Matryona’s Homestead differs from our readings in the past couple of weeks in that it goes further than the surface level and shifts the more apparent aspects of Russia that have changed (industrialization, deforestation, etc.) and explores more historical details, such as village life and culture. For me, Matryona represents the traditional villager of the time – hard working, never complaining, acting often out of selflessness – all despite her ill health and old age. Although she is deeply attached to her home and feels that it has supported her through much of her life, she follows suit of the drunken villagers and helps deconstruct her very own home. Matryona was a lovely woman yet her selfless acts were taken for granted and exploited by her fellow villagers, which follows with the fact that village life in that time was exploited and restructured by the ruling communist power.

Ignatich mentions that he wants to live in a peaceful and wooden part of Russia but is disappointed when he fails to find this on the collective farm school where he is assigned. Evident by the factory smokestacks polluting the air and the drunken villagers, and between the misuse of logging and wide-spread industrialization, the Russia he wanted seemingly no longer existed. Our theme for tomorrow’s class, fittingly, is “The village in Soviet prose of the Thaw period”. I did some research and found that village prose was a movement in Soviet Russian literature beginning during the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ (the decade following Stalin’s death where the Soviet Union experienced some freedom from the repression and censorship they experienced after the revolution), that focused largely on representing rural village communities and their struggle during this time.

Specific to village life, this traditional aspect of Russia was exploited and reorganized, but I get a sense in this piece that while many aspects of village life were forcibly changed, there is still a sense of community and traditional life that they are holding on to. This could be seen in the sustained selflessness and kindness of Matryona regardless of the exploitative villagers, or even more so in Vanya’s deep love for reading in Gogol and Raika. He writes that regardless of the hardships of winter, the coldness and hunger, he holds on to his one passion: reading books to his Mama and Talya. This is a small yet significant way of maintaining some sort of joy in a not-so-joyous time.