Summary"Farewell to Matera" by Rasputin allows you to find out the features of this work Soviet writer. By right, it is considered one of the best that Rasputin managed to create during his career. The book was first published in 1976.

The plot of the story

The summary of Rasputin's "Farewell to Matera" allows you to get acquainted with this work without reading it in its entirety, in just a few minutes.

The story takes place in the 1960s. In the center of the story is the village of Matera, which is located in the middle of the great Russian river Angara. Changes are coming in the lives of its inhabitants. Soviet Union builds the Bratskaya hydroelectric power station. Because of this, all the inhabitants of Matera are relocated, and the village is subject to flooding.

The main conflict of the work is that the majority, especially those who have lived in Matera for decades, do not want to leave. Almost all old people believe that if they leave Matera, they will betray the memory of their ancestors. After all, in the village there is a cemetery where their fathers and grandfathers are buried.

main character

The summary of "Farewell to Matera" by Rasputin introduces readers to the main character named Daria Pinigina. Despite the fact that the hut is going to be demolished in a few days, it whitens it. She refuses her son's offer to transport her to the city.

Daria strives to the last to stay in the village, does not want to move, because she cannot imagine her life without Matera. She is afraid of change, does not want anything to change in her life.

Almost all residents of Matera are in a similar situation, who are afraid of moving and living in a big city.

The plot of the story

Let's start with a summary of Rasputin's "Farewell to Matera" with a description of the majestic Angara River, on which the village of Matera stands. Literally before her eyes, a considerable part of Russian history. The Cossacks went up the river to set up a prison in Irkutsk, merchants constantly stopped on the island-village, scurrying back and forth with goods.

Prisoners from all over the country were often transported past, who found shelter in that same prison. On the shore of Matera they stopped, prepared a simple dinner and moved on.

For two whole days, a battle unfolded here between the partisans who stormed the island and Kolchak's army, which held the defense in Matera.

The special pride of the village is its own church, which stands on a high bank. IN Soviet time it was converted into a warehouse. It also has its own mill and even a mini-airport. Twice a week, the "maize man" sits down on the old pasture and takes the inhabitants to the city.

Dam for hydroelectric power station

Everything changes dramatically when the authorities decide to build a dam for the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. The power plant is the most important, which means that several surrounding villages will be flooded. First in line is Matera.

Rasputin's story "Farewell to Matera", a summary of which is given in this article, tells how the locals perceive the news of the imminent move.

True, there are few inhabitants in the village. Mostly only old people remained. Young people moved to the city for more promising and easier work. Those who remained now think of the upcoming flood as the end of the world. Rasputin devoted his "Farewell to Matera" to these experiences of the indigenous people. The very brief content of the story is not able to convey all the pain and sadness with which the old-timers endure this news.

They oppose this decision in every way. At first, no amount of persuasion can convince them: neither the authorities nor their relatives. They are called to common sense, but they flatly refuse to leave.

They are stopped by the native and habitable walls of houses, the usual and measured way of life, which they do not want to change. Memory of ancestors. Indeed, in the village there is an old cemetery, where more than one generation of Matera residents is buried. In addition, it is reluctant to leave a lot of things that were indispensable here, and in the city they will be of no use to anyone. These are frying pans, tongs, cast iron, tubs, and you never know in the village useful devices that in the city have long replaced the benefits of civilization.

They are trying to convince the elderly that in the city they will be settled in apartments with all amenities: cold and hot water at any time of the year, with heating, for which you do not need to worry and remember when you last stoked the stove. But they still understand that, out of habit, they will be very sad in a new place.

The village is dying

Lonely old women who do not want to leave are in a hurry to leave Matera less than others. They become witnesses of the village being set on fire. The abandoned houses of those who have already moved to the city are gradually burning down.

At the same time, when the fire calmed down, and everyone begins to discuss whether it happened on purpose or by accident, then everyone agrees that the houses caught fire by chance. No one dares to believe in such folly that someone could raise their hands on residential buildings until quite recently. It is especially hard to believe that the owners themselves could set fire to the house when they left Matera for the mainland.

Daria says goodbye to the hut

In Rasputin's "Farewell to Matera", you can read the summary in this article, the old-timers say goodbye to their homes in a special way.

The main character Daria, before leaving, carefully sweeps the entire hut, cleans up, and then also whitewashes the hut for the upcoming happy life. Already leaving Matera, he is most upset because he remembers that somewhere he forgot to grease his home.

Rasputin in the work "Farewell to Matera", a summary of which you are now reading, describes the suffering of her neighbor Nastasya, who cannot take a cat with her. Animals are not allowed to be taken on the boat. Therefore, she asks Daria to feed her, without thinking that Daria herself is leaving in just a few days. And for good.

For the inhabitants of Matera, all things, pets with which they have spent so many years side by side, become as if alive. They reflect the whole life spent on this island. And when you have to leave completely, then you must definitely clean up carefully, as they clean and preen the deceased, before sending them to the next world.

It is worth noting that the church and Orthodox rituals are not supported by all the villagers, but only by the elderly. But the rituals are not forgotten by anyone, they exist in the souls of both believers and atheists.

Sanitary brigade

In detail, Valentin Rasputin's "Farewell to Matera", a summary of which you are now reading, describes the upcoming visit of the sanitary brigade. It was she who was entrusted with razing the village cemetery to the ground.

D Arya opposes this, uniting behind her all the old-timers who have not yet left the island. They cannot imagine how such atrocities can be allowed.

They send curses on the heads of offenders, call on God for help, and even enter into a real battle, armed with ordinary sticks. Defending the honor of her ancestors, Daria is militant and assertive. Many would resign themselves to fate, being in her place. But she is not satisfied with the current situation. She judges not only strangers, but also her son and daughter-in-law, who without hesitation abandoned everything that was acquired in Matera and moved to the city at the first opportunity.

She scolds the youth of today, who, in her opinion, leave the world she knows for the sake of distant and unknown benefits. More often than anyone else, she turns to God so that he helps her, supports her, and enlightens those around her.

Most importantly, she does not want to part with the graves of her ancestors. She is convinced that after death she will meet with her relatives, who will surely condemn her for such behavior.

The denouement of the story

On the last pages of the story, Daria's son Pavel admits he was wrong. The summary of Rasputin's story "Farewell to Matera" cannot be completed without the end of the work drawing attention to the monologue of this hero.

He laments that the people who lived here for several generations, it took so much vain work. In vain, because everything will eventually be destroyed and go under water. Of course, it is pointless to speak out against technical progress, but the human attitude is still the most important thing.

The simplest thing is not to ask these questions, but to go with the flow, thinking as little as possible why everything happens this way and how it works the world. But it is precisely the desire to get to the bottom of the truth, to find out why it is so, and not otherwise, that distinguishes a person from an animal, Pavel concludes.

Prototypes of Matera

Writer Valentin Rasputin spent his childhood in the village of Atalanka, located in the Irkutsk region on the Angara River.

The prototype of the village of Matera, presumably, was the village of Gorny Kui, located in the neighborhood. All this was the territory of the Balagansky district. It was he who was flooded during the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station.

Definition of concepts (Space, Time, Chronotope, Architectonics)

No work of art exists in a space-time vacuum. It always has time and space in one way or another.

Artistic time is a form of being of aesthetic reality, a special way of knowing the world.

The main signs of time in literary work:

• 1. Greater concreteness, immediate certainty.
• 2. The writer's desire to bring together artistic and real time.
• 3. Ideas about movement and immobility.
• 4. Correlation of the past, present and future.

A.A. Potebnya, emphasizing that the art of the word is dynamic, showed the limitless possibilities of organizing artistic time in the text. The text was considered by him as a dialectical unity of two compositional-speech forms: description (“image of features that simultaneously exist in space”) and narrative (“Narration turns a series of simultaneous features into a series of successive perceptions, into an image of the movement of gaze and thought from object to object”) . A.A. Potebnya distinguished between real time and artistic time; having considered the correlation of these categories in the works of folklore, he noted the historical variability of artistic time.

Time in work of art-- the duration, sequence and correlation of its events, based on their causal, linear or associative relationship.

Time in the text has clearly defined or rather blurred boundaries (events, for example, can cover tens of years, a year, several days, a day, an hour, etc.), which may or, on the contrary, not be indicated in the work in relation to the historical time or time set conditionally by the author (see, for example, E. Zamyatin's novel "We").

Images of artistic time:

Biographical time (childhood, youth, maturity, old age)

Historical time (characteristic of the change of eras, generations, major events in the life of society)

Cosmic (the idea of ​​eternity and universal history)

Calendar (Change of seasons, weekdays and holidays)

Daily (day, night, morning, evening)

Three subjects participate in a literary work - the author-creator, the hero, the reader-recipient, therefore, time and text should be thought of in the following interconnection with each other: real time creation (epoch, date, directly the duration of the process), the time of the functioning of the work of art of the word as a material object among other objects of reality (book, manuscript, inscription carved on a stone, birch bark, etc.), the time of its perception (B.V. Tomashevsky - time of narration) by the reader (Yu.M. Lotman - decoding of semiotic codes, the text as a “semantic generator”)

Artistic time in the text appears as a dialectical unity of the finite and the infinite. In an endless stream of time, one event or their chain is singled out, their beginning and end are usually fixed. The end of the work is a signal that the time period presented to the reader has ended, but time continues beyond it. Converted to artistic text and such a property of real-time products as orderliness. This may be due to the subjective definition of a reference point or a measure of time.

Artistic time is based on a certain system language tools. This is primarily a system of tense forms of the verb, their sequence and opposition, transposition (figurative use) of tense forms, lexical units with temporal semantics, case forms with the meaning of time, chronological marks, syntactic constructions that create a specific time plan (for example, nominative sentences represent in the text plan of the present), names historical figures, mythological heroes, nominations of historical events.

The analysis of artistic time includes the following main points:

• 1) determination of the features of artistic time in the work in question:
  • - one-dimensionality or multidimensionality;
  • - reversibility or irreversibility;
  • -- linearity or violation of the time sequence;
• 2) selection in the temporal structure of the text of temporary plans (planes) presented in the work, and consideration of their interaction;
• 3) determining the ratio of the author's time (the narrator's time) and the subjective time of the characters;
• 4) identification of signals that highlight these forms of time;
• 5) consideration of the entire system of temporal indicators in the text, identification of not only their direct, but also figurative values;
• 6) determination of the ratio of time historical and everyday, biographical and historical;
• 7) establishing the connection between artistic time and space.

The literary text is also spatial, that is, the elements of the text have a certain spatial configuration.

In his work, the writer creates a certain space in which the action takes place. This space can be large, encompass a number of countries (in a travel novel), or even go beyond terrestrial planet(in fantasy and romantic novels), but it can also be narrowed down to the narrow boundaries of one room. The space created by the author in his work may have peculiar "geographical" properties; be real (as in a chronicle or historical novel) or imaginary (as in a fairy tale).

It can have certain properties, one way or another "organize" the action of the work. The last property of artistic space is especially important for literature and folklore. The fact is that space in verbal art is directly connected with artistic time. It is dynamic. It creates an environment for movement, and it itself changes, moves. This movement (in movement unites space and time)" can be easy or difficult, fast or slow, it can be associated with a known resistance of the environment and with cause-and-effect relationships.

The main features of space in a literary work:

• 1. Does not have direct sensual authenticity, material density, visibility.
• 2. Perceived by the reader associatively.

Space (concrete/conditional; compressed/volumetric; closed/open; terrestrial/cosmic; actually visible/imaginary)

The following types of artistic space are distinguished: abstract (universal, worldwide - Shakespeare's plays) and concrete (indicating specific geographical, topographic realities - "Woe from Wit" by A.S. Griboyedov); closed (the house is the house of the Turbins in the novel "The White Guard" by M. Bulgakov), open (the steppe in N.V. Gogol's story "Taras Bulba"), borderline (images of the "threshold", "window", "door" - in works of oral folk art); natural-geographical (description of natural geographical realities - deserts, seas, mountains - the poem "Mtsyri" by M.Yu. Lermontov) and the space of civilization (description of the city, village, etc. - Petersburg in the novels of F.M. Dostoevsky ); psychological space (closed, limited by inner peace hero - the psychological space of Svidrigailov in the novel "Crime and Punishment" by F.M. Dostoevsky), social space (participation of the hero in the events public life-- social space of Pavel Vlasov in M. Gorky's novel "Mother"); fantastic (dreams of heroes, a magical world created by the author - "The Adventures of Gulliver" by D. Swift).

Artistic space is inextricably linked with artistic time.

The relationship of time and space in a literary text is expressed in the following main aspects:

• 1) two simultaneous situations are depicted in the work as spaced apart, juxtaposed (see, for example, Hadji Murad by L.N. Tolstoy, The White Guard by M. Bulgakov);
• 2) the spatial point of view of the observer (character or I narrator) is at the same time his temporal point of view, while the optical point of view can be both static and moving (dynamic): ... So we completely got out, crossed the bridge, climbed to the barrier - and a stone, deserted road looked into my eyes, vaguely whitening and running away and endless distance ... (I.A. Bunin. Sukhodol);
• 3) the temporal shift usually corresponds to the spatial shift (for example, the transition to the present narrator in I.A. Bunin's "Life of Arseniev" is accompanied by a sharp shift in the spatial position: Whole life passed since then. Russia, Eagle, spring ... And now, France, the South, Mediterranean winter days. We ... have long been in a foreign country);
• 4) the acceleration of time is accompanied by the compression of space (see, for example, the novels of F.M. Dostoevsky);
• 5) on the contrary, the dilation of time can be accompanied by the expansion of space, hence, for example, detailed descriptions spatial coordinates, scene of action, interior, etc.;
• 6) the flow of time is transmitted through a change in spatial characteristics: "The signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time." So, in the story of A.M. Gorky's "Childhood", in the text of which there are almost no specific temporal indicators (dates, an accurate count of time, signs of historical time), the movement of time is reflected in the spatial movement of the hero, his milestones are moving from Astrakhan to Nizhny, and then moving from one house to another , cf .: By spring, the uncles were divided ... and the grandfather bought himself a large, interesting house on Polevaya; Grandfather unexpectedly sold the house to the tavern keeper, buying another, along Kanatnaya Street;
• 7) the same speech means can express both temporal and spatial characteristics, see, for example: ... they promised to write, they never wrote, everything was cut off forever, Russia began, exiles, water froze in the morning in a bucket, children grew up healthy, the steamer ran along the Yenisei on a bright June day, and then there was St. Petersburg, an apartment on Ligovka, crowds of people in the Tauride courtyard, then there was a front for three years, wagons, rallies, bread rations, Moscow, Alpine Goat, then Gnezdnikovsky, famine, theaters, work in a book expedition ... (Yu. Trifonov. It was a summer afternoon).

Significant relationship between temporal and spatial relationships, artistically mastered in the literature defines the term Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin - Chronotope.

A chronotope is a culturally processed stable position from which or through which a person masters the space of a topographically voluminous world, according to M. M. Bakhtin, the artistic space of a work. The concept of chronotope introduced by M. M. Bakhtin unites space and time, which gives an unexpected turn to the theme of artistic space and opens up a wide field for further research.

The term architectonics itself is not recognized by all experts, many, if not most, believe that we are talking simply about different facets of the meaning of the term composition. At the same time, some very authoritative scientists (say, M. M. Bakhtin) not only recognized the correctness of such a term, but also insisted that composition and architectonics have different meanings.

The concept of architectonics combines the ratio of parts of a work, the location and interconnection of its components (terms), which together form a certain artistic unity. The concept of architectonics includes both the external structure of the work and the construction of the plot: the division of the work into parts, the type of storytelling (from the author or on behalf of a special narrator), the role of dialogue, one or another sequence of events (temporary or in violation of the chronological principle), introduction to narrative fabric of various descriptions, author's reasoning and lyrical digressions, grouping actors and so on.

spatial temporal architectonics story

There are many grounds for asserting that in the process of working on the story the writer experienced a state similar to that of a person participating in a ritual action. In an effort to embody in the word the fullness of love and the abyss of the tragedy of farewell to his native land, he unconsciously embodied the ritual model in the work. Let's consider this question in more detail.

The image of time and space in the story.

Rasputin presents the reader with the sacred time of the farewell ritual, and as in any ritual, time in the story has special properties. It should be recalled that in modern philosophy there are ideas about different ways of understanding human existence in the world. Using the terminology of Mircea Eliade, they can be called the words "worldly" and "sacred". These are opposite types of worldview, according to which the same events, phenomena or objects are endowed with different values. What is ordinary for worldly experience, explicable with the help of scientific knowledge accepted in the culture of ideas or limitations, for sacred experience is always associated with the idea of ​​a mystery, the experience of joining in a mystery and comprehending it.

If we consider the events taking place on Matera in ordinary, worldly time, then they will be perceived as the migration of people from one place of residence to another. The author depicts the flow of sacred time, which has special properties. Sacred time is the time of holidays and rituals. Its main property is reversibility, that is, it is literally the primary mythical time, transformed into the present (7.48-74). The ritual reproduces in the present some sacred event that took place in the mythical past, "in the beginning." Participation in a holiday or ritual involves going out of the "usual" time span to restore the mythical time, connected with the real ritual itself. Thus, sacred time is a circular, reversible, restorable Time, some kind of eternal present, which is restored through rites.

Time in the story is multidimensional: the present contains the past and predicts the future. Main Feature image of time is the existence of two time perspectives: "direct" and "reverse". The direct temporal perspective is understood as the dynamics of the plot, the reverse is the constant knowledge of the impending end, manifested in the narrator's speech and the self-perceptions of the characters. The reverse perspective arises already in the first sentence of the story: “And spring has come again, its own in its endless series, but the last for Matera ...” Such a contrast is spring ... in an endless series, but the last, meaning the simultaneous movement of life and its stop , will continue further: “Again ... the ice was carried away ...”, “Again ... the water rustled ...”, “Everything is in place, but not everything is like that ...” (VR, 1,159). The second part of the first chapter is also built on opposition: starting with a story about the first peasant who founded the village three hundred years ago, and continuing with a story about the location of the village and the island, it ends with a description of the reason for the resettlement of people and the limitation of time: last summer. This is how past and present connect. Reverse time perspective - a "premonition" of impending events - is, as it were, "a prototype of future experiences, shadows cast by the future into the present." (8.19) The whole narrative is organized on such a temporal contradiction, and this indicates the presence of a mythological basis in the story.

Such a concentration of development in a unit of time is inherent in the ritual, and can be perceived (and reflected) by religious consciousness, which distinguishes between secular and sacred human experience. The author's persistent indications of the simultaneous development and completion of time, which was mentioned above, testify to the unusualness of the moment experienced by the characters and the author himself.

The space of the story is organized in the same way. The image of the island and the river is given repeatedly.

“That first peasant, who more than three hundred years ago decided to settle on the island, was a sharp-sighted and smart man, who correctly judged that he could not find a better land than this. The island stretched for more than five miles, and not with a narrow ribbon, but with an iron - there was somewhere to accommodate arable land, and a forest, and a swamp with a frog ... ”(VR, 1,160).

“The village had its own church, as it should be, on a high, clean place, clearly visible from afar from both channels ...” (VR, 1,161).

“The cemetery lay behind the village on the road to the mill, on a dry sandy hill, among birches and pines, from where the Angara and its banks could be seen far and wide.” (BP,1,169).

“From here, from the top of the island, you could see at a glance both the Angara, and the distant foreign islands, and your own Matera ... And the island lay quietly, calmly, all the more so, the native land, destined by fate itself, that it had clear boundaries, immediately beyond which it began no longer hard, but flow. But from edge to edge, from coast to coast, it had enough expanse, and wealth, and beauty, and wildness, and every creature in pairs - everything, having separated from the mainland, it kept in abundance, is that why it was called by the loud name of Matera? ... In the same place, like a king-tree, a mighty, three-girth, age-old larch was piled up (leaf - the old people called it “he”), with directly protruding, also mighty branches and a top cut off in a thunderstorm.” (VR,1,184)

A detailed description of the island (the location of a village, a cemetery, a mill, meadows, bogs, swamps, forests), which makes it easy to make a topographic map, matches the description of Matera's space: the flow of water and time, the combination of the blue of the sky and the Angara, the radiance of the sun and the brilliance of the stars. The presence of a double view of time-space - private and general - provides a focus on the meaning of events not only in their specific manifestation, but also on a larger - universal - scale.

Matera has everything necessary for the physical existence of a person: land, water, forest, fields. At the same time, the space of the island is a sacred space, which has its own Center, connecting heaven and earth. In the mythology of different peoples, there is an idea of ​​a cosmic axis (pillar, ladder, mountain, tree), around which the World extends. This axis is in the middle of sacred space. It should be noted that the Siberian and Finno-Ugric peoples have preserved the myth of the tree - the "Pillar of Heaven" in an unclouded form. The “Pillar of Heaven” represents nothing but the Axis of the World, the “Tree of Life”, growing in the center of the world, from the “navel of the Earth”. Belief in the "Pillar of Heaven" is sometimes mixed with belief in a cosmic mountain, which the Mongols and Kalmyks call Sumur or Sumer, and the Buryats - Sumbur. (9, 95). The mountain, the foliage, the church - all these are the coordinates of not the mundane, but the sacred space of Matera, on which the ritual action of farewell develops.

This is also evidenced by a special aspect of the image (it can be called "getting used to"), which combines the objective and subjective planes of expression. The author places himself and readers as if inside the depicted space, experiences and describes the world around him, and not from some alienated position. This is primarily evidenced by the principle of depicting space, which is the same for the whole story: the narrator, the main character are on the island and see and comprehend only the space around them (ch.1,4,15). The new village is also described, along the streets of which Paul is walking (ch. 22), and this principle is most clearly expressed in chapter 6 when describing the Host. The topographical accuracy of his path through Matera merges with the description of the "peace" of this strange animal.

Thus, the narrative reflects the special religious consciousness of the author. Using the concept of "religious" we associate it not with the divine, but with a purely human, spiritual principle. With a person's faith "... in the "holiness" of his existence, revealed to him in one form or another and giving strength to overcome the inhuman conditions of profane history" (9,16). Only for a person with a religious consciousness does the world exist in sacred time and space. Only the sacred world participates in being, and a religious person longs for being, placing himself in the Center of the World, in a space organized in a special way. This is how the personal Cosmos is created, which opposes the universal Chaos. The presence in the sacred world allows not only to find a foothold in the unsteady Chaos, but also to realize the gap between the two forms of human existence - worldly and sacred.

In Rasputin's story, the narrative reflects three types of consciousness: proper mythological (the Master), religious (Daria) and mundane (Pavel). Combination of subjective and objective, different variants The "getting used to" reflected in the narrative testifies to the special state of the author's consciousness, immersed in the sacred world of the ritual, which has thus found a foothold. This fulcrum, or rather, the perspective of vision and image, allows the author to more fully and accurately determine the assessment of the events taking place in his homeland, to see them on a different scale.

The form of the closed-open organization of time and space, found by the author, allows the reader to perceive the events of the story as isolated from a number of ordinary ones, reorganized in a special way, carrying a complete expression main theme and ideas for the work. Thus, the idea is affirmed of the need for a consciously worthy and spiritualized farewell to mother earth, mother mother, such a farewell that will test and confirm in a person his humanity. The image of events is given in two aspects, secular and sacred, reflecting two types of worldview, and farewell to the island and the village reproduces the ritual of transition from one form of existence to another, from life to death.

Stages of farewell to Matera. Story composition.

All the events unfolding on Matera testify to a person's going beyond the limits of ordinary existence, to the tension of all his forces and emotions. O. Aranovskaya, noting the typological features of the ritual, writes: “At that time, the world and every person in it become non-identical to themselves - ordinary. In this state of going beyond the conventional limits, a “contact of the worlds” is made - the local and the other world: the ritual action is especially convenient for communicating with deceased ancestors. There is an intense “feeling” and understanding of what is happening. In turn, the non-self-identity of the world characterizes the moment of its renewal” (10.61). The farewell ritual is depicted in the story as a simultaneous farewell to the island of all the inhabitants of Matera and the individual farewell of Darya Pinegina. Daria's farewell comes from a nationwide farewell (both in terms of plot and composition). In this personal farewell, the author's understanding of the problem finds its final expression.

Compositionally, the theme of farewell develops in three stages. The boundaries of the development of the theme that we single out (Chapter 9 and 14 inclusive) are determined by the beginning and end of the intensive comprehension of what is happening by Pavel and Daria, and to a lesser extent by Andrei. Thus, the first part of the development of the theme of farewell (1-8 ch.) can be called "the beginning of farewell." The second part of the development of the theme (9-14 ch.) - "collective farewell", the third (15-22 ch.) - "Daria's farewell".

The theme of the collective farewell of the inhabitants of Matera to the land and the village begins to sound from the very beginning of the story in the depiction of the life of the last summer: “We planted gardens - but not all ...”, “... sowed bread - but not in all fields ...” ( BP, 1,159). Collective awareness will also manifest itself in a new way for the writer's work to express the feelings and thoughts of the characters through anonymous remarks and monologues (the scene at the cemetery): The place is the most suitable. - To know, infidels.

Why ruin the place? In the Angara they are ... ”(VR, 1,171). The collective point of view is conveyed in the feelings of people during the first fire:

“People have forgotten that each of them is not alone, they have lost each other, and now there was no need for each other. It is always like this, during an unpleasant, shameful event, no matter how many people are together, everyone tries, not noticing anyone, to remain alone - it is easier then to free oneself from shame. They were not well in their souls...” (BP, 1,209). Collective awareness is most fully expressed - farewell at the apex point of the work - events related to haymaking.

In folk ideas about nature, the month of July, called the "crown of summer" and "kresnik" (from kres - fire), was the time of the triumph of all the bright forces of nature. Therefore, haymaking among Rasputin's heroes is always associated with the best memories and hopes (remember Nastena). And in Farewell to Matera, the haymaking scene is central both in terms of composition and content. During haymaking, and especially later, when charge long rain, people will understand that it was a kind of game. A game that fully reflected their need for joyful work and unity, when the women became ten years younger, knowing that in a month they would grow old by the same amount, when, due to some cheerful whim, they worked with the help of a horse, and a car " kept on a leash."

The unification of the people in joyful labor at the same time becomes a judgment of themselves, a judgment before the past (in the person of old women) and eternal (nature). The writer resorts here to a non-personalized dialogue between the questioning old women - “What did you need? What was necessary, what did they complain about when they lived like this? Well? Eh, there is no one to whip you, ”and by the agreeing people:“ No one ”(VR, 1,225). Together with the old women, everything that was on the island, that was the island, asked about something. And it was as if people were trying to answer these questions, not thinking about the past, not being afraid of the future, cherishing only the hopeful present.

This state is the non-identity of a person (people) to himself (themselves). The narrator calls this state a game, in the form of expression it is a ritual action, because in the attempts of the inhabitants of Matera, like Daria, to answer main question- why is it that during their lifetime the island goes under water? - there is their spiritual development and renewal, characteristic of ritual action. Before unraveling this question, the writer puts his heroes, and they, trying to discover this secret, know themselves, they are tested by it. The author does not give a direct solution to this question, but he answers quite definitely with the image of Matera's vitality, and, most importantly, with the awareness of the beauty of life that occurred during and after haymaking. It is in parting with the native Matera during the work loved by all that people come to feel joy and beauty as the highest value of life. Beauty that "saves the world." “In the end, they will put the plants and take them away, the cows will clean them up to the last blade of grass by spring, all the work, but these songs after work, when it’s already not them, not people, as if their souls sang, united together, ... this sweet and disturbing fading in the evenings in front of the beauty and horror of the approaching night ... this quiet deep pain, from nowhere, that you didn’t know yourself until now, didn’t know that you are not only what you carry in yourself, but and what is not always noticed is around you, and losing it is sometimes more terrible than losing an arm or a leg - all this will be remembered for a long time and will remain in the soul with unsunseting light and joy ”(VR, 1,237-238).

Beauty is one of the hypostases of the highest spiritual values ​​of a person. Together with truth - correct knowledge, the correspondence of the concept to the subject - and goodness, beauty is a component of the ethical ideal of a person. In this case, it is not so much about external beauty, but about internal beauty. About the beauty that shines with the awareness of one's love for the motherland, the people, the feeling of one's involvement in the common life.

The result of awareness of the beauty of being is catharsis. As proved, catharsis is a single function of tragedy and ritual. The archetype of the concept of "catharsis" in all its aspects is the release of something hidden. This is the final exhaustion of the potential factor, the objectification of negative processes and liberation from them. The ritual action up to antiquity, before the transition of the ritual into tragedy, contained a "sacred violation", a "cleansing judgment" and the avoidance of filth by transferring it to another object (10.67).

All stages of the ritual action are found in the line of development of the theme of farewell: the inhabitants of Matera are preparing to leave their sacred native land, they perform a “cleansing judgment” on themselves during haymaking, Daria takes the blame for herself and everyone, during whose life the island and the village of Matera go under water .

The system of characters in the story.

As already noted, in the image of the process of parting, realized in the archetype of the ritual action, many images (characters, nature, interior) automatically acquire mythological features, that is, they become the material expression of the idea of ​​the work. The writer creates the world of Matera. This is a clear and solid world, based on the inviolability of ideas about the eternity of the earth, sky, sun, loving and masterful attitude towards nature. This world is created through a double incarnation of the idea of ​​farewell, materialized in life-like and conditional images (the island of Matera - Atlantis, the tree - the tree of life Listven, an unknown animal - the Master of the island). But the meaning of the images, as it were, "flows" from one to another: a lifelike image acquires the property of a symbol, its meaning is on the verge between real and symbolic. Daria is identified with Listven, Bogodul - with the Master. Rasputin combines in the figurative system of the story ideas about two parallel ways of perception and evaluation: secular and sacred.

The image of Daria is inextricably linked with the image of Matera herself - the village and the island, living out their last term. And Daria's understanding of her life and her current position is connected with a difficult thought about Matera. Just as Matera is separated from the earth by "the flow of water and the flow of time," so Daria is separated from all the inhabitants of the island and the village by her old age. Rasputin always distinguishes her from others: “Daria lived in the same fear as others, but she lived more confidently and more seriously” (BP, 1,206), at a table with her friends she sits “in the chair”; he most often looks at Matera from the hill - “the top of the island”, and at the arsonist who entered the hut - from the height of the table and speaks with a “severe judgmental voice” (VR, 1,290).

The need to comprehend life has always existed in Darya, as a religious and spiritual person, but the exclusivity of the situation of flooding of native places makes one think about life and one's place in it more sharply. Daria feels that she is not identical to herself, her ideas about life are tested again and again in her observations of what is happening, dialogues with herself and her friends, and actions. The heroine connects her lack of understanding of what is happening with the fact that she has already outlived her life and there is no need to look for “some special truth and service, when the whole truth is that there is no use from you now and will not be later ...” (VR ,1,186). The thought, cruel in its completeness, deepens even more in a conversation with Katerina, when Daria blames herself for “keeping the habit to herself”, in other words, she loves herself, while the main thing in life is to do the job. These “last” questions-reflections, asked with such reckless courage and strength, are also connected with a bewildered misunderstanding - “Is it so? Is not it?" Having gone through a double comprehension by the heroine, these thoughts about life - service and self-love are completed in Daria's dialogue with Klavka Strigunova. On Klavkino straightforward: “Your grandmother feels sorry for herself. ... afraid to go where it smells of life, ”Daria replies:“ I, a girl, thought about it ... Well, okay, I think, let me be like that ... And what are you like? ... This land belongs to you alone ? This land belongs to everyone - who was before us and who will come after us. We are here in the smallest share on her .... they only gave us Matera for support ... so that we take care of her and feed ourselves with benefit from her ... ”(VR, 1,241). Thus the idea of ​​personal service is connected with universal service and responsibility before life.

The motive of memory is dialogically connected with the motive of service. It develops in the reverse sequence to the previous one: from universal to personal understanding and approval. Chapter 13 gives detailed description work of the inhabitants of Matera, it is said about their communication with nature. From the pretentious assertion of the need for emotional memory, the author leads his heroine to doubt: “Is it possible that the people who remain will remember Matera no more than last year’s snow?” (VR, 1,259). And yet she cannot think out this thought to the end, "... for something complete and understandable, there was not enough connection." In the seemingly final version of comprehension - “The truth is in memory. Whoever has no memory has no life”, yet there is a downside: “But she understood: this is not the whole truth ...” (VR, 1,283).

In order to get the complete truth about human life, according to Rasputin, it is necessary to live it to the end, without giving up anything in it. Daria understands that only the living out of her life until the last day, the transition to otherness, to death, can reveal the full truth about earthly life.

And, perhaps, the main motive developing in connection with the image of Daria is the motive of the last term. As already noted, the awareness of the finiteness of Matera's life is a characterological feature of the time of the whole story, the "deadline" is constantly foreseen. It "floats" to the surface - three times: it is announced at the meeting, Daria and Andrey talk about the life span, and, finally, it comes: Pavel goes for his mother on the night of September 20. This motif is prepared by Daria's reflections on life-service, her understanding that a person is not given the time of his death to know. The deep meaning of the motif of the last term is connected with the individual farewell of the heroine.

Daria's personal farewell to Matera goes through the same milestones as the collective farewell, but in reverse order. Immediately after the completion of the collective farm haymaking, Daria says goodbye to her mowing, then, together with Katerina, to the mill (parallel - the villagers say goodbye to Katerina's burning hut), finally, performs the farewell ceremony of her hut (parallel - the old women say goodbye to Nastasya's hut). Events seem to return to the same circle, but in a different, new quality.

If we imagine the recurring events of farewell, first collective, and then Darya, in the form of a spiral, dialectically combining the direction and quality of the experienced cycle of time, then we get the opposite picture. Collective farewell includes many events. This is Nastasya's farewell to the hut, in which all close friends participated. Then - the farewell of all the inhabitants of the village with the house set on fire by Petrukha, and finally, the farewell of all the people with the island and life on it during haymaking. The circles of the imaginary spiral expand, testifying to everything more people experiencing farewell to their homeland, carrying away in their souls the memory of the happiness and beauty of their native land.

The events of Daria's personal farewell separate her further and further from people, an imaginary spiral develops in the opposite, narrowing direction. Daria feels the end of the life of the island as her guilt before the whole family, whose life is cut to pieces. “She imagined how later, when she descends from here to her family, many, many people will gather for judgment - there will be both father and mother, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers - all who passed their turn before her. It seemed to her that she could see them well, standing in a huge, wedge-shaped formation that had no end, all with gloomy, stern, inquiring faces. And on the tip of this centuries-old wedge, stepping back a little so that she could be seen better, she was the only one facing him. She hears voices and understands what they are about, although the words sound unintelligible, but she herself has nothing to say. ….They ask about hope, they say that she, Daria, has left them without hope and future.”(VR,1,282)

Communication with the other world is the climax of the ritual action, which clearly confirms the simultaneous existence of the world of the sacred and the mundane, proves the inviolability for the religious consciousness of the statement: "as above, so below." Daria “hears” the answer of the dead and, at their order, sees off the hut, native to all those living in it and those who have left it, in accordance with the rite of seeing off the deceased. Daria at this time is in a special world - sacred and eternal.

From the point of view of a secular understanding of life, turning to deceased parents is psychologically understandable: Daria needs an authoritative interlocutor, and among the people around her there is no equal to her in terms of consciousness and sharpness of perception. In addition, she is "the oldest old woman." And Rasputin persistently focuses on such character traits of the heroine, which testify to the exhaustion of this person's life. She asks herself "last" questions, and in search of an answer, she realizes that during her lifetime she cannot find an answer to them. Daria is a “complete”, “closed” person; a person who already exists as a person, has already taken place. It cannot be reborn, renewed, survive metamorphosis - this is its final (last and final) stage. (11,137) life. Daria does not accept a new life outside the island. It is all in the present and the past, but not in the future, all with departed ancestors, but not with the living.

The heroine herself understands this. Before the beginning of the individual farewell, Daria, both in her thoughts and aloud, condemned the people around her, time; in the fifteenth chapter, she first thinks: “I judge people, but who gave me such a right? It turns out that I moved away from them, it's time to get out ... ”(VR, 1,260). Thoughts about her guilt come to the heroine during a conversation with her friends, when she is surprised at their dreams of a future life and reflects on the significance of the position in a person’s life, the place that he occupies. So Daria comes to understand the purpose and means of life movement - hope for a better future, illuminating the way forward for a person. Without this ray of hope, there is no faith in a better future. And her absence testifies to the impasse in which the heroine found herself. But the strength of her spirit is nourished by a personal, not shifted to others, responsibility to the past and present, and therefore to the future. In the way Daria “dresses up” the hut, not only the retribution of the latter, which is in her power, to her home, village, island, but also the conviction that only in this way, and not otherwise, should a person say goodbye to a life that is receding into the past. So: worthy and steadfast, holy and simple. And the tragic end of Daria's farewell leaves a ray of hope, instills in the reader faith in moral values, in the need for human vitality and viability.

The cleansing rite of Daria's hut, as well as the collective rite of farewell, leads to a state of catharsis, which makes it possible to realize not only the tragedy of what is happening to people and the island, but also a special supra-individual connection between a person and the world, reflected in the heroine's sense of personal involvement in everything that happens in life. Through the depiction of feelings of personal involvement and responsibility, Rasputin affirms the need for the strength of the family connection of the individual with the sacred world, the connection deposited in the depths of the human psyche, in the structure of his feelings, thinking, and national consciousness.

There is another image in the story that just as steadfastly fulfills its duty in relation to Matera. This is the Royal Listven, the roots of which, according to an old legend, were attached to the river bottom, to one common land, Matera. Royal Listven - Rasputin's "tree of life". Daria sees him from the "top of the island" - a dry grassy eel, when she reflects on her life. She sees him, standing alone among the burned-out Matera, in the minutes of her last visit to the cemetery, she comes to him after performing the ritual of her hut ..

The author brings together the images of the heroine and Listven not only externally. The description of the “dressing up” of the hut matches the description of the “battle” of the arsonists with Listven. The parallel begins with the image of the evening when Daria came to the cemetery for the last farewell and “heard” the order of her ancestors, at the same time the arsonists tried to cut down the tree for the first time. The “dressing up” of the hut and the “battle” with Listven continue for two days. This parallel is especially significant in the story, since it is one of two (about the second - below) violations general principle images of time and space - the principle of "chronological incompatibility", meaning the incompatibility of several actions simultaneously in different places (12, 68). In the presence of many dialogically resonating motifs in the whole story, there are only two chronological parallels. And this allows us to assert that the author's convergence of images is not an accident.

Rasputin's "Tree of Life" differs from the mythological one. And above all, the fact that this strong, reliable, like iron, Larch, "is not capable of was more to dissolve the green needles in the spring "and was without a top, without moving up, although he" did not lose his mighty majestic appearance. The mythological tree of life (among the Slavs - oak, among the Scandinavians - ash, etc.) is eternally alive, fruitful and fragrant with the aroma of flowers and bee honey. As you can see, the description of Listven and Daria, the oldest of the old women, largely coincides: they are both the center of the world of Matera, both of them are strong with past accumulations. Rasputin's thesis about the secrecy and inviolability of the past in the present, about the truth that is in "memory" is once again confirmed through the image of the Royal Listven.

Along with the parallel Daria - Listven, there are two more doubles in the story: Bogodul and the Host. Bogodul is a person with his own character, outlook on life. He brings news to the old women about the changes taking place on the island, “protects himself and the old women from “strangers”, sheltered the old women on their last night on the island. It would seem to this ends the functions of the image, but, as for old women, for the author, his presence, his appearance, his reaction to the environment are important. Bogodul is perceived by the old women and is characterized by the narrator as a deep old man. Here, the author's attitude to the image of a timeless image, a person who accompanies the lives of many generations of people, who is always needed by them (remember Bogodul's "profession"), is obvious. Here is how his appearance is described: “he was on his feet, he walked slowly and widely, with a heavy, wavy step, bending in his back and lifting his big shaggy head ... From the dense thickets on his face, only the crest of a fleshy, hummocky nose looked out and red flickered, bloodshot eyes. From snow to snow, Bogodul slapped barefoot... (VR, 1,175). And this is a poetic description of the ideas of the Slavs about the brownie: “... the brownie loves to take different types, but usually he is a dense, not very tall old man, in a short gloomy coat or blue caftan, ... he has a decent gray beard; the hair is cut in a brace, but it is shaggy and obscures the face; his voice is stern and muffled, he loves to swear and uses purely folk expressions at the same time .... Like a real master, whose name is honored by the people, the brownie looks after everything in the house, sympathizes with both family joy and family grief ”(13,59,60,62). There is no need to verbatim compare the cited descriptions, the similarity of Bogodul and the brownie is obvious, manifested not so much in details as in the main. The similarity of images means the degree of penetration of the writer into the folk-poetic consciousness, for which the ideas about the world of the sacred are unshakable.

But it is not enough for the author to embody the idea of ​​a master's attitude to life, which includes knowledge of the past, present and future, in the image of a man named Bogodul. To reinforce this idea, the story introduces the image of an animal of an unknown breed, its name, the Master, speaks of the main function in the story. The owner is a timeless, eternal being, the intangible "spirit" of Matera, a zoomorphic embodiment of eternal service and memory. Outwardly, in the text of the story, the images of Bogodul and the Boss draw closer, perhaps, only by the fact that the animal always starts from Bogodul’s barracks in its rounds around the village, and the Bogodul’s premonition of the imminent death of Bogodul, like himself. The identity of the functions of these images - the protection of the island and the old women, the service to the island and the villagers, and finally, the prediction of a simultaneous death - point to their internal semantic connections. This connection is associative. (14.66). The images included in the archetypal plot bear the properties of the archetypal basis: appearance Bogodula is associated with the idea of ​​the eternity of this person - he did not change, "as if God set out to lead at least one person through several generations" (BP, 1,175). Animal - The owner also accepts the idea of ​​eternal life, he believes that no one can dream, and what people consider dreams are only memories. And Daria, in her appeals to the departed, proceeds from ideas about the connection between the two worlds.

The author brings together the images of Daria, Bogodul and the Host not only on the basis of general ideas, but also on the basis of their actions: they all remain on Matera, they cannot leave it. The meaning of the finale of the work reflects the presence in the story of a double perspective of the image associated with the secular and sacred types of perception of the world. The very structure of the ritual action becomes the bearer of content, the canon in its immutability dictates the development of the plot of the story. Daria, the Boss, Bogodul remain on Matera of their own free will until the very "deadline". And they do not die, but pass into another dimension, join eternity. The final is interpreted by V. Rasputin as "ascension" (15,12). Thus, the completion of the ritual action and the mythological story converge in a single interpretation of death as a transition to a different form of being, a connection between the living and the dead. The images of Daria, Bogodul, the Host, Listven are connected with a single idea of ​​the fulfilled duty to eternal life, of the work that Daria is doing, of the benefit that she seeks to bring with her departure to the living and the dead. The farewell ritual ends with a sacrifice.

Valentin Rasputin. Russian genius Chernov Victor

"Farewell to Matera"

"Farewell to Matera"

In the autumn of 1976, the magazine Our Contemporary (Nos. 10, 11) published a new story by Valentin Rasputin, Farewell to Matyora. About how the idea of ​​the work arose, how it was written, the author himself spoke as follows: “Among the Russian names - the most common, kondovy, indigenous - the name “Materay” exists everywhere, throughout the expanses of Russia. We also have it in Siberia, and on the Angara there is also such a name. I took it with this meaning, the name must mean something, the surname must mean something, especially since this name old village, old earth...

All this happened in front of my eyes. A truly tragic sight when you walk along the Angara in the evening, along the Ilim (this is the river that flows into the Angara), and you see how these strong villages are burning in the dark. It was a sight that will be remembered forever.

"Farewell to Matera" - this work was the main one for me, neither stories, nor other stories. For this story, maybe I was needed ...

I'm not calling back. I call for the preservation of those values ​​and traditions, all that a person lived by. My village, for example, when it was moved, became a timber industry enterprise. There was nothing else to do there, only to cut down the forest. The wood was cut and cut well. The village was large, not from the poor. Occupation does affect a person. They made good money, and everything seemed to be fine, but the booze was terrible, there is not even such a thing now. It was the 70s - 80s. Just cut down the forest, make money on it - after all, this is not a divine thing. It struck me then and forced me to write.

Apparently, we do not need to live well in Russia in order to remain human beings. You don't need wealth, you don't need to be rich. There is such a word - wealth. There is some measure in which we remain in our moral integrity.

In these words of the writer one can hear bitterness and disappointment, pain for his people, for his native land. He, like his heroine Daria, does not defend the old hut, but the Motherland, like hers, Rasputin’s heart also hurts: “Like on fire, it, Christ’s, burns and burns, whines and whines.” As the critic Y. Seleznev accurately noted: “The name of the island and the village - Matyora - is not accidental in Rasputin. Matera, of course, is ideologically figuratively connected with such generic concepts as mother (mother - Earth, mother - Motherland), mainland - land surrounded on all sides by the ocean (the island of Matera is, as it were, a “small mainland”). For the author, as well as for Daria, Matera is the embodiment of the Motherland.

If in the "Deadline" or in "Live and Remember" it was still possible to talk about the "tragedy of a single peasant family", then in "Farewell to Matyora" the author did not leave such an opportunity for critics. The peasant continent, the whole peasant world, is perishing, and this is precisely what the critics have to discuss. However, they tried to smooth over the severity of the problem and accuse the author of "romanticizing and idealizing the patriarchal world", in which some critics saw only conservative and negative qualities. A. Salynsky assessed the problematics of the story as “trivial” (Questions of Literature. 1977. No. 2), V. Oskotsky noted Rasputin’s desire to “squeeze tragedy out of a collision, not tragic at any cost” (Questions of Literature. 1977. No. 3) , E. Starikova noticed that Rasputin "more harshly and less humane than before, divided the world of his story into" his own and others "" (Literature and modernity. M., 1978. Sat. 16. S. 230). The severity of the questions raised by the writer caused a discussion on the pages of the Literary Gazette “Village prose. Bolshaki and country roads "(1979, September-December).

A. I. Solzhenitsyn wrote about this: “This is, first of all, a change of scale: not a private human episode, but a major national disaster - not just one flooded island inhabited for centuries, but a grandiose symbol of the destruction of people's life. And even more huge: some unknown turn, concussion - parting for us all. Rasputin is one of those seers to whom layers of being are revealed that are not accessible to everyone and are not called by him in direct words.

From the first page of the story, we find the village already doomed to destruction - and through the story this mood grows, it sounds like a requiem - and the voices of the people, and the voices of nature itself and human memory, as it resists its death. The farewell to the island grows piercingly, a drawn-out dying that cuts the heart.

The whole fabric of the story is a wide stream of folk poetic perception. (During its course, for example, the different characters of the rains are amazingly described.) How many feelings - about the native land, its eternity. The fullness of nature - and the liveliest dialogue, sound, speech, exact words. And - the author's insistent motive:

Previously, conscience was very different. If someone strove without it, it is immediately noticeable. And now - cholera will sort it out, everything is mixed up in one heap - something, something else. We now do not live on our own. People have forgotten their place under God.

The arsonists came, "the raiders from the state farm," and they burn one after the other, which is empty. The giant king-tree Listven, a distinctive sign of the entire island, only it turned out to be unbreakable and unburned. They burn - "Christ's mill, how much bread has been ground for us." Here - some of the houses have already been burned, and the rest "should shrink into the ground from fear." The last flash of the former life is the friendly time of haymaking, the beloved village time. “We are all our own people, we drank water from the same Angara.” And now this hay - through the Angara, and stacked near multi-storey lifeless houses for homeless cows, doomed to the knife. Farewell to the village, stretched out in time, some have already moved and come to visit the island, others stay in place until the last. They say goodbye to the graves of relatives, arsonists wildly swoop into the cemetery, pulling crosses and burning them into a pile. The old woman Daria, preparing for the inevitable burning of her hut, whitens it fresh, washes the floors and throws grass on the floor, as if under the Trinity: "How much is walked here, how much is trampled." For her to give a hut - "like putting a dead man in a coffin." And the visiting grandson of Daria is alienated, careless about the meaning of life, has long been cut off from the village. Daria to him: "Whoever has a soul, that's God, guy." “And that you spent your soul - you don’t care.” - Now it is recognized: the hut, if you do not touch it, burns by itself for two hours - but for many more days it smokes drearily afterwards. And even after the burning of the hut - Daria is unable to leave the island, with two or three more old women she huddles in a worthless barracks. And so - the deadline for departure was missed. Daria's son is sent on a boat to take off the old people at night - and then such a dense fog looms, which they have never seen in their lives, and they can no longer find the familiar island on the Angara. This is how the story ends - a formidable symbol, as it were, of the unreality of our being: do we exist at all?

A whole generation is dying, generations of keepers of age-old folk foundations, traditions, without which a people cannot exist. The themes of parting with the generations of people who lived and worked on the earth, sounding already in the "Deadline", farewell to the mother-ancestor, to the world of the righteous, are transformed in the plot of the story "Farewell to Matera" into the myth of the death of the entire peasant world. On the “surface” of the plot of the story is the story of the flooding of the Siberian village of Matera located on the island by the waves of the “man-made sea”. In contrast to the island from “Live and Remember”, the island of Matera (mainland, firmament, land), gradually leaving before the eyes of readers to lead under water, is a symbol of the promised land, the last refuge of those who live in conscience, in harmony with God and with nature . Living out their last days old women led by the righteous Daria refuse to move to a new village ( new world) and remain until the hour of death to guard their shrines - a peasant cemetery with crosses and royal foliage, the pagan Tree of Life. Only one of the settlers - Pavel - visits Daria in a vague hope of touching the true meaning of life. In contrast to Nastya, he floats from the world of the “dead” (mechanical civilization) to the world of the living, but this is a dying world. At the end of the story, only the mythical Master of the Island remains on the island, whose desperate cry, sounding in the dead void, completes the story.

“Farewell to Matyora” sums up Rasputin’s philosophical and ideological reflections on tragic fate villages under wheels scientific and technological revolution”, carried out by barbaric, cruel, inhumane methods. The tragic worldview of the writer is intensifying, which acquires apocalyptic features, embodied in the pictures of fire and flood.

The story reflects the philosophy, poetics, mysticism of parting with the traditional way of life, "grandfather's shrines", the moral and spiritual precepts of the ancestors, which Rasputin personifies in the image of the majestic and strong-willed old woman Daria. Rasputin's Matera Island is not just a separate village, but a model of a peasant world filled with its inhabitants, cattle, animals living in a cozy and native landscape, in the center of which there is a powerful foliage, the borders of which are guarded by a mysterious and mystical Owner. Harmony and expediency, knowledge and work, respect for the living and reverence for the dead reign here. But parting with this life is not at all elegiac and blissful, it is interrupted by scandals, fights, quarrels between the indigenous people and the “burners”, “destroyers” who came to clear the territory for the future power plant before flooding. On their side is the grandson of Daria - Andrey. The younger generation, which, according to Rasputin, should be better than the outgoing one, is not fulfilling its historical role. Therefore, the writer believes that "civilization from some unspecified time took the wrong course, tempted by mechanical achievements and leaving human perfection on the tenth plane."