Alexander Solzhenitsyn\u2019s \u201cMatryona\u2019s Home\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In response to hearing a new technological invention on the radio, Matryona remarks, \u201cNew ones all the time, nothing but new ones. People don\u2019t want to work with the old ones anymore, where are we going to store them all?\u201d (456). Within industrialization, old technology is constantly being replaced by new, better, and more efficient machines. \u00a0If the end goal is the increased production of a\u00a0commodity, there is no point in maintaining an old less efficient mode of production. Matryona, however, who belongs to a generation presumably before Russia\u2019s industrialization questions the waste this constant innovation. To put it in idiomatic terms, Matryona is thinking in an \u201cif it\u2019s not broken, don\u2019t fix it\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Solzhenitsyn follows Matryona\u2019s 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, \u201c\u2019Queer singing, not our sort of singing.\u2019 \u2018You can\u2019t mean that, Matryona Vasilyevna\u2026 Just listen to him\u2019 She listened a bit longer, and pursed her lips, \u2018No it\u2019s wrong. It isn\u2019t our sort of tune, and he\u2019s tricky with his voice\u2019\u201d (456). Although masquerading behind a classic Russian tune, Chaliapin\u2019s folk song is not Russian to Matryona. Instead, his rendition is \u201ctricky,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn\u2019s \u201cMatryona\u2019s Home\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":688,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[35,23,34],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-russian-countryside-and-the-peasant-village","tag-matryonas-home","tag-peasant","tag-solzhenitsyn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/688"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}