''Matryona's Place'' (), sometimes translated as ''Matryona's Home'' (or House), is a novella written in 1959 by

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and Soviet dissidents, dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag pris ...

. First published by

Aleksandr Tvardovsky Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky ( rus, links=no, Александр Трифонович Твардовский, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsandr ˈtrʲifənəvʲɪtɕ tvɐrˈdofskʲɪj; – 18 December 1971) was a Soviet poet and writer and chief editor of ' ...

in the Russian literary journal ''

Novy Mir ''Novy Mir'' (, ) is a Russian-language monthly literary magazine. History ''Novy Mir'' has been published in Moscow since January 1925. It was supposed to be modelled on the popular pre-Soviet literary magazine ''Mir Bozhy'' ("God's World"), w ...

'' in 1963, it is Solzhenitsyn's most read short story. The narrator, a former prisoner of the

Gulag The Gulag was a system of Labor camp, forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies, Soviet secret police that was in charge of runnin ...

and a teacher of mathematics, has a longing to return to live in the Russian provinces and takes a job at a school on a

collective farm Collective farming and communal farming are various types of "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise". There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member-o ...

. Matryona offers him a place to live in her tiny, run-down home, but he is told not to expect any "fancy cooking." 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

serf Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery. It developed du ...

s. 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. Set in 1956, six years after the events portrayed in ''

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' (, ) is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine ''Novy Mir'' (''New World'').Gisela Pankow Gisela Pankow (25 February 1914 – 14 August 1998) was a French psychoanalyst. Pankow dedicated her life to challenging Freud's assertion regarding the impracticality of psychoanalytic treatment for psychoses. Remaining within the framework of ...

attempts to examine the plot of ''Matryona's Place'' from the point of view of

psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek language, Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious mind, unconscious processes and their influence on conscious mind, conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on The Inte ...

. According to her, the central theme of the work is the "disarticulated house". As a young woman, Matryona, thinking that her fiancé is dead, marries his brother, and when he returns alive, the fiancé threatens to kill her, resulting in a secret identity between Matryona and the house that eventually leads to her death. Lived time stopped for here with the threat, and space became open and dangerous for Matryona, so she let herself die when the time came for the "open" to get her. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, it is necessary to go back to the patient's past and prevent such a development by restoring identity.

References

Sources

* . * . * . * . * . * . * . * , Includes translations of ''An Incident at Krechetovka Station'' and ''Matryona's House''.

External links

Audiobook, in Russian
{{Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Fiction set in 1956 1959 Russian novels Novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Soviet novellas