Short summary
Rural Russia, 1953. A mathematics teacher returned from exile seeking a quiet place to live and work. After being assigned to the remote village of Tal'novo, he became a lodger with an elderly woman who lived alone in a decaying cottage.
The narrator discovered Matryona's tragic past: she had loved Ilya but married his brother Efim when Ilya went missing in WWI. When Ilya returned from captivity, he threatened them both but eventually married another woman also named Matryona. All of Matryona's six children died in infancy, while Ilya's thrived. She adopted Ilya's daughter Kira and raised her as her own. Matryona lived in poverty, helping everyone without pay despite her illness and receiving no pension.
When Kira needed timber for building, old Ilya convinced Matryona to give up part of her house. While transporting the dismantled outhouse by tractor-sledge across an unguarded railway crossing, the second sledge got stuck on the tracks. Matryona, Ilya's son, and the tractor driver were killed by two engines traveling without lights. At her funeral, relatives argued over her property while the narrator realized the truth about her.
She was that one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand. Neither can the whole world.
Detailed summary
Division into chapters is editorial.
The narrators journey and arrival at Matryonas house
In the summer of 1953, a former prisoner returned from exile in the hot, dusty wastelands, making his way aimlessly back to Russia. No one had sent for him and no one was waiting for him, because his return had been delayed by ten years. He approached the Regional Education Department seeking work as a mathematics teacher.
I simply wanted to go somewhere in central Russia, somewhere where it was not too hot and where leaves rustled in the forest. I just wanted to creep away and vanish in the very heartland of Russia—if there were such a place.
The personnel department first offered him a position in High Field, a beautiful village situated on a slope among hills, encircled by woods, with a pond and a dyke. However, the village had no bakery and no food shops, forcing residents to drag their provisions in sacks from the local town. Unable to sustain himself there, he returned to the personnel office and was assigned to Peatproduce, a grim industrial settlement built around peat diggings.
Peatproduce was a depressing place with monotonous huts, a factory chimney pouring smoke, narrow-gauge railway lines, and the constant noise of engines and whistles. The narrator found it impossible to find proper lodging in the village, as none of the cottages had rooms with four proper walls. A woman selling milk at the tiny market told him about Tal'novo, an ancient village beyond the railway track, and offered to help him find accommodation there.
After searching through several houses in Tal'novo, they came to Matryona's cottage near a little dammed-up stream. The house had four windows along the side where the sun never shone, a steep shingled roof, but the shingles were rotting and the logs had turned grey with age.
Life with Matryona: daily routines and her character
The cottage's spacious room was filled with flower pots and tubs of fig plants on stools and benches, straining to catch the sparse northern light. The owner appeared ill and exhausted, lying on the stove without a pillow, her bleary eyes showing how much her sickness had drained her. She complained about her recurring illness but agreed to take in the narrator as a lodger.
Silent yet alive, they filled the loneliness of Matryona's life, growing in wild profusion as they strained to catch the sparse northern light.
The narrator settled into the cottage, sharing the room with Matryona, whose bed was in the corner by the door near the stove while he set up his camp bed by the window. The other occupants included a lame cat, mice that scurried behind the five layers of wallpaper, and cockroaches that swarmed in the kitchen at night but respected the boundary of the living area.
Matryona rose at four or five each morning, quietly stoking the stove and tending to her single goat. She prepared simple meals from small potatoes grown in her sandy, unmanured garden - usually potato soup or millet porridge that was often burnt and left a film on the palate. The narrator ate everything patiently, appreciating her kindness more than the quality of the food.
I set greater store by the smile on her round face, which, when I eventually took up photography, I tried in vain to capture on film.
Matryona faced numerous hardships that autumn. She was struggling to obtain a pension, requiring endless trips to various offices twenty kilometers away, dealing with bureaucratic delays and missing documents. The social-security office, district soviet, and village soviet were all in different directions, making each errand a full day's journey. Despite being dismissed from the collective farm due to illness, she was not certified as disabled and had to apply for a pension based on her husband's work record, though he had been dead for twelve years.
I noticed that she had an infallible means of restoring her good spirits: work. She would immediately pick up her spade and dig potatoes, or go off with a sack under her arm to fetch some peat.
Every day brought Matryona a major task beyond her cooking and housework. She gathered peat illegally from the bogs, collected hay for her goat from roadside verges and field boundaries, and helped neighbors without payment. When the collective farm needed workers, she would go with her own pitchfork to help spread manure. She also took turns feeding the village goatherds, spending her own money on food to avoid neighborhood gossip.
Matryona could never refuse. She would abandon her private affairs, go and help her neighbour, and then when she returned say without a trace of envy: 'Oh, she's got such huge potatoes, Ignatich.'
When her ferocious illness struck, Matryona would lie prone for days without complaining or asking for anything. Her lifelong friend would come to tend the goat and stoke the fire. The village doctor was disagreeable and unhelpful, simply telling patients to rest and then come to the clinic themselves. Only her everyday chores summoned Matryona back to life, and she would gradually resume her activities with renewed energy.
Matryonas past: the story of her lost love and marriage
One evening, a tall, dark, elderly man visited the cottage. His whole face was framed in thick black hair, with a dense beard, thick moustache, and eyebrows that met across his nose. He had come to discuss his son, a lazy student in the narrator's mathematics class who never did homework and treated school as a place to rest.
After the visitor left, Matryona revealed that this was her brother-in-law, and late that night she confessed a secret from her past. She had almost married Ilya before her husband Efim. Ilya was the elder brother who had courted her first when she was nineteen and he was twenty-three. They used to sit together in the woods during the summer of 1914.
When World War I began, Ilya was taken to fight and posted missing. Matryona waited three years without word. Their mother died, and Efim, the younger brother, began courting her, saying she might as well come to their house as his wife. On Trinity Sunday she married Efim, and at Michaelmas, Ilya returned from Hungarian captivity.
There he stood on the doorstep. I cried out and fell down on my knees to him. But it was no good. 'If he wasn't my own brother,' he said, 'I'd murder the pair of you.'
Ilya refused to marry any of the village girls, saying he would only marry someone with the same name as Matryona. He brought a girl called Matryona from Lipki and built his own house. This other Matryona bore him six children and endured beatings throughout their marriage, while Matryona's own six children with Efim all died within three months of birth. The village decided there was a curse on her.
In 1941, Efim was called up and vanished without trace in the war, just as his elder brother had in the first war. Matryona lived alone in the decaying cottage, eventually taking in Kira, one of Ilya's daughters, and raising her for ten years as her own child. Kira had recently married an engine driver in Cherusti and was Matryona's only source of occasional help.
The dismantling of the outhouse and family conflicts
Matryona had expressed the wish that after her death, the separate outhouse should go to Kira. To validate their tenure of a plot of land in Cherusti, they needed to build on it, and Matryona's outhouse was ideal since timber was impossible to obtain elsewhere. Old Ilya began visiting regularly, pressing Matryona to give up the outhouse while she was still alive.
Matryona could not sleep for two nights, torn by the difficult decision. Though she did not mind about the empty outhouse, she was upset by the thought of dismantling the roof that had sheltered her for forty years. One February morning, Ilya arrived with his sons and sons-in-law, and they began tearing apart the room with five axes, numbering the joists and planks.
The men worked carelessly, knocking holes in the wall and acting as though Matryona would not live there much longer. While they dismantled the timber, the women distilled moonshine vodka in preparation for loading day. When the work was finished, the dismantled outhouse lay piled in front of the gate, but a blizzard and subsequent thaw delayed the tractor's arrival for two weeks.
During this time, Matryona went around like a lost soul, particularly depressed by visits from her three sisters who called her a fool for letting the outhouse go. Her lame cat strayed and was killed, adding to her distress. When frost finally came and the roads hardened, she looked forward to photographing herself at her old loom once the timber was gone.
The tragic accident at the railway crossing
A big tractor-drawn sledge arrived and was loaded with timber, but there was still more to transport. An argument arose about whether to move both sledges together or separately. The tractor driver, a burly, self-confident man who was borrowing the machine illegally, insisted he could pull both sledges at once to complete the job in one night.
After the loading was finished, about ten men gathered in the kitchen for drinks. The narrator noticed Matryona wearing his quilted jacket, which had gotten dirty from the timber. He scolded her for the first time, and she apologetically took it off. The men climbed onto the sledges and departed with the tractor as darkness fell.
And on her last day on earth I had scolded her for wearing my jacket.
Hours passed without Matryona's return. The village was unusually quiet, with no trains passing on the nearby railway line. At one o'clock in the morning, four men in uniform arrived at the cottage, asking about the tractor and whether the men had been drinking. They revealed that there had been a terrible accident - the whole lot had been killed, and the nine o'clock express had nearly been derailed.
Matryona's friend arrived and explained what had happened. At the ungated level crossing, the tractor had pulled the first sledge across when the rope snapped. The second sledge struck an obstacle and began falling apart. The tractor driver, Ilya's lame son, and Matryona had returned to mend the rope when two engines traveling backwards without lights from the opposite direction rammed the sledge at full speed, killing all three instantly.
The funeral and aftermath: greed, mourning, and final reflections
At dawn, what remained of Matryona was brought home on a sledge covered with dirty sacking. Her body was hideously mangled, but her face remained calm and whole. The cottage was prepared for the funeral - fig plants removed, floors scrubbed, and the coffin placed under the ikon. Villagers came to pay their respects, and the female relatives led ritualized mourning that contained elements of accusation and property claims.
The sisters took possession of the cottage, goat, and stove, found the two hundred roubles Matryona had saved for her funeral, and mourned in a way that blamed Ilya's family for her death. Meanwhile, Ilya recovered the remaining timber and divided Matryona's property among the relatives. The narrator reflected on Matryona's true nature - she had been that one righteous person without whom no village or world can stand.
this woman, who had buried all her six children, had stored up no earthly goods. Nothing but a dirty white goat, a lame cat, and a row of fig plants.