took a bottle and started drinking immediately.

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

“Drink, drink with a willing soul. Are you a visitor?

- Where are you from? I brightened up.

And I learned that not everything is around the peat extraction, that there is a hillock behind the railroad track, and a village behind the hillock, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then the whole region goes villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo - everything is quieter, away from the railway, to the lakes.

A wind of calm drew me from these names. They promised me horse-drawn Russia.

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

I turned out to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the fee, the school promised me another peat truck for the winter. Worries, no longer touching, passed over the woman's face. She herself had no place (she and her husband brought up her elderly mother), so she took me to one of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room, everywhere it was crowded and bustling.

So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. A mile of this place did not please me in the whole village; two or three willows, a crooked hut, and ducks swam in the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves off.

“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” my guide said, already tired of me. - Only she is not so tidy, she lives in the wilderness, she is sick.

Matryona's house stood right there, not far away, 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 like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gate, once mighty, turned gray from old age, and their top was thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but put her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapping - a simple undertaking against cattle and a stranger. The yard was not covered, but there was much in the house under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, highly shaded by a roof. To the left, more steps led up to upper room- a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

This edition is the true and final one.

No lifetime publications cancel it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

April 1968

At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that, all the trains slowed down almost to the point of feeling. Passengers clung to the windows, went out into the vestibule: they are repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?

No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.

Only the machinists knew and remembered why this was all.

1

In the summer of 1956, from the dusty hot desert, I returned at random - just to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling me at any point in it, because I was ten years late with the return. I just wanted to go to the middle lane - without heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to get lost in the very interior of Russia - if there was such a place somewhere, I lived.

But something was already starting to falter. When I climbed the stairs of the ...sky oblono 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, do you need mathematicians somewhere far away from the railroad? I want to live there forever.

They felt every letter in my documents, walked from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - they ask to go to the city all day, but bigger. And suddenly they gave me a place - High Field. From one name the soul cheered.

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

Alas, no bread was baked there. They didn't sell anything edible. The whole village dragged food in bags from the regional city.

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wood barrack, hung a stern 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 melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: "No tickets." The exact meaning of these additions I appreciated later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and stood up to the revolution. Then they were cut down - peat developers and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, brought down quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, on which he elevated his collective farm.

Between the peat lowlands, a village was randomly scattered - monotonous poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see a partition that reached the ceiling, so I could not rent a room with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and the engines, also thickly smoking, piercingly whistling, dragged along it trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes. Without error, I could assume that in the evening a radiogram would be torn over the doors of the club, and drunks would wander along the street - not without that, and stab each other with knives.

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

Drink, drink with a willing soul. Are you a visitor?

Where are you from? I brightened up.

A wind of calm drew me from these names. They promised me horse-drawn Russia.

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

I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the payment, the school promised me another peat truck for the winter. Worries, no longer touching, passed over the woman's face. She herself had no place (she and her husband raised her elderly mother), so she took me to one of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room, it was cramped and busy.

Well, except maybe we’ll go to Matryona, ”said my guide, already tired of me. - Only she is not so tidy, she lives in the wilderness, she is sick.

Matrona's house stood right there, not far away, 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 like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gate, once mighty, turned gray from old age, and their top was thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but put her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapping - a simple undertaking against cattle and a stranger. The yard was not covered, but there was much in the house under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps led up to spacious bridges, high in the shade of the roof. To the left, more steps led up to the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the cellar. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

« Matrenin yard» Solzhenitsyn - a story about tragic fate open, not like her fellow villagers woman Matrena. Published for the first time in the magazine New world in 1963.

The story is told in the first person. Main character becomes Matrena's tenant and talks about her amazing fate. The first title of the story, “A village is not worth without a righteous man,” conveyed the idea of a pure, disinterested soul well, but was changed to avoid problems with censorship.

Main characters

Narrator- a middle-aged man who served lines in prison and wants a quiet, quiet life in the Russian hinterland. Settled at Matryona and talks about the fate of the heroine.

Matryona a single woman in her sixties. She lives alone in her hut, often gets sick.

Other characters

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

Sisters Matryona- women who seek their own 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 the possible repair of the tracks. Passing this section, the train picked up its previous speed again. And the reason for the slowdown was known only to the machinists and the author.

Chapter 1

In the summer of 1956, the author was returning from "a burning desert at random just to Russia." His return "was dragged on for ten years," and he had no where, no one to rush to. The narrator wanted to go somewhere in the Russian hinterland with forests and fields.

He dreamed of "teaching" away from the bustle of the city, and he was sent to the town with the poetic name High Field. The author did not like it there, and he asked to be redirected to a place with a terrible name "Peat product". Upon arrival at the village, the narrator understands that it is “easier to come here than to leave later.”

In addition to the hostess, mice, cockroaches, and a lame cat picked up out of pity lived in the hut.

Every morning, the hostess woke up at 5 am, afraid to oversleep, because she did not really trust her watch, which was already 27 years old. She fed her "dirty white crooked-horned goat" and prepared a simple breakfast for the guest.

Somehow Matryona learned from rural women that "a new pension law has come out." 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 located tens 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 drag bags of peat for themselves for the winter, hiding from the raids of the guards. The land here was sandy, yielded by the poor.

People in the village often called Matryona to their garden, and she, leaving her business, went to help them. Talnovo women almost lined up to take Matryona to their garden, because she worked for pleasure, rejoicing at a good harvest from others.

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

Matryona once told about the horse Volchka, who got scared and "carried the sleigh into the lake." “The men jumped back, and she grabbed the bridle and stopped it.” At the same time, despite the seeming fearlessness, the hostess was afraid of the fire and, to the point of trembling in her knees, the train.

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

Once, three of her younger sisters came to Matryona at 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 a pension, the grandmother seemed to come to life, and the work was easier for her, and the disease bothered less often. Only one event darkened my grandmother's mood: at Epiphany in the church, someone took her pot of holy water, and she was left without water and without a pot.

Chapter 2

Talnovo women asked Matryona about her lodger. And she passed 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 something interesting there. I only knew that she got married and came to this hut as a mistress. She had six children, but they all died. Later she had a pupil Kira. And Matrona's husband did not return from the war.

Somehow, 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 just so as not to “spoil academic performance statistics”, sometimes for some reason Matryona herself asked. After the petitioner left, the narrator learned from the hostess that it was the brother of her missing husband. That evening she told him that she was to marry him. As a nineteen-year-old girl, Matrena 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 Thaddeus's younger brother, 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 the winter Thaddeus returned “from the Hungarian captivity”. Matryona threw herself at his feet, and he said that "if it were not for my brother, I would have chopped you both."

He later took “another Matryona” as his wife, a girl from a neighboring village, whom he chose as his wife only because of her name.

The author recalled how she came to the hostess and often complained that her husband beats and offends her. She bore Thaddeus six children. And Matryona's children were born and died almost immediately. It's the corruption, she thought.

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

Kira came to visit and said that in Cherusty (where she lives), in order to get land for young people, it is necessary to build some kind of building. For this purpose, the bequeathed Matryona chamber was very suitable. Thaddeus began to come often and persuade the woman to give her up now, during her lifetime. Matryona did not feel 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 once built with his father.

For two weeks the chamber lay near the house, because the blizzard covered all the roads. But Matryona was not herself, besides, her three sisters came and scolded her for allowing her to give up the upper room. On the same days, "the rickety cat wandered off the yard and disappeared," which greatly upset the hostess.

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

Chapter 3

The next morning, Matryona was going to be buried. The narrator describes how the sisters came to say goodbye to her, crying “for show” and blaming Thaddeus and his family for her death. Only Kira grieved sincerely for the deceased foster mother, and the “Second Matryona”, the wife of Thaddeus. The old man himself was not at the wake. When they were transporting the ill-fated upper room, the first sleigh with boards and armor remained standing at the crossing. And, at a time when one of his sons died, his son-in-law was under investigation, and his daughter Kira almost lost her mind with grief, he only worried about how to deliver the sled home, and begged all his friends to help him.

After Matryona's funeral, her hut was "filled up until spring", and the author moved to "one of her sister-in-laws". The woman often remembered Matryona, but all with condemnation. And in these memories arose completely new look a woman that was so strikingly different about the people around. Matryona lived with open heart, always helped others, did not refuse anyone to help, although her health was weak.

A. I. Solzhenitsyn ends his work with the words: “We all lived next to her, and did not understand that she was the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, not a village stands. Neither 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 rickety cat." Image main character- this is the image of the same righteous man, without whom the village does not stand. Matryona devotes her whole life to others, there is not a drop of malice or falseness in her. People around take advantage of her kindness, and do not realize how holy and pure this woman's soul is.

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

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Matryonin yard

No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.

Only the machinists knew and remembered why this was all.

1

- Tell me, do you need mathematics? Somewhere away from the railroad? I want to live there forever.

Alas, no bread was baked there. They didn't sell anything edible. The whole village dragged food in bags from the regional city.

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!

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

“Drink, drink with a willing soul. Are you a visitor?

- Where are you from? I brightened up.

A wind of calm drew me from these names. They promised me horse-drawn Russia.

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

“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” my guide said, already tired of me. - Only she is not so tidy, she lives in the wilderness, she is sick.

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

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 window-side part of it, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficuses. They filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the rest of the light, and besides, behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed to me yellow and sick. And in her clouded eyes one could see that the disease had exhausted her.

While talking to me, she lay prone on the stove, without a pillow, with her head to the door, and I stood below. She did not show joy at getting a tenant, complained about a black ailment, from the attack of which she was now emerging: the ailment did not attack her every month, but, having flown, -

- ... keeps two-days and three-days, so I won’t be in time to get up or serve you. And the hut would not be a pity, live.

And she listed other hostesses to me, who would be more peaceful and pleasing to me, and sent me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to settle in this darkish hut with a dim mirror, which it 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. Here it was good for me because, due to poverty, Matryona did not keep the radio, and because of loneliness she had no one to talk to.

And although Matryona Vasilievna forced me to walk around the village, and although in my second parish she denied for a long time:

- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook - how will you lose it? - but she already met me on her feet, and even as if pleasure arose in her eyes because I returned.

We got along about the price and about the peat that the school would bring.

I only found out later that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilievna did not earn a single ruble from anywhere. Because she didn't get paid. Her family did little to help her. And on the collective farm, she worked not for money - for sticks. For the sticks of workdays in the grimy accounting book.

And so I settled 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 away from the light, put a table by another window. There was electricity in the village - it was pulled up from Shatura back in the twenties. In the newspapers then they wrote - "light bulbs of Ilyich", and the peasants, wide-eyed, said: "Tsar Fire!"

Maybe to someone from the village, who is richer, Matryona’s hut didn’t seem well-lived, but we were quite good with her that autumn and winter: it didn’t leak from the rains and the cold winds blew the oven heat out of it not immediately, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side.

In addition to Matryona and me, there were other things that lived in the hut: a cat, mice and cockroaches.

The cat was not young, and most importantly - a shaggy. Out of pity, she was picked up by Matryona and took root. Although she walked on four legs, she limped heavily: 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 cat-soft, like everyone else, but a strong simultaneous blow of three legs: dumb! - such a strong blow that I did not immediately get used to it, shuddered. It was she who substituted three legs at once in order to save the fourth.

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

Sometimes she ate a cat and cockroaches, but they made her sick. The only thing that the cockroaches respected was the line of the partition separating the mouth of the Russian stove and the kitchenette from the clean hut. They did not crawl into a clean hut. On the other hand, the kitchenette swarmed at night, and if late in the evening, having gone to drink water, I lit a lamp there - the floor was all, and the bench was large, and even the wall was almost completely brown and moved. I brought borax from the chemical laboratory, and, mixing it with dough, we poisoned them. There were fewer cockroaches, but Matryona was afraid to poison the cat along with them. We stopped adding poison, and the cockroaches bred again.

At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was busy at the table, the rare quick rustle of mice under the wallpaper was covered with a single, unified, continuous, like the distant sound of the ocean, the rustle of cockroaches behind the partition. But I got used to him, because 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 handed me Belinsky, Panferov and another stack of some books, but was silent. I got used to everything that was in Matryona's hut.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. Matryonin's walkers were twenty-seven years old as they were bought in a 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 lamp behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make any noise, stoked the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all her bellies were - this one dirty-white crooked-horned goat), walked for water and boiled 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, small ones for herself, and for me - the size of a chicken egg. But her sandy 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, waking up in the late winter light and stretching, sticking my head out from under the blanket and sheepskin coat. They, and even a camp padded jacket on my legs, and a bag stuffed with straw underneath, kept me warm even on those nights when the cold pushed from the north into our frail windows. Hearing a restrained noise behind the partition, I always said measuredly:

– Good morning, Matryona Vasilievna!

And always the same friendly words were heard from behind the partition. They began with some kind of low warm murmur, like grandmothers in fairy tales:

“Mmmm…you too!”

And a little later:

- And breakfast is in time for you.

She did not announce what was for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: kartov unflaked, or soup cardboard(everyone in the village spoke like that), or barley porridge (other cereals that year could not be bought in Peat product, and even barley with a fight - how they fattened pigs with the cheapest and took them in bags). It was not always salty, as it should be, it often burned, and after eating it left a coating on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

But it was not Matryona's fault: there was no oil in the Peat product, margarine was in great demand, but only combined fat was free. Yes, and the Russian stove, as I took a closer look, is inconvenient for cooking: cooking is hidden from the cook, the heat to the cast-iron rises unevenly from different sides. But because it must have come to our ancestors from the Stone Age itself, because, once heated before dawn, it keeps food and drink for livestock warm, food and water for humans all day long. And sleep warmly.

I obediently ate everything boiled to me, patiently put aside if something unusual came across: a hair, a piece of peat, a cockroach leg. I did not have the courage to reproach Matryona. In the end, she herself warned me: “If you don’t know how, don’t cook - how will you lose?”

“Thank you,” I said sincerely.

- On what? On your good? She disarmed me with a radiant smile. And, looking ingenuously with her pale blue eyes, she asked: “Well, what can I cook for you?”

TO to some meant evening. I ate twice a day, as at the front. What could I order for the snake? All from the same, kartov or cardboard soup.

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

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

That autumn, Matryona had many grievances. Before that, a new pension law was issued, and her neighbors advised her to seek a pension. She was lonely all around, and since she began to get very sick, they let her go from the collective farm. There were many injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered an invalid; she worked for a quarter of a century on a collective farm, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for myself, and it was only possible to achieve for my husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But her husband had been gone for fifteen years, since the beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to get those certificates from different places about his older And how much did he get there? There were troubles - to get these certificates; and so that they wrote all the same that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and to assure the certificate that she lives alone and no one helps her; and what year is she; and then wear it all to the social security; and re-wear, correcting what was done wrong; and wear more. And find out if they will give a pension.

These worries were made more difficult by the fact that social security 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 the office to the office and drove her for two months - then after a dot, then after a comma. Each pass is a day. He goes to the village council, but today there is no secretary, just like that, there is no, as it happens in the villages. Tomorrow, then go again. Now there is a secretary, but he does not have a seal. Third day go again. And go on the fourth day because blindly they signed the wrong piece of paper, Matryona's papers are all chipped in one bundle.

“They oppress me, Ignatich,” she complained to me after such fruitless penetrations. - I took care of it.

But her forehead did not remain clouded for long. I noticed that she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work. Immediately she would either grab a shovel and dig for potatoes. Or with a bag under her arm, she went for 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, pleased with everything, with her kind smile.

“Now I’ve put a tooth on it, Ignatich, I know where to get it,” she said about peat. - Well, the place, there is only one love!

- Yes, Matryona Vasilievna, isn’t my peat enough? The car is complete.

- Fu-u! your peat! So much more, and so much more - then, it happens, that's enough. Here, how the winter will spin, yes duel into the windows, so you not only drown, how much it blows. Letos we trained peat teams! Wouldn't I have dragged three cars even now? So they catch. Already one of our women is being dragged through the courts.

Yes, it was. The frightening breath of winter was already swirling - and hearts ached. We stood around the forest, and there was nowhere to get fireboxes. Excavators roared all around in the swamps, but peat was not sold to residents, but only carried - to the authorities, and who was with the authorities, but by car - to teachers, doctors, factory workers. Fuel was not allowed - and it was not supposed to ask about it. The chairman of the collective farm walked around the village, looked demandingly into the eyes, or dully, or ingenuously, and talked about anything except fuel. Because he stocked up. Winter was not expected.

Well, they used to steal timber from the master, now they pulled peat from the trust. The women gathered in five, ten, to be bolder. We went during the day. During the summer, peat was dug up everywhere and stacked to dry. This is what peat is good for, that, having extracted it, they cannot take it away immediately. It dries until autumn, and even until snow, if the road does not become or the trust gets tired. This is the time the women took him. At once they carried away six peat in a bag if they were damp, ten peat if they were dry. One bag of this, sometimes brought three kilometers away (and it weighed two pounds), was enough for one heating. And there are two hundred days in winter. And it is necessary to drown: Russian in the morning, Dutch in the evening.

– Yes what to speak obapol! - Matryona was angry at someone invisible. - As the horses are gone, so what you can’t pin on yourself, that’s not even in the house. My back never heals. In winter, a sleigh on oneself, in the summer bundles on oneself, by God, it’s true!

Women went a day - more than once. IN good days Matryona brought six bags. She piled my peat openly, hid hers under the bridges, and every evening she blocked the hole with a plank.

- Will they guess, enemies, - she smiled, wiping sweat from her forehead, - otherwise they won’t find him for life.

What was the trust to do? He was not allowed states to place guards in all the swamps. I had to, probably, having shown abundant production in reports, then write off - for crumbs, for rains. Sometimes, in gusts, they gathered a patrol and caught women at the entrance to the village. The women threw their sacks and ran away. Sometimes, upon a denunciation, they went door-to-door with a search, drew up a report on illegal peat and threatened to take them to court. The women stopped wearing them for a while, but the winter approached and drove them again - with sleds at night.

In general, looking closely at Matryona, I noticed that, in addition to cooking and housekeeping, every day she had some other important business; she kept the natural order of these affairs in her head and, waking up in the morning, always knew what her day would be busy with. In addition to peat, in addition to collecting old stumps turned out by a tractor in a swamp, in addition to lingonberries, soaked for the winter in quarters ("Sharpen your teeth, Ignatich," she treated me), in addition to digging potatoes, in addition to running around on a pension business, she had to go somewhere else - then to get hay for his only dirty white goat.

“Why don’t you keep cows, Matryona Vasilievna?”

“Eh, Ignatich,” Matryona explained, standing in an unclean apron in the kitchen doorway and turning to my table. - I have enough milk from a goat. And get a cow, so she will eat me with her legs. Do not mow at the canvas - there are their own owners, and there is no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and they don’t tell me on the collective farm - not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and the collective farmers, down to the whitest flies, are all in the collective farm, all in the collective farm, and for themselves from under the snow - what kind of grass? .. They used to boil with hay in low water, from Petrov to Ilyin. It was believed that the grass is honey ...

So, one stout goat had to collect hay - a great job for Matryona. In the morning she took a sack and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the borders, along the road, along the islands in the middle of the swamp. Having stuffed a bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. From a bag of grass, dried hay was obtained - a napkin.

The new chairman, recently sent from the city, first of all cut the gardens for all the disabled. Matryona left fifteen acres of sand, and ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, even for fifteen acres, the collective farm Matryona sipped. When there weren’t enough hands, when the women refused very stubbornly, the chairman’s wife came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, resolute, with a short gray short coat and a menacing look, as if from a military man.

She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona interfered.

- Well, - said the wife of the chairman separately. - Comrade Grigorieva! We must help the collective farm! I'll have to go pick up manure tomorrow!

Matryona's face folded into 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 drawled. - I'm sick, of course. And now I'm not attached to your cause. - And then she hastily corrected herself: - What time is it to come?

- And take your pitchfork! - the chairman instructed and left, rustling with a 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 I thought 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 waiting for the whistle from the factory to twelve. Moreover, women will start up, settle scores, who went out, who did not go out. When, by chance, by yourself worked, so no sound there wasn’t, only oh-oh-oyinki, now dinner rolled up, now the evening has come.

Yet in the morning she went out with her pitchfork.

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

- Tomorrow, Matryona, you will come to help me. Let's dig up potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her turn of affairs, went to help her neighbor, and, returning, still said without a trace of envy:

- Oh, Ignatich, and she has large potatoes! I was digging for hunting, I didn’t want to leave the site, by golly it’s true!

Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden could do without Matryona. The women of Talnovsky have established precisely that it is harder and longer to dig up your own garden with a shovel than, having taken a plow and harnessed with six of you, to plow six gardens on yourself. That's why they called Matryona to help.

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

She doesn't take money. Involuntarily you hide it.

Another big fuss fell on Matryona when it was her turn to feed the goat herders: one - hefty, deaf, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This queue was a month and a half times, but drove Matryona into a big expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, sold both sugar and butter, which she herself did not eat. It turns out that the housewives laid out in front of each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

“Be afraid of the tailor and the shepherd,” she explained to me. “They will slander you all over the village if something goes wrong with them.

And in this life, dense with worries, at times a severe illness still broke in, Matryona collapsed and lay in a layer for a day or two. She didn't complain, she didn't moan, but she hardly moved either. On such days Masha, close girlfriend Matryona, from the very young years, came to take care of 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 amazing in Talnov, somehow indecent in front of the neighbors - they say, mistress. They called once, she arrived very angry, ordered Matryona, as soon as she was in bed, to come to the first-aid post herself. Matryona went against her will, they took tests, they sent her to the district hospital - and it just died out.

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

“You haven’t seen me before, Ignatich,” she justified herself. - All my bags were, I didn’t consider five pounds a weight. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona! You'll break your back!" The divir did not come up to me to put my end of the log on the front end. We had a military horse, Volchok, healthy ...

- Why military?

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

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

- How can I go to Cherusti, the train will crawl out from Nechaevka, its hefty eyes will pop out, the rails are buzzing - it throws me into the heat, my knees are shaking. Oh god it's true! - Matryona herself was surprised and shrugged her shoulders.

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

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

- Fu-u! Now Matryona does not need to die! some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. - More money She's old and has nowhere to go.

- What is a pension? others objected. - The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, and tomorrow it will take away.

Matryona ordered herself to roll up new felt boots. Bought a new sweatshirt. And she straightened her coat from a worn railway overcoat, which was presented to her by a machinist from Cherusti, 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, which 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 peace, Ignatich.

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, to click seeds. She did not invite guests to her place in the evenings, respecting my work. Only on Epiphany, returning from school, did I find a dance in the hut and was introduced to three of Matryona's sisters, who called Matryona as the eldest - Lyolka or nanny. Until that day, little was heard in our hut about the sisters - were they afraid that Matryona would ask them for help?

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

- Baboons! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. - Did someone take someone else's consecrated water by inconvenience? in a pot?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys rejoiced, there were also boys. Matryona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t.

Not to say, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even more likely she was a pagan, superstition took over in her: that you can’t go into the garden on Ivan Lenten - on next year there will be no harvest; that if the blizzard twists, it means that someone strangled himself somewhere, and if you pinch your foot with the door - to be a guest. How long I lived with her - I never saw her praying, nor that she crossed herself at least once. And every business began “with God!” and to me every time “with God!” said 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 St. Nicholas in the kitchenette. Forgetfulness they stood in the dark, and during the vigil and in the morning on holidays, Matryona lit a lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her rickety cat. She choked mice ...

Having torn herself a little out of her little hut, Matryona began to listen more attentively to my radio as well (I did not fail to set myself reconnaissance- so Matryona called the outlet. 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 deaf hut - intelligence). That year, it was customary to receive two, three foreign delegations a week, see them off and take them to many cities, gathering rallies. And every day, the news was full of important reports about banquets, dinners and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned, sighed disapprovingly:

- They go, they go, they hit something.

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

- Everything is new, new, they don’t want to work for the old ones, where will we put the old ones?

Back in that year, artificial satellites of the Earth 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 resolutely sentenced:

- They sing wonderfully, not in our way.

- What are you, Matryona Vasilyevna, but listen!

I also listened. She pressed her lips:

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

Attention! This is an introductory section of the book.

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