Matryona's Place

First published by Aleksandr Tvardovsky in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir in 1963, it is Solzhenitsyn's most read short story.

[1] The narrator, a former prisoner of the Gulag and a teacher of mathematics,[2] has a longing to return to live in the Russian provinces and takes a job at a school on a collective farm.

Matryona offers him a place to live in her tiny, run-down home, but he is told not to expect any "fancy cooking.

[4] Set in 1956, six years after the events portrayed in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,[5] the novella is considered to be one of the author's finest literary achievements.

[6] In one of her works (1972), Gisela Pankow attempts to examine the plot of Matryona's Place from the point of view of psychoanalysis.