that half-heartedly combats the cold winter winds. Her home and its token “peasant-ness” speak to her values, traits Ignatich discusses quietly but at great length. He describes her passive acquiescence to adversity and uncomplaining acceptance of her circumstances. Despite the injustices done to her—the denial of her pension, her social ostracization, and the abject poverty she lives in—her work ethic is unwavering. She fills every day with necessary, laborious tasks, and her prolonged survival is attributable to this independence, self-sufficiency, and perpetual productivity.

This seemingly indefatigable spirit, Ignatich notes, is informed by her quiet, unostentatious religious faith and pious adherence to traditional practices. She sits for hours at her loom, listens tearfully to opera, and mutters angrily about the wastefulness of “new-fangled things” that make people not “want to go on working with the old machines.” In a discussion about Chaliapin’s rendition of Russian folk songs, she says: “He sings beautifully, but he doesn’t sing our way.” These traits are subtly littered throughout the narrative to describe the lost, lamented past and the venerated Russia that was. 

The story ends as Ignatich details then reinterprets Matryona’s “faults.” He lists the traits that the villagers deride, focusing on her simple lifestyle, difficult life, and humble home to indicate the excess of modernity and the virtue of tradition. Matryona—and the way the villagers view her—reflects the disconnect between prerevolution Russia and the Stalin-era Soviet Union. Her death, regularly foreshadowed, is the result of this jarring disconnect; Matryona—and, therefore, prerevolution Russia—is a casualty of the present, murdered by the very technology and sociocultural realities that she rejects. Ultimately, modern life triumphs over tradition. The immorality of Stalinism and its reverberating impacts across the nation has prevailed, and the bastions of traditional life that Solzhenitsyn praises have been lost to time.

As winter descends on Tal’novo, Ignatich learns of the village’s struggle for survival. Although Tal’novo is surrounded by peat bogs (organic material that is used as fuel for indoor fires and cooking) and neighbors the industrial town of Peatproduce, the villagers lack access to this vital resource. The collective farm does not distribute the peat it produces to the locals, nor is it available for purchase. Indeed, the farm restricts access to the “boss class.” By necessity, the villagers have learned how to circumnavigate this restriction, digging peat out from privately owned lands or stealing it. Ignatich tells readers that a “sixty pound” sack of peat “was enough to fire one stove for a day,” though “winter lasts two hundred days” and there are two stoves to stoke every single day. To acquire the necessary peat to survive the winter, villagers must perform intense physical labor and, in many cases, risk breaking the law. 

Similarly, when Kira and her new husband learn that they must build a home to validate their ownership of the plot of land in Cherusti, such a task seems impossible. Matryona bequeaths Kira the materials of her outhouse; it is an incredibly generous offer, as “there was no hope of getting the timber anywhere else.” These examples indicate the socioeconomic situation in which the people of Tal’novo struggle to survive. Their actions must be framed within this bleak reality, and the selfishness that Ignatich focuses on is a direct result of their adverse circumstance. While this neither excuses nor accepts their actions, it helps to reframe the blatant immorality of certain actions. The villagers’ willful exploitation of Matryona, for example, clarifies that in Tal’novo, survival is an every-man-for-himself situation.

The powerful force of personal necessity is present throughout the story, a motivating factor that Matryona often rejects. While she certainly performs the mundane daily tasks necessary for her wellbeing, she also offers additional labor to her neighbors. Her willingness to lend a hand without reward reflects Solzhenitsyn’s advocacy for communism in its true form, and her neighbors’ lack of reciprocity reveals communism in its contemporary form: it is an exploitative structure that replicates the socioeconomic inequalities it once condemned. The ability to perform the physical labor necessary for survival is the sole resource remaining to her, and yet she offers it freely to all who ask. 

Eventually, Matryona’s tireless helpfulness leads to her destruction. One woman alone cannot change the system and its complicit participants, nor can she carry a whole village on her back. The villagers are blind to the importance of her cheerful labor, and the lesson of her life is lost on them. To Ignatich, however, Matryona’s life is a revelation. Her death makes her a martyr and reveals the importance of collective action and class solidarity, validating the virtues of Revolution-era communism while decrying its modern form.