Matryona’s House

My dear Marie asked me via e-mail about Matryona’s House by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn which, I mentioned in the meme. Here is what I could find on the web and I want to share with her and with others who might be interested….

• What Solzhenitsyn said about his work:

Matryona’s House was something that was very, very emotional for me,’ Solzhenitsyn recalls, ‘and was dedicated to the memory of a holy Russian woman. (Solzhenitsyn a Soul in Exile by Joseph Pearce)

• Little excerpt from 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 … 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. Nor the world.

• A book containing Matryona’s House on amazon.com.

• A fragment from a NY Times article (Solzhenitsyn’s Short Fiction by Richard Locke, July 16, 1971):

Matryona’s House is….a Russian variation on Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, a portrait of an oppressed Christian soul, an impoverished but cheerful and generous old peasant woman who is abused by her family and neighbors and finally killed through the Karamazovian avarice of a former suitor. Its naturalistic attention to the details of Matryona’s daily routine and the miseries of village life, essentially unchanged by Communism, offended Soviet critics in its “pessimism.” But for American readers the story is rich with memories of Tolstoy and Gorky and brings a touch of the brute humanity of Samuel Beckett’s tramps to the ancient image of holy Christian poverty.

• This link on Solzhenitsyn (worth reading the whole thing), containing a short reference to Matryona:

After collapse of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn returned from Vermont to his native land in 1994. The new regime, led by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, had offered to restore his citizenship already in 1990, and next year his treason charges were formally dropped. Solzhenitsyn made a sensational whistle-stop tour through Siberia, becoming a highly popular figure. Solzhenitsyn was also received by President Yeltsin and in 1994 he gave an address to Russian Duma.

Solzhenitsyn settled in Moscow, where he has continued to criticize western materialism and Russian bureaucracy and secularization. Western democratic system means for Solzhenitsyn “spiritual exhaustion” in which “mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.” “We have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience.

The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.” (from a speech given in Harvard in 1978). Sozhenitsyn’s old Russian ideals were already explicit in the character of Matryona in Matryona’s House. Its narrator meets a saintly woman, whose life has been full of disappointments but who helps others.