Perhaps the biggest change to a peasant’s daily life after the revolution took place in Russia was the idea of living on worker’s collectives, complicated institutions where Russians would live and share the work as well as the profits communally. Both “Matryona’s Home” and “Harvesting” shows the profound beauty of a simple and elegant life such as this, but they also show how easy this way of life is to overly-romanticize and how it frequently falls short of it’s ideals.
In “Harvesting”, the action of sleeping is described a lot more than one would normally expect in a plot-driven fictional short story like this, and it is described as full and peaceful. This shows the satisfaction of an honest days work, and the serenity of being in harmony with the Earth. “My blood hums pleasantly, then I’m out of my body swimming somewhere, and I experience a sensation of perfect bliss. It’s strange, but I am aware that I’m sleeping-I am consciously, sweetly asleep. The earth carries me swiftly along on her bosom, but I am sleeping, I know that. Never again in all my life have I slept like that-with my whole body, to my heart’s content, without measure.”
Even the dog feels this satisfaction of being a part of a working machine: “Far away, beyond the forest, the large red sun slowly sinks into the deep blue haze. It’s good here on earth, pensive, peaceful. Under the chairman’s table, Borzya, our infinitely good-tempered scamp of a dog, lies curled up, sleeping peacefully.” This quote is essential because it hows how beautiful and untroubled a moment in life can be. It implies that there can be a harmony between living things on earth, drawing on themes of bounty and plenty, arguing that there is plenty for all of us on ‘good earth’.
However this peaceful way of thinking about life is interrupted by the realities of a boss, Chairman Alekseich, fruitlessly trying to feed a starving nation by trying desperately to up the farm’s production and cracking down on insubordination to increase the efficiency. This shows the conflict reality has with this utopic lifestyle, and thus its frequent shortcomings.
This contrast between the moments of ‘bliss’ the workers experience, and the unwavering outside forces making this bliss largely impossible and unsustainable is also shown in “Matryona’s Home” in the difference between how the narrator expects Matryona’s life to be and how it actually is. It is clear that Matryona believes in the importance and dignity of her work, yet she still gets caught up in the dissatisfaction of the peasants and takes part in their destructive drunken revelry. And the narrator himself is shocked by the stink of the factories and harshness of the deforestation, as opposed to the peaceful Russian countryside he had pictured.