Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Matryona’s Home” is an exhaustive description of an old peasant women Matryona and her way of life. The text is almost more ethnographical than it is plot driven and seems to work equally as the text of preservation as one of fiction. In small moments through Matryona, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the doomed eventual extinction of the rural peasant way of life.

In response to hearing a new technological invention on the radio, Matryona remarks, “New ones all the time, nothing but new ones. People don’t want to work with the old ones anymore, where are we going to store them all?” (456). Within industrialization, old technology is constantly being replaced by new, better, and more efficient machines.  If the end goal is the increased production of a commodity, there is no point in maintaining an old less efficient mode of production. Matryona, however, who belongs to a generation presumably before Russia’s industrialization questions the waste this constant innovation. To put it in idiomatic terms, Matryona is thinking in an “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mindset. Matryona herself has taken actions against the expansion of production. She does not own a cow in fear that it will consume more than she can provide. She does not manure the soil and consequently only has small potatoes. She works for free for the good of others without asking for pay. Matryona’s actions are not only anticapitalistic, but more specifically against development. Matryona cannot conceptualize the necessity for growth; instead, she is content with her simple extravagant life.

Solzhenitsyn follows Matryona’s comments on machines with comments on new and classic renditions on Russian folk-songs, highlighting her affinity to the old preindustrial Russia, and linking her way of life to the preindustrial. After listening to the modern Chaliapin cover of a folk song, Matryona comments, “’Queer singing, not our sort of singing.’ ‘You can’t mean that, Matryona Vasilyevna… Just listen to him’ She listened a bit longer, and pursed her lips, ‘No it’s wrong. It isn’t our sort of tune, and he’s tricky with his voice’” (456). Although masquerading behind a classic Russian tune, Chaliapin’s folk song is not Russian to Matryona. Instead, his rendition is “tricky,” deceiving the listener to seem as if it represents this rural identity. Matryona, however, sees through this disguise, and is disgusting at the semblance of the rural in the modern.

If I had more space, I would explore more themes of how Matryona combats aspects of modern Russian culture which camouflage in the rural identity.