In February 1945, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the Russian prison camps. Passages in letters to a friend had been found by military censors to be insufficiently respectful of Stalin.
After his “rehabilitation,” in 1959 he wrote perhaps his best-known and most well-loved story: “Matryona’s House.”
It begins like this:
“For at least six months after the incident took place every train used to slow down almost to a standstill at exactly a hundred and eighty-four kilometres from Moscow. The passengers would crowd to the windows and go out onto the open gangway at the end of the carriages to find out whether the track was under repair or if the train was ahead of schedule. But these were not the reasons for the delay. Once it had passed the level crossing, the train would pick up speed again and the passengers would go back to their seats. Only the drivers knew why they had to slow down.”
“And I knew too.”
Matryona is an older, semi-destitute woman who lives by herself and willingly agrees to share her house with the narrator of the story, a teacher named Ignatich. Like Solzhenitsyn himself, Ignatich is an ex-prisoner who, after serving a prison term in the Gulag, has been released from “perpetual exile” and has been allowed to reintegrate into a village.
She has growing indoors a jungle of fig plants she loves so much that when she once wakes to find the cottage full of smoke, instead of trying to save the building she throws the fig plants to the floor so they won’t suffocate. Her other possessions consist of a loom on which she occasionally practices the old craft of weaving; a neat, spare bed; a dim mirror; and a couple of ikons.
Matryona is one of those people upon whom falls so much suffering that you begin to wonder whether she is inviting it. All six of her children died soon after being born, so that she never had more than one alive at the same time. Then her husband, who had rejected and emotionally abandoned her all along, went off to war and never returned.
Work is her salvation. She tends the milch goat. She toils for others without pay. She never complains, never shirks, never whines, never draws attention to herself. Her cheerfulness and good humor, her refusal to take offense, make her an outsider in the village.
She likes the old songs, arias composed by Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857). Greedy relatives dismantle her beloved outhouse for the lumber, her three sisters berate her for her softness, her lame cat wanders into the road and is killed.
In her quiet way, Matryona seems fearless. She walks her own path and stands her own ground in spite of being ridiculed, marginalized, and made a laughingstock by the people she serves. Her days are ordered; her time, though given away seemingly haphazardly, is disciplined. She insists on helping out the men in grueling physical labor.
But she is afraid of three things: fire, lightning, and the trains that, belching smoke, thunder down the tracks from faraway cities to shatter the village calm and its old, settled ways of farming, wood-chopping wood, and goat-raising.
In the end, she is killed by a train, virtually dismembered while helping the men who have dismantled her outhouse move a tractor-pulling sledge.
“At dawn the women brought home all that remained of Matryona, drawn on a sledge and covered with a dirty piece of sacking. They removed the sack to wash the corpse. It was hideously mangled — no legs, half the torso missing, and no left arm. One of the women said: ‘The Lord left her right arm so she can pray to Him in heaven.’ ”
Many see “Matryona’s House” as a demonstration of the impossibility of resisting the modern world, or as a study of the simple Slavic soul.
I’d go a step further and posit that Matryona — the first syllable of her name is the Russian word for “mother” — is a Christ figure. She emblemizes the inefficiency, borderline foolishness, and almost completely hidden heart of those who live by the Gospels.
Her decrepit house is a sanctuary of love that, like her body, by the end of the story, is torn apart (“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up…”).
So in this season when we’re encouraged to strive for picture-perfect dinners and Instagrammable family gatherings, we might do well to remember Matryona’s house:
“She was a poor housekeeper. In other words, she refused to strain herself to buy gadgets and possessions and then to guard them and care for them more than for her own life.”
“She never cared for smart clothes, the garments that embellish the ugly and disguise the wicked.”
“Misunderstood and rejected by her husband, a stranger to her own family despite her happy, amiable temperament, comical, so foolish that she worked for others for no reward, this woman, who had buried all her six children, had stored up no earthly goods. Nothing but a dirty white goat, a lame cat, and a row of fig plants.”
“None of us who lived close to her perceived that she was that one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand.”
“Neither can the whole world.”
