Matryona's Place

Matryona's Place (Russian: Матрёнин двор, romanized: Matryonin dvor), sometimes translated as Matryona's Home (or House), is a novella written in 1959 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. First published by Aleksandr Tvardovsky in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir in 1963, it is Solzhenitsyn's most read short story.^[1]

The narrator, a former prisoner of the Gulag and a teacher of mathematics,^[2] has a longing to return to live in the Russian provinces and takes a job at a school on a collective farm. Matryona offers him a place to live in her tiny, run-down home, but he is told not to expect any "fancy cooking."^[3] They share a single room where they eat and sleep; the narrator sleeps on a camp-bed and Matryona near the stove. The narrator finds the farm workers' lives little different from those of the pre-revolutionary landlords and their serfs. Matryona works on the farm for little or no pay. She is forced to give a small annex of her home to a relative who wants to use the wood from it to build a house elsewhere in the village. A group of drunken farmers, with a tractor borrowed without permission, decide to move the wood at night. Matryona, typically, offers to help. During the chaos that follows she is killed by a train. Her character has been described as "the only true Christian (and) the only true Communist" and her death symbolic of Russia's martyrdom.^[4]

Set in 1956, six years after the events portrayed in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,^[5] the novella is considered to be one of the author's finest literary achievements.^[1] It is accessible to non-native speakers who have learnt Russian to an intermediate level.^[6]