: A woman worked all her life on a collective farm. She lost her children and husband, but retained kindness and selflessly helped everyone. After her ridiculous and terrible death, her relatives share her house and remember her with reproach.

The narration is conducted in the first person. The narrator guesses Solzhenitsyn himself, who after eight years of forced labor camps was sent to an eternal settlement in a deserted Kazakh village, but the link was withdrawn, he returned to the RSFSR and settled in the village. The division of the retelling into chapters is conditional, in the original - three chapters without titles.

Arrival in the village

In the summer of 1956, Ignatich returned to Soviet Russia.

After living in a dusty, hot desert, he wanted to settle in the midst of cool deciduous forests, "get lost and lost in the interior of Russia."

In the regional center, he asked for a position as a mathematics teacher somewhere farther from the city, and he was sent to a place with the strange name of Peat product.

Peat product turned out to be a railway station from which it is impossible to leave - there were never tickets there. The village stood between the peat lowlands, in the evenings there was loud music playing in the club, and local drunkards poked each other with knives. Ignatich had already begun to regret the silence of the Asian desert when he met a woman at a local bazaar and learned from her that there were a number of small villages outside the village.

Matryona House

A new acquaintance took Ignatich to the village of Talnovo, where he took a corner in the house of an elderly Matryona Vasilyevna.

The house consisted of a spacious hut with a stove and a separate room.

In addition to Matryona and me, they also lived in a hut: a cat, mice and cockroaches. The cat was not young, and most importantly - a pyramid. She was selected by Matryona out of pity and took root.

The woman warned that she could not cook. Almost no food was brought into Peat Products, and people ate mostly potatoes, flavored with combined fat.

But Ignatich still remained in Matryonin’s hut - that was the very “condo Russia” that he was looking for.

Health and Faith

Matryona was ill at that moment - this ailment flew into her unexpectedly and put to bed for several days. When Matryonin’s life “burst from time to time a difficult illness”, her close friend Masha took care of her.

The paramedic was called only once. She forced Matryona to take tests, sent them to the district hospital, but the case died out.

Matryona told me what heavy bags I carried in my youth and how she once stopped a frightened horse on the move. But she was not fearless - she was afraid of fire, lightning and trains.

Matryona went to church for baptism for holy water, but was not particularly religious, rather even a superstitious pagan.

Only her sins were less than her lame cat. That - choked mice ...

Only this year she did not get the holy water: someone took her bowler.

Work on the collective farm and attitude to money

She didn’t receive money for many years - they didn’t pay pensions, her relatives hardly helped.

But on the collective farm, she did not work for money — for sticks. For the sticks of workdays in the tricked-out book of the teller.

All fall Matryona sought retirement and went to authorities many kilometers from home.Many injustices were discovered - the woman was ill, but was not considered an invalid; She worked all her life on the collective farm, and not at the factory, so she was entitled to a pension only for the loss of a breadwinner. Matryona had not had a husband for fifteen years, and now it was not easy to obtain certificates of his experience.

The rest of the time she was engaged in farming - digging potatoes, getting hay for a single goat, stealing peat from a trust so as not to freeze in winter.

The new chairman cut Matryonin’s garden, leaving her fifteen hundred square meters of barren sandy land, and for these hundreds made her work on the collective farm for free.

Matryona’s neighbors didn’t refuse help either - she was called to dig potatoes, to plow a garden. She did not take money for help, she refused.

By winter, Matryona’s life was getting better - she began to receive a pension, and the rent went from the tenant. She managed a pair of felt boots and a coat, in the lining of which she sewed two hundred rubles - for her funeral.

Youth, Thaddeus and Marriage

Matryona did not ask her tenant about the past - he himself informed her that he spent many years in prison. Ignatich, too, “did not stir up her past,” without even assuming that there was anything significant in Matryona’s life.

Once Faddey Grigoryev came to Ignatich and asked to give a good mark to his son - the most malicious loser in the class.

Struggling for a high percentage of academic achievement, district schools transferred even the most inveterate losers from class to class, but Ignatich did not want to give undeserved grades and refused.

Late in the evening, Matryona admitted that she had once nearly married Thaddeus, but that he had not returned from World War I. After waiting three years, Matryona married his younger brother Yefim and moved to the house, where she lived her whole life - before he belonged to the Grigoryevs.

In the summer they played a wedding, and in the fall Thaddeus returned from Hungarian captivity. From anger, he almost cut off with an ax Matryon and his brother.

He stood on the doorstep. I'll scream! He would have thrown himself into a knee! .. You can’t ... Well, he says, if it weren’t for my brother, I would chop both of you!

Thaddeus did not marry the local one, he looked for a bride named Matryona in a neighboring village, built a separate hut, and bred children. Matryona herself gave birth six times, and not a single child survived. Then Yefim went to the Second World War and disappeared. Left alone in a huge hut, Matryona took up the daughter of Thaddeus Kira for education and recently married her to a young engineer.

Now only Kira helped the lonely old woman.

Railroad tragedy

Matryona bequeathed to Kira a part of her house - a maid. A few days later, Kira’s husband was allocated a plot of land. To keep him, it was necessary to urgently build something, but the forest on peat bogs has long been cut down. Thaddeus often asked Matryon to give the chambermaid, and she agreed.

On a February morning, Thaddeus and his sons dismantled the building in an instant, but they could not immediately take out the logs - a snowstorm broke out, then the thaw began. A tractor with a large sled trailer arrived only two weeks later. The whole log house on the sleigh did not fit, and the sons of Thaddeus whipped up another sleigh. The tractor driver did not want to do two walks, so both trailers were tied to the tractor.

We left late at night, treating ourselves to moonshine. Matryona got along with her. At night, four in railway overcoats came to the narrator. Visitors began to question whether the tractor was leaving the yard and whether the tractor driver drank before leaving. Ignatich kept silent about the booze, and after the departure of uninvited guests he rushed to clean up the remains of the binge. The railroad workers did not explain anything; Masha, who had come running soon, told of the trouble.

At the crossroads, the homemade sleigh got stuck and began to fall apart, Matryona rushed to help the men. At that time, two coupled steam locomotives with headlights turned off from the station side, ran into a sleigh and crushed people scurrying around them, including Matryona.

Funeral and property division

They buried and mourned Matryona the next day. The economy instantly took possession of her three sisters, which had never been heard of before. Kirin’s husband, a driver, was put on trial because he had to warn about the transport of logs through the way, but did not.

The mangled rails at the crossing were repaired for three days. The repairmen were warming themselves around bonfires made up of the remains of the upper room, and the first surviving sleds remained standing at the crossing and this tormented the soul of the greedy Thaddeus. Having finally obtained permission, he brought the remains of the room to his courtyard, and the next day he buried his son and the woman he had once loved. From the Matryonin legacy, an insatiable old man demanded for himself a barn, where a goat lived, and a fence, the sisters dismantled the rest. Sincerely mourned for Matryon only Cyrus.

The Matryona was boarded up, and Ignatich moved to one of her relatives. She spoke about the deceased a lot of new things. Husband Matryonu did not like and had a mistress; she was a poor, unscrupulous mistress, she did not chase after wealth and helped strangers for free.

Ignatich listened to these disapproving speeches and recalled a wonderful woman who thought more about people than things, worked for others for free, and, abandoned by her husband, who buried six children, remained open and sociable.

We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was that same righteous man, without whom, according to a proverb, a village was not worth it. Not a city. Nor is all our land.

The retelling is based on the editorial board of a short story in 30 volumes, 2006.