SOURCE: "The Impact of Structure in Solzhenitsyn's 'Matryona's Home'," in The Russian Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, April, 1977, pp. 167-83.

"Matryona's Home" is considered to be not only one of Solzhenitsyn's finest works but also one of the greatest short stories in recent Soviet literary history. It has been discussed in almost every survey of Solzhenitsyn's work and has often been translated. Unfortunately, these discussions and translations have not always been adequate to the demands of the story. In part this is due to the multiple nuances of language and event employed by the author. These nuances are difficult to disentangle in the space of the few paragraphs usually assigned to the story in literary surveys, and it is an acknowledged fact that in the linguistic struggle known as translation, the original language is often the loser. This can be seen in the various renditions of the very title of the work. "Matrenin dvor" is translated as "Matryona's House" (Paul Blackstock; Michael Glenny) or "Matryona's Home" (H. T. Willetts; Robert Jackson). Yet the term dvor is broader than either "house" or "home." It might best be translated as "homestead" with all the flavor of the American West that the word connotes. In fact, the flavor of the American West is probably most analogous to the atmosphere of the Russian interior that Solzhenitsyn is attempting to convey. For Americans, the West is the "real country"; it is the locus of the American myth. The depths of the forest and the peasant dvor, the house and surrounding land, play a similar role in the Russian cultural myth. In addition, dvor translated as "house" lacks the thematic irony of the original term. Matryona possesses a ramshackle house which she shares with a crippled cat, bugs, and the narrator-lodger. But she does not possess anything like a dvor or homestead. Her "courtyard" is nothing more than a patch of grass, freely accessible to the neighbors, just as Matryona herself is always open and available to her neighbors' demands. This irony is underscored by the fact that in the kolkholz, the dvor is an essential legal and economic entity yet among the neighbors, Matryona and her dvor are social and spiritual anomalies. In the kolkhoz, Matryona's dvor possesses little status.

Even in the title of the story, linguistic nuance contributes greatly to thematic impact. Possessiveness, whether of material objects or of people when they are viewed as objects, is an important motif in this work and one which motivates much of the action of the plot.

This paper will discuss the various levels of language and event in "Matryona's Home" as they contribute to the theme of the story. It will attempt to do this by presenting an analysis of the work's structure.¹

Matryona has been viewed as a symbol of ancient pristine Russia mutilated by modern culture, an icon whose spiritual beauty transcends the disruption and dislocations of modern history.² My own view of the story is less static. I see "Matryona's Home" as the story of one individual's moral maturation. Matryona herself is an image that lies dormant in the narrator's mind until catastrophe becomes the impetus for its development. Solzhenitsyn's metaphor for this process—the narrator's realization of the true significance of the old peasant woman—is the narrator's hobby, photography. A photographer captures an image on a piece of film by exposing the film to light for a fraction of a second. The narrator's life with Matryona is a series of such exposures. Once the image has been imprinted it remains latent in the film, for it is only by passing through the darkroom that the image may develop and emerge from the film. Matryona's sudden death plunges the narrator into the darkness of despair, but it is in this darkness that the true image of Matryona develops and emerges at last in the final pages of the story. Solzhenitsyn's story traces the processes by which latent images are brought to consciousness. He accomplishes this by so structuring the story as to evoke the widest range of nuance and allusion in the mind of the reader.

In any literary work, the opening section or paragraph is often the most essential. It can present at a glance all of the major motifs and themes as well as background details that characterize the work, while attempting to capture the reader's interest. For this reason, a well-designed opening section or first paragraph can determine the impact of the entire work on the reader. "Matryona's Home" begins with just such a well-constructed opening section. It is brief enough to quote in full.

Na sto vosem'desiat chetvertom kilometre ot Moskvy eshche s dobrykh polgoda posle togo vse poezda zamedliali svoi khod pochti kak by do oshchupi. Passazhiry l'nuli k steklam, vykhodili v tambur: chiniat putì, chto li? Iz grafika vyshel?

Net. Proidia pereezd, poezd opiat' nabiral skorost', passazhiry usazhivalis'.

Tol'ko mashinisty znali i pomnili, otchego eto vse.

Da ia.

The section is set off typographically from the remaining text on the page. The remaining text is labeled "1" . This opening section thus forms a kind of prologue to the body of the tale. We can analyze the elements that compose this prologue as well as the tone in which it is presented.

A literal translation of the opening section would run as follows:

At the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow for at least a good half year after that all trains would slow down as if groping their way. The passengers would cling to the windows, go out into the corridor: are they fixing the tracks or what? Has the train gone off schedule?

No. After passing the crossing, the train would again pick up speed and the passengers would return to their seats.

Only the engineers knew and remembered what it was all about.

And I.

The prologue is composed of four short paragraphs scarcely more than one or two sentences apiece. These sentences decrease in length as the text progresses. The last paragraph contains only two words. Each sentence thus receives the maximum attention of the reader. The structural effect is that of an inverted pyramid, with the point toward the "I" of the narrator.

The prologue also locates the action of the story in space and time. The scene is a definite distance from the capital—184 kilometers—at a definite spot—on the railway line—within a distinct time period—at least six months after "that." The narrator is introduced as an important character, since only he and the engineers know why certain events described in this opening section are taking place. The tone is conversational, colloquial, with idiomatic expressions (do oshchupi), parataxis (passazhiry l'nuli k steklam, vykhodili . . . ) and use of direct discourse to present the astonishment of the passengers (chiniat putì, chto li? Iz grafika vyshel?). Solzhenitsyn manipulates rhythm in the second paragraph by introducing variations on the Russian verbs of motion idti and ezdit': "proidia pereezd, poezd . . ." (after passing the crossing, the train . . ."). The accumulation of these three verb forms—a gerund and two nouns based on the verb ezdit' (to travel)—in consecutive order, combined with repetition of the labial "p" ("proidia pereezd, poezd opiat' . . .") articulates the train's slow accumulation of speed as it chugs past the crucial spot.

The collective effect of all these elements is to place the reader directly into the center of action. In fact, the reader shares with the passengers on the train a sense of bewilderment: why do the trains slow down at this particular point? And what is it that the narrator knows and remembers? The reader's interest is piqued especially by the strategically placed, enigmatic "that." Evidently the speaker is referring to some event, but for the moment he gives no details. The reader is thus forced to attempt to reconstruct the incident referred to by piecing together details that are provided: the trains slow down, the engineers know and remember something, the narrator (is he a trainman too?) shares their knowledge and their memory, the event occurred about 120 miles from Moscow.

This reconstruction of the event is a device familiar to writers of detective fiction and, in fact, "Matryona's Home" contains many of the elements of a good detective story. There is a mysterious protagonist who is searching for something and who accidentally becomes involved in the crime of murder, although as an observer rather than as a participant. The story itself is a long meditation on the part of this protagonist, a reconstruction in his own mind of the events that led up to the crime in an attempt to uncover the motives for it. And in the tradition of the best detective fiction, the character of the victim, the murderer and the teller of the tale are all examined for the psychological clues that uncover the hidden motives for human behavior. Moreover, "Matryona's Home" is not the only instance in which Solzhenitsyn exploits the apparatus of the detective novel in order to rivet the attention of his reader. His novel The First Circle opens with a furtive telephone call, a warning, and a sense of impending doom, while the entire plot of the novel involves the search for the mysterious caller.

The opening section of "Matryona's Home" reveals another important motif, that of memory. Memory is closely connected with the image of the train. The engineers not only know why all this is happening, they also remember why it is happening (". . . mashinisty znali i pomnili"). Trains slow down in memory of the mysterious event. With subtle literary irony, the passengers leap to their feet as the train slows down; they rise in unknowing homage to the memory of that which took place. The narrator's tale, his epitaph to the memory of the incident at the railway crossing, begins with the train that brought him to Matryona's village and ends with the fate of the other trains that pass that way. Yet this "ending" is actually the beginning of the story; it is the information contained in the prologue. The image of the train is also directly associated in the reader's mind with a complex of literary memories, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina probably foremost among them. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian literature the train is a familiar phenomenon. It is frequently described by local peasants as an iron horse or fire-breathing dragon—the folk memory of a mythical past. Matryona herself describes the train to the narrator in these terms. Here, the train functions as a symbol of civilization intruding violently into the backwaters of the native culture, displacing animals and persons.

We have seen how an incident involving a train appears at the beginning of Solzhenitsyn's story. Similar incidents occur in the middle and at the end of the tale, forming a framework for the plot. Aside from the incident described in the prologue, the narrator's introduction to the village of Torfoprodukt at the beginning of the story is a sign at the train station which reads: NO TICKETS. In the incident which occurs in the middle of the tale, Matryona recalls how she and her relatives were nearly killed as they struggled to board a train without tickets—the Stationmaster had refused to sell them tickets in their price range—only to discover that the train was empty. The narrator discovers that "for some reason" Matryona fears trains more than anything else. Her fear turns out to be prophetic. At the end of the story, she and her relatives are killed by two engines linked together groping their way down the track backwards in the dark.

Thematically, the train serves as a symbol of arbitrary cruelty. It proceeds blindly along its designated track, oblivious to anything that might stand in its way. This blind cruelty is compounded by the vicious cruelty of those who serve the monster: the Stationmaster, for example, who refuses to sell tickets. The train is also the unwitting instrument of vengeance of Faddei, the villain of the piece.

Solzhenitsyn's technique of anchoring memory in some concrete object is repeated toward the end of the story with great effect in the episode of the narrator's jacket. On the day of her death, Matryona borrows her lodger's jacket without telling him, thus incurring his wrath. This jacket was the narrator's constant companion through the years of his imprisonment and exile and represents for him his past. In a sense, it is his past. His anger at Matryona's breach of courtesy stems in part from his sense that Matryona has been tampering with a part of himself. Yet the depth of the narrator's emotion, his anger at Matryona's thoughtlessness and his subsequent regret for having scolded the old woman for her act, reinforces his memory of the events that took place on the fatal day of Matryona's death. From then on, the jacket is irrevocably bound to the memory of Matryona and the special qualities that distinguished her from everyone else: her lack of possessiveness, her casual attitude toward material acquisitions.

These objects, the train, the jacket, anchor memory in the sense that they bring latent memory to consciousness. Similarly, through his reminiscences the narrator hopes to impart his memory to the passengers on the train, so that by the end of his tale, they will not stumble blindly to their feet, but will rise in conscious recognition of Matryona's qualities.

The arrangement of elements in the first sentence of the prologue to "Matryona's Home" is essential to convey a motif which, along with the motif of memory, Solzhenitsyn has chosen to introduce to the reader immediately at the beginning of the story. In the Russian, the first sentence builds slowly to the key phrase do oshchupi (blindly, fumblingly, gropingly) by piling up the elements of place, time, event and manner. The major emphasis is on the first and last elements in the series. On the strictly literary level, place is a more crucial element than time in the story. Time locates the tale historically; place locates it thematically. In Part 1 of the narrative we discover that the events to be described took place during the summer of 1953 through February of 1954. The incident with the trains described in the prologue would then have taken place in about August of 1954 or almost a full year after the narrator first returned to Russia from the "dusty desert" of Asia. The summer of 1953 is, of course, about five months after the death of Stalin. Stalin's name explains the narrator's long exile from Russia ("a little matter of ten years" as he tells us in Part 1), his hunger for the Russian interior, a dark, cool, leafy contrast to the "wasteland" of his exile; the hint of Stalin's death suggests the possibility of the narrator satisfying his hunger.

Place contributes in an essential way to the theme of Solzhenitsyn's story. As we noted at the beginning of this essay, the Russian interior represents the "genuine" Russia, the heartland of the culture. In Part 1, the narrator expresses his desire to "lose himself in the very depths of Russia" (zateriat'sia v samoi nutrianoi Rossii) as if returning to the womb. His journey into the Russian interior is thus a voyage into the very core of his being as a Russian. And at the heart of this core stands Matryona.

The question is, how does the narrator proceed on this journey toward his goal? The answer is—he gropes toward it, just as the train gropes its way along the tracks toward its ultimate destination.

The notion of groping one's way is intrinsically connected with both the structure and the theme of "Matryona's Home." Although the narrator lives with the old peasant woman for many months, it is not until the very end of the story that he grasps the full significance of her life and death. Before that, he is fumbling for the truth, blinded by superficial images. He sees Matryona only as a picturesque remnant of the Russian past. Her ramshackle hut, her crippled cat and mangy goat, the bugs and her ancient loom: all these are quaint reminders of Old Russia, props in a theater set. The narrator attempts to preserve these quaint remnants by photographing Matryona in her natural habitat. But the old woman invariably freezes up before a camera and becomes unnaturally severe. Clearly, the static image on the glossy surface is not the real Matryona. The image of the true Matryona remains undeveloped in the narrator's mind until the fatal accident.

Manner also implies a motive for the narrator's return to his homeland. He is depicted in the very process of groping for his psychological and spiritual roots, for the manner of how best to live in conformity with his nature as a Russian. He believes that this process requires leaping backwards over the disjuncture of Stalin's regime and of the whole Soviet experiment. It involves digging below the surface of Soviet culture to the base soil of the ancient Russian culture and below that, to the ideal of that culture.

"Matryona's Home" is a relatively brief work of thirty-odd pages. Its impact on the reader, however, is disproportionate with its brevity. One of the reasons for the story's tremendous impact is the author's skillful use of language. Subtle differences in wording and phrasing go far toward clarifying major motifs and themes in the story, as we have seen in our discussion of the prologue. Another reason for the story's impact on the reader is the variety of structural devices employed by the author. These devices may be grouped under at least four major headings: fairy tale, ballad, cinema, and symbolic image. The fairy tale and ballad belong among the genres of oral literature, the cinema is a nonliterary form, while the device of symbolic imagery, common enough in belles lettres, incorporates overtones of the myth or religious legend in Solzhenitsyn's story. Each of these forms is familiar to the reader in other contexts. In "Matryona's Home" they mold the plot and atmosphere of the story, uniting allusions scattered throughout the story into a thematic whole. These forms act subliminally on the reader throughout the story as reminders of familiar territory just as they influence the narrator of the tale in his search for the heart of Russia.

The fairy tale technique particularly concerns the character and role of the narrator. In the opening scenes in which the narrator is introduced, the story follows quite closely the plot outline of a traditional fairy tale. Like the traditional fairy tale hero, the narrator comes from a far distant land (in this case, the steppes of Asia) in search of something. The phrases he chooses to explain his quest to the reader echo the lulling tone of the traditional Russian fairy tale: "Mne khotelos' zatesat'sia i zateriat'sia v samoi nutrianoi Rossii—esli takaia gde-to byla, zhila." ("I wanted to crawl away and hide myself in the very depths of Russia—if such a place existed somewhere"). The twofold repetition of the verb is a traditional skazka (fairy tale) technique (compare, "V nekotorom tsarstve, v nekotorom gosudarstve, zhil-byl tsar'. . ."; "In a certain kingdom, in a certain land, there once lived a tsar . . ."). The object of the narrator's quest, like that of the fairy tale hero, is a woman, but not the beautiful and nobly-born princess of the traditional tales. Rather, the woman of the narrator's quest is Russia herself, the authentic Russia hidden behind the veil of Soviet culture.

Like the traditional hero, the narrator meets with hindrances in the course of his quest. The first of these is Soviet red tape. Officials go through his documents with a fine comb before they assign him, in his capacity as a teacher, to what turns out to be a false idyll, the land of Vysokoe Pole, the High Field. Vysokoe Pole is for the narrator what the land of the Phaiacians was for Odysseus: a spot of incredible beauty and total detachment from reality. The village of Vysokoe Pole is not self-sufficient, however. It depends for its existence on Soviet reality in the form of the regional town, from which it imports its food supplies. And so the narrator plunges back into the conflict, going from an extreme of beauty to an extreme of ugliness. This is Torfoprodukt, a dreary workers' settlement, located, as its name suggests, in the peat bogs. Yet the logic of the fairy tale often has it that the brightest treasure is concealed in the least beautiful spot. So it is that through this settlement, the hero is led to penetrate through the gloom to Matryona, the true object of his search.

On his journey into the depths of Russian reality, the narrator encounters the guideposts and guidepersons typical of the traditional fairy tale. At the very entrance to Torfoprodukt he comes upon the sign that traditionally greets heroes at the crossroads of their quest. But instead of the usual "To the left—a horse awaits you," "To the right—death awaits you," this sign reads: BOARD TRAINS ONLY FROM THE PASSENGERS' HALL! Affixed to the first injunction are two other notices: AND WITHOUT TICKETS. NO TICKETS. These last two are unofficial additions by local wits. The guidepost at the station is succeeded by the traditional fairy tale guideperson who appears at the entrance to the forest to direct the hero to his destination.

In "Matryona's Home" this guide takes the form of a peasant woman possessed of mellifluous speech and a bottle of milk which she sells to the narrator. (I have deliberately avoided the Freudian level of psychological interpretation in the story, but it is surely significant that the narrator-hero, about to "lose" himself in the depths of Mother Russia, begins his adventure by swallowing a bottle of milk.) The woman's peasant speech rings like an incantation in the narrator's ears. He submits to the magic of village names that roll off the woman's tongue for they promise him that he is nearing the object of his search—kondovaia Rossiia, "solid" Russia. Having drunk down the woman's potion, the narrator-hero is led by his guide, by a round-about route, to the good witch, Matryona.

Matryona's hut and its strange inhabitants remind one of Baba Iaga's home in the forest. Matryona's establishment, however, bears none of the sinister overtones of the evil witch and the narrator is soon comfortably settled there. Matryona's voice, too, has an enchantingly soothing effect on him, particularly when she is about to feed him.

Matryona got up at four or five o'clock in the morning. . . . I scarcely heard her at her morning chores. I slept late, awoke in the wintry daylight, stretched a bit and poked my head out from under my blanket and my sheepskin. . . . When I heard discreet noises on the other side of the screen, I spoke to her, slowly and deliberately.

"Good morning, Matryona Vasilievna."

And every time the same goodnatured words came to me from behind the screen. They began with that low, warm murmer that grandmothers make in fairy tales [kakim-to nizkim teplym murchaniem, kak u babushek v skazkakh]:

"Mmmmm . . . and the same to you."

And after a little while, "Your breakfast is ready for you now."

It would seem that the narrator has reached the goal of his quest. He has come home. But the idyll is soon shattered and the narrator discovers that, in fact, the true object of his search, the "genuine Russia" has been hidden from him all the time. Kondovaia Rossiiia—solid Russia—turns out to be an illusion, while the frail Matryona is seen to be more solid and genuine than all her surroundings.

The narrator's word kondovaia in the context of the story is filled with thematic nuances. It is variously translated as "backwoods," "the very core," and "true, legendary," but none of these convey the full flavor of the Russian. Literally, the word means "well built, solid" and is usually associated with wood. The significance of this literal definition for the entire story is self-evident. The narrator is journeying from the dusty Asian steppes into the forests of Russia. In the forest he hopes to find the heart of Russia. The narrator observes that before the Revolution, Torfoprodukt had been covered with deep, impenetrable forests, but afterwards peat diggers and the local kolkhoz had collaborated in cutting them down. The kolkhoz chairman had even sold vast tracts of forest for personal gain. Beneath the faded, sagging wallpaper that covers the inner walls of Matryona's home stands genuine, solid wood, but it is rarely seen in its full beauty. Papered on the inside and weather-beaten on the outside, its true nature is disguised and ignored.

Matryona's house is solidly built, but it is wrenched and hacked apart by the axes of Faddei and his sons, just as Matryona is hacked apart by the train as she helps Faddei cart away the planks on a sledge poorly constructed of rotten wood. In "Matryona's Home" wood indicates the state of people's souls.

While the structure and motifs of the fairy tale predominate in the first part of the story and are particularly associated with the narrator's view of surroundings and events, the motifs of the ballad dominate the latter parts of the story and are most closely associated with Matryona. The ballad traditionally recounts a story of love, betrayal, and revenge. The chorus of a popular American ballad runs: "And only say that you'll be mine / And in no other's arms entwine." In this ballad, the heroine's unfaithfulness causes her erstwhile lover to "plunge a knife into her breast" in the midst of an embrace. A Russian variant of this scene has: "Ty voz'mi, voz'mi sabliu vostruiu, / Ty razrezh', razrezh' moiu belu grud'," where the heroine invites her own punishment. Yet another variant of this same Russian ballad has equal significance for the story of Matryona's unhappy marriage: "Ty zhenis', zhenis', razbessovestnyi, / Ty voz'mi, voz'mi u soseda dochku." ("Marry, oh marry, unscrupulous one, / Take, oh take the neighbor's daughter.") This is exactly what Faddei does when he returns from the war to discover that Matryona, his own betrothed, has married his brother. Since Faddei cannot have the original Matryona, he appropriates a second Matryona from a nearby village. But before leaving his brother's house, he curses and threatens the couple, claiming that only ties of kinship prevent him from taking an ax to them both. Forty years later, Faddei takes an ax to Matryona's house and that very night, Matryona is hacked to death by a train as she helps her relatives cart away the wood.

The Doppelgänger who sucks his original dry is a familiar figure both in folk literature and in belles lettres. Faddei's wife, the "second Matryona," true to form, seems to sap the vitality from the Matryona who is the narrator's host. The narrator watches as her endless complaints exhaust his Matryona's resources of goodnatured sympathy. Even before the narrator's arrival, the second Matryona seems to have been mysteriously influencing her original's existence for evil. In the course of forty years, both Matryonas bear six children apiece. Yet all six of the original Matryona's children die, while those of her double live. The author employs this ominous coincidence to draw attention once again to Matryona's unique virtue, her utter selflessness. Lacking a natural child to carry on her existence and memory in the world, she adopts the youngest daughter of the second Matryona and brings her up in her own house. Ironically, she thereby invites her own destruction, for this child furnishes Faddei with the excuse he needs for repossessing Matryona's house—the house which should have come to him as the eldest son. Matryona's house is dismantled and hauled to the railroad tracks in order to secure some property for the daughter and her husband in a distant village.

Solzhenitsyn uses the structure and motifs of the ballad to point up an important moral theme in the story. This is the theme of possessiveness, of which Faddei is the primary example. Faddei is determined to have what he believes to be his, whether it is a house or a woman, at any price. His mania for possession causes him ultimately to commit murder. But if Faddei is the most spectacular culprit, he is not alone in the petty greed that Solzhenitsyn views as an eternal death of the spirit. After Matryona's death, her relatives descend upon her small "estate" with vulturous rapacity. Even Matryona's only real friend in the village is anxious to claim her small share of the legacy—an old grey shawl—before it is borne off by someone else. The narrator himself is guilty of some cupidity in the incident of the jacket. Yet this incident capsulizes an ironic reversal of roles, for Matryona's lodger, the village teacher, completes his moral education under the tutelage of his landlady. And, as is often the case, he only begins to grasp the point of the lesson after it is over. With Matryona gone and her possessions dispersed, the message of Matryona's life and death reveals itself to him with greater clarity.

We have already discussed the way in which photography serves as a metaphor, describing the process by which the narrator's accumulated memories of his life with Matryona develop and, suddenly, cohere in his mind. History preserved in pictures is a common enough phenomenon. But when these are moving pictures, they assume an even greater authenticity. Several scenes in "Matryona's Home" feature the art of the cinema as a means of recreating the past. But here the narrator uses his talents in this direction to recreate Matryona's memories of her past, which, for the narrator, is synonymous with the authentic Russian past.

Much of "Matryona's Home" is highly photogenic, dramatic and colorful. Scenes of backwoods Soviet Russian life have an immediate appeal to the eye: the train station at Torfoprodukt, Matryona's house, the wake held in her memory. Capsule scenes such as the conversation between Matryona and the kolkhoz chairwoman in which Matryona is ordered to go to work for the kolkhoz with her own tools are also well suited to film. But most significant of all is the scene in which Matryona tells the narrator her life story. In this scene, the narrator's eyes act as camera lenses, scouring the walls of the house for visible signs of Matryona's tale.

"He was the first one who came courting me, before Efim did . . . he was his brother . . . the older one . . . I was nineteen and Faddei was twenty-three. . . . They lived in this very same house. It was their house. Their father built it."

I looked round the room automatically. Instead of the old grey house rotting under the faded green skin of wallpaper where the mice played, I suddenly saw new timbers, freshly trimmed and not yet discolored, and caught the cheerful smell of pine tar.

The narrator's mind transforms the scene he is viewing. The rotted planks of Matryona's house fade out. A scene of earlier days fades in. Matryona continues to speak and again, the narrator transforms the scene in his imagination and projects it to the reader-viewer.

"That summer we went to sit in the grove together," she whispered. "There used to be a grove where the stableyard is now. They chopped it down . . . I was just about to marry him, Ignatich. Then the German war began. They took Faddei into the army."

She let these words fall and suddenly the blue and white and yellow July of the year 1914 burst into flower before my eyes: the sky still peaceful, floating clouds, the people sweating to get the ripe corn in. I imagined them side by side, the black-haired Hercules with a scythe over his shoulder, and the red-faced girl, clutching a sheaf. And there was singing under the open sky, such songs as nobody can sing these days with all the machines in the field.

Evidently, the narrator's imagination has been not a little influenced by Soviet posters and grade C films. One can almost hear the voices of a full-fledged Russian chorus swelling in the background as peasant-bogatyrs are shown bringing in the harvest. Yet sentimental as the scene is, it is still the narrator's lyric paean to the Russia of the past recreated in Matryona's memories and projected by the narrator's imagination.

Photography is a science of light. But Solzhenitsyn uses light imagery in other ways throughout his story. Light as knowledge, as spiritual illumination, appears in that early scene in which the narrator meets the peasant woman selling milk in a market near Torfoprodukt. The narrator's first impression of Torfoprodukt is one of gloom: he arrives in the town toward evening; clouds of grey smoke rising from factories connected with the peat works greet him. He spends an uncomfortable night on a bench in the grey station. When it is "scarcely light" (chut' svet) he wanders out to have another look at his surroundings. In the half-light of dawn, he comes upon the peasant woman, is struck by her speech and asks where she is from: " 'A vy otkuda? ' prosvetlel ia. I ia uznal, chto ne vse vokrug torforazrabotki, chto est' za polotnom zheleznoi dorogi—bugor, a za bugrom—derevnia, i derevnia eta—Tal'novo. . . ." ("'Where are you from?' I brightened up. And I learned that not everything around was peatworks, that beyond the railroad embankment was a hill, and beyond the hill, a village, and this village was Tal'novo.") Just as the narrator "lights up" on hearing the peasant woman's speech one can imagine the sun simultaneously rising over the hills as day replaces dawn. The woman illuminates the narrator as to the landscape that extends beyond the hills, far from the grey factory town. This bright vista is Matryona's territory and it is there that the narrator gains his ultimate insight into true righteousness. The single verbprosvetlet' thus neatly fuses emotional, physical, geographical and spiritual illumination on the narrator's part.

In the struggle between Matryona, the force of Light, and the rest of the villagers, children of Darkness, that takes place like an undertow throughout the story, Faddei is the chief representative of spiritual gloom. With his huge black beard and tenebrous mien, he is a dark patch in every scene. The narrator depicts him standing in a murky spot when he threatens his brother and Matryona, his brother's new bride: "Suddenly, I imagined Faddei standing there, young and black haired, in the dark patch by the door, with his ax raised." The only time Faddei's eyes are seen to gleam with light is when he is dismantling Matryona's house and then it is the yellow light of greed and vengeance that illumines them, not the white light of knowledge or truth. When old Masha, Matryona's only friend, comes to request Matryona's shawl as her rightful share of the legacy, the narrator concedes her right to the shawl, but he recognizes the dark corner of the soul from which the request comes. "'Ignatich, . . . do you remember the lovely grey shawl that Matryona had. . . . Didn't she promise it, after her death, to my little Tania?' And she looked at me hopefully in the gloom (I s nadezhdoi smotrela na menia v polut'me . . .) . . . ."

The most obviously symbolic use of light, of course, occurs in the description of the accident. Matryona's relatives, gathered at the railroad tracks to haul their sledges full of wood over the crossing, watch out for the lights of an oncoming train. But they peer for this ominous sign in the wrong direction and are hit by two engines, unlighted and coupled together, careening backwards down the track. Moral blindness is here embodied in physical blindness. Moreover, the identity of modern Soviet history, proceeding purposefully toward the wrong goal in the wrong direction and Russian peasant culture, proceeding at cross purposes but in a similar manner, is symbolized by the fact that two engines, locked together, plough into two sledges, roped together. Matryona had advised hiring two tractors, one for each sledge, but Faddei's avarice precluded paying a second driver.

In his essay, Jackson argues that the accident that caused Matryona's death "emerges out of Russian life and history, most immediately out of the years of revolutionary upheaval and change—for Solzhenitsyn profoundly tragic years involving the disfiguration and dislocation of Russian life."³ But the accident cannot be blamed solely on the Stalin years nor yet on the Soviet experience. Rather, it is the result of deep-rooted vices inherent in human nature and fostered by culture, whether Soviet culture or Russian peasant culture. One of the chief ironies of "Matryona's Home" is the similarity between Soviet life, the so-called new order, and peasant life, the old order. Both have their prescribed rituals; the word poriadok (order) occurs in connection with peasant custom as well as with Soviet red tape. At Matryona's funeral, the narrator observes in the traditional "wailing" over the body, a "coldly preconceived order established from all time (kholodno-produmannyi, iskoni-zavedennyi poriadok)." The ancient peasant ritual of mourning is a "politicized" event, and not because of any intervention by Soviet officialdom. It is the politics inherent in human relations that cause the mourners to shift the blame from themselves to the dead and to state indirectly their present position with regard to the possessions of the deceased.

The narrator had fled from Soviet culture seeking the pure air of the Russian peasantry. But all that he discovered in the peasant village was greed, superstition, spite, envy and a desire for self-advancement. Even Matryona conforms to some extent to false values. She takes her turn feeding the village herdsmen on delicacies in order to maintain her position in the community. ("'You have to be careful with tailors and herdsmen,' Matryona explained. 'They'll spread your name all around the village if something doesn't please them.'") She refuses to call in a doctor to tend her in her illness for fear of the neighbors' gossip (". . . they would say she was putting on airs." ". . . mol—barynia"). She is superstitious, more pagan than Christian, as the narrator remarks, and she fears thunderstorms, fire, and trains. Yet in all the village, Matryona is the one righteous one.

One of the greatest ironies in the story is the narrator's discovery at the very end of the tale that the charming incarnation of Russian peasantry with whom he has been living for months is not a typical peasant at all. She is a saint. The narrator concludes his tale with the proclamation that Matryona was "that one righteous person without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand. Nor any city. Nor our whole country." His declaration reminds one of the Eastern European Jewish legend of the lamed-vovniks, the thirty-six "hidden righteous" who go unnoticed in the world but without whom the world cannot exist. In her superstitious ignorance and conformity to peasant ritual, Matryona is indeed the archetypical peasant. But she is distinguished from her neighbors by her utter selflessness. This quality is carried by the old woman to such a degree that it outshines all else. The miracle is that by effacing herself, Matryona shines all the more brightly. She is never so much herself as when she is gone. And she burns most brightly in the memory of the narrator. At Matryona's wake, her relatives sing the traditional Vechnaia Pamiat', Eternal Memory, dischordantly and indifferently. But for the narrator, the memory of Matryona is essential to his view of how best to live.

By means of a variety of linguistic and structural devices, Solzhenitsyn points to his themes and his moral ideal and the ironies that underlie them. His devices are signposts for any reader who, like the narrator, journeys with a good will toward the discovery of an ideal image and of a place for the self.

Notes

¹ Shortly after this paper was written, Professor Robert L. Jackson's excellent article "'Matryona's Home': The Making of a Russian Icon" came to my attention. While Professor Jackson's analyses and conclusions often coincide with my own (and this is scarcely surprising considering the polemical nature of the story), our emphasis on the literary elements that produce these conclusion differs. Professor Jackson's essay concentrates on the theme of "figuration and disfiguration" (obraz and bezobrazie). He sees Matryona as an icon, an obraz, whereas I tend to see the character of Matryona as an imprint in the mind of the narrator. It is the narrator of the story who helps to create Matryona's meaning as much as Matryona herself. Throughout this paper I have referred to the story as "Matryona's Home" because this is the title more familiar to the Western reader.

² Robert Louis Jackson, '"Matryona's Home': The Making of a Russian Icon," in Kathryn Feuer (ed.), Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976).

³ Ibid., p. 61.