“Mythological symbolism in V.G. Rasputin’s story “Farewell to Matera.” Three generations of heroes of the story “Farewell to Mother” - three views on the solution to the problem “man and native land” Farewell to Mother images of old people

The plot of Rasputin’s work “Farewell to Matera” is based on parting with the “small homeland”, where grandfathers and great-grandfathers previously lived. And now this piece of land, which has its own invisible Master, must disappear due to the construction of a hydroelectric power station. The author skillfully shows how new world gradually highlights spirituality and what was created by the ancestors, as well as the memory of them.

The only characters who remember their obligations to their ancestors and are not ready to part with their homeland are the old people. And “the oldest of the old women” is Daria Pnigina. She is the one who becomes the main character stories. Despite her advanced years, she is still quite strong, she still has strength in her arms and legs. In addition, the woman skillfully copes with “considerable housework.”

The image of Daria raises the problem of generations, memory and family ties. In this regard, the episode in the cemetery clearly stands out, when they began to destroy the graves. Here the extraordinary strength of spirit that the old woman showed was clearly visible. Not afraid of the “hefty man, like a bear,” the woman rushed to defend the holy place. After all, a cemetery is a sacred place for honoring ancestors, and destroying it is a sin and blasphemy. But for the new generation, the order from above is more important, and the affection of older residents to the land and respect for other people’s memory is alien to them.

Daria is the embodiment of spiritual ideals. It is she who constantly talks about fidelity, the meaning of human life, the continuity of generations and human soul. The heroine had to live a difficult life, full of losses: the loss of her husband and the death of three children. However, this did not embitter her, did not drive her to despair, but, on the contrary, gave her strength, experience and the opportunity to understand the main thing in life. The most important thing for a person is his soul. It’s not for nothing that the heroine often starts conversations with her grandson Andrei. True, it is difficult for them to understand each other.

By creating the image of Daria, her son Pavel and grandson Andrei, the author shows how from generation to generation a person degrades mentally. And if in Pavel we see at least some sympathy and pity for Matera, then Andrey doesn’t care anymore. Leaving the village, he didn’t even want to walk through the places of his childhood and say goodbye to his “small homeland.”

Daria has a completely different attitude towards Matera and every house and corner in the village. This is her native, living and full-fledged world. They burn down the mill, the heroine goes to see her off, thinking how much good she has given her. Before they were going to burn the heroine’s hut, she whitewashed it and tidied it up, as if she was performing a ritual over a dead person. And before leaving her home, the woman locks it so that strangers do not desecrate it.

The author endowed his heroine with true folk strength and spirituality. This unimaginable power of character is based on connection with the past, on the veneration of ancestors, on gratitude to the native land. It is these values ​​that V.G. praises. Rasputin.

Once again we see “old old women” with typical Russian names and surnames: Daria Vasilievna Pinigina, Katerina Zotova, Natalya Karpova, Sima. Among the names of episodic characters, the name of another old woman stands out - Aksinya (perhaps a tribute to the heroine “ Quiet Don"). The most colorful character, similar to a goblin, was given the semi-symbolic name Bogodul (from the word Bogokhul?). They all have a working life behind them, lived conscientiously, in friendship and mutual assistance. “Warm and bask” - these words of old woman Sima are repeated in different versions by all the writer’s favorite heroes.

The story includes a number of episodes that poeticize such common life- life in peace. One of the semantic centers of the story is the haymaking scene in the eleventh chapter. Rasputin emphasizes that the main thing for people is not the work itself, but the blissful feeling of life, the pleasure of unity with each other, with nature. Grandmother Daria’s grandson Andrei very accurately noticed the difference between the life of mothers and the hectic activities of hydroelectric power station builders: “They live there only to work, but here you seem to be the other way around, it’s like you work for a living.” Work for the writer’s favorite characters is not an end in itself, but participation in the continuation of the family line and, more broadly, the entire human tribe. That’s why Daria’s father, who bequeathed the same to his daughter, did not know how to take care of himself, but worked tirelessly. That is why Daria herself, feeling behind her the order of generations of ancestors, “a structure that has no end,” cannot accept that their graves will go under water - and she will find herself alone: ​​the chain of times will break.

That is why for Daria and other old women, a house is not only a place to live and things are not only things. This is a part of their life animated by their ancestors. Rasputin will tell you twice how they say goodbye to the house and things, first Nastasya, and then Daria. The twentieth chapter of the story, which tells how Daria forcibly whitewashes her house, already doomed to be burned the next day, decorates it with fir, is an exact reflection of the Christian rites of unction (when spiritual relief and reconciliation with inevitability comes before death), washing the deceased, funeral service and burials.

“Everything that lives in the world has one meaning - the meaning of service.” It is this thought, put by the writer into the monologue of the mysterious animal symbolizing the owner of the island, that guides the behavior of the old women and Bogodul. They all recognize themselves as responsible to those who have passed on for the continuation of life. The land, in their opinion, was given to man “to maintain”: it must be protected, preserved for posterity. Hence the perception of everything that lives and grows on earth as one’s own, blood, dear. Therefore, it is impossible not to remove the potatoes, it is impossible not to mow the grass.

Rasputin finds a very precise metaphor to express Daria Vasilievna’s thoughts about the course of life: gender is a thread with knots. Some knots unravel, die, and new ones are formed at the other end. And the old women are by no means indifferent to what these new people who come to replace them will be like. That is why Daria Pinigina always thinks about the meaning of life, about the truth; gets into an argument with his grandson Andrei; asks questions to the dead.

In these disputes, reflections and even accusations there is righteous solemnity, anxiety, and - certainly - love. “Eh, how kind we are all individually, and how recklessly and a lot, as if on purpose, we all do evil together,” Daria argues. “Who knows the truth about a person: why does he live? - the heroine is tormented. - For the sake of life itself, for the sake of the children, or for the sake of something else? Will this movement be eternal?.. How should a person, for whom many generations have lived, feel? He doesn't feel anything. He doesn't understand anything. And he behaves as if life began with him first and it will end with him forever.”

Daria's thoughts about procreation and her responsibility for it are mixed with anxiety about the “complete truth,” about the need for memory, the preservation of responsibility among descendants - anxiety associated with the tragic awareness of the era.

In Daria’s numerous internal monologues, the writer speaks again and again about the need for each person to “get to the bottom of the truth himself,” and to live by the work of conscience. What most worries both the author and his old men and women is the desire of an ever-increasing majority of people to “live without looking back,” “in relief,” to rush with the flow of life. “You’re not breaking your navel, but you’ve wasted your soul,” Daria says to her grandson in her hearts. She is not against machines that make people's work easier. But it is unacceptable for a wise peasant woman for a man who has acquired enormous strength thanks to technology to eradicate life, to thoughtlessly cut down the branch on which he sits. “Man is the king of nature,” Andrei convinces his grandmother. “That's it, king. He will reign, he will reign, and he will sunbathe,” answers the old woman. Only in unity with each other, with nature, with the entire Cosmos can mortal man defeat death, if not individual, then generic.

Space, nature - complete characters stories by V. Rasputin. In “Farewell to Matera”, a quiet morning, light and joy, stars, Angara, gentle rain represent the bright part of life, grace, and give the prospect of development. But in tune with the gloomy thoughts of old men and women caused by the tragic events of the story, they create an atmosphere of anxiety and trouble.

A dramatic contradiction, condensed into a symbolic picture, appears already on the first pages of “Farewell to Matera.” Harmony, tranquility and peace, the beautiful full-blooded life that Matera breathes (the etymology of the word is clear to the reader: mother - homeland - earth), is opposed by desolation, exposure, expiration (one of V. Rasputin’s favorite words). The huts groan, the wind blows, the gates slam. “Darkness has fallen” on Matera, the writer claims, with repeated repetitions of this phrase evoking associations with ancient Russian texts and the Apocalypse. It is here that, preceding V. Rasputin’s last story, an episode of a fire appears, and before this event “stars fall from the sky.”

For native speakers moral values the writer contrasts modern “obsevkov”, drawn in a very harsh manner. Only Daria Pinigina's grandson was endowed by the writer with a more or less complex character. On the one hand, Andrei no longer feels responsible for his family, for the land of his ancestors (it is no coincidence that he never visited his native Matera on his last visit, and did not say goodbye to her before leaving). He is attracted by the bustle of a large construction site, he argues until he is hoarse with his father and grandmother, denying what is eternal values ​​for them.

And at the same time, Rasputin shows, the “minute empty look at the rain,” which ended the family discussion, “managed to bring together again” Andrei, Pavel and Daria: the unity with nature in the guy had not yet died. They are also united by work in haymaking. Andrei does not support Klavka Strigunova (it is typical for a writer to give derogatory names and surnames to characters who have betrayed national traditions), who rejoices at the disappearance of her native Matera: he feels sorry for the island. Moreover, not agreeing with Daria on anything, for some reason he is looking for conversations with her, “for some reason he needed her answer” about the essence and purpose of man.

Other antipodes of the “old crones” are shown in “Farewell to Matera” in a completely ironic and evil way. Katerina’s forty-year-old son, chatterbox and drunkard Nikita Zotov, for his principle “just to live today”, is deprived of his name by popular opinion - turned into Petrukha. The writer, on the one hand, apparently plays up here the traditional name of the farce character Petrushka, depriving him, however, of the positive side that the hero of the folk theater still had, on the other hand, he creates the neologism “petrukhat” by similarity with the verbs “rumble” , “to sigh.” The limit of Petrukha’s downfall is not even the burning of her home (by the way, Klavka did this too), but the mockery of her mother. It is interesting to note that Petrukha, rejected by the village and his mother, seeks to attract attention to himself with new outrages in order to at least, through evil, establish his existence in the world.

“Officials” establish themselves in life exclusively through evil, unconsciousness and shamelessness. The writer supplies them not only speaking surnames, but also with capacious symbolic characteristics: Vorontsov is a tourist (carefree walking on the earth), Zhuk is a gypsy (i.e. a person without a homeland, without roots, a tumbleweed). If the speech of old men and women is expressive, figurative, and the speech of Pavel and Andrei is literary correct, but confusing, full of cliches that are unclear to them, then Vorontsov and others like him speak in chopped, non-Russian phrases, they love the imperative (“We will understand or what will we do?”; “Who allowed?”; “And you will give me no connivance again”; “We will not ask you to do what is required.”

SYMBOLICS OF THE FINAL. At the end of the story, the two sides collide. The author leaves no doubt about who holds the truth. Vorontsov, Pavel and Petrukha got lost in the fog (the symbolism of this landscape is obvious). Even Vorontsov “fell silent”, “sits with his head down, looking meaninglessly in front of him.” All that remains for them to do is, like children, to call for their mother. It is characteristic that it is Petrukha who does this: “Ma-a-at! Aunt Daria-ah! Hey, Matera!” However, he does, according to the writer, “dumbly and hopelessly.” And after screaming, he falls asleep again. Nothing can wake him up anymore (symbolism again!). “It became completely quiet. There was only water and fog all around and nothing but water and fog.” And the mother's old women at this time, in last time united with each other and little Kolyunya, in whose eyes there is “unchildish, bitter and meek understanding,” they ascend to heaven, equally belonging to both the living and the dead.

This tragic ending is illuminated by the story that preceded it about the royal foliage, a symbol of the unfading of life. The arsonists were never able to burn or cut down the resilient tree, which, according to legend, supported the entire island, the entire Matera. Somewhat earlier, V. Rasputin will say twice (in the 9th and 13th chapters) that no matter how difficult the future life of the settlers may be, no matter how the irresponsible “responsible for resettlement” who built a new settlement on inconvenient lands mocked common sense, without taking into account the peasant routine, “life... it will endure everything and will take place everywhere, even on bare rock and in a shaky quagmire, and if necessary, then under water.” A person, through his work, becomes close to any place. This is another of his purposes in the universe.

Composition

“Farewell to Matera” is a realistic work, the plot is based on the usual for those years flooding of an island with a village located on it, since a dam for a power plant was being built on the river. But the writer uses some mythological images in the story that expand the meaning of the work and give ordinary things a depth of symbolism.
The very first phrase of the story sets the theme of “the last spring.” “The Last Spring” is an obvious contradiction, given that in folklore symbolism spring is the beginning of a new life. This spring is becoming the “last” for Matera. The name of the island and the village is also symbolic, since the word is etymologically related to the word “mother”, and V.I. Dahl’s dictionary indicates the meaning of “mainland”. For Rasputin, Matera is an island, that is, “a piece of land surrounded on all sides by water.” Water is one of the key symbols of the story: it will flood the village. In folklore there is an image of “living water”, but in “Farewell to Matera” water becomes a symbol of death. According to the author, man distorts the foundations of existence, turning life into death. Water also points to the biblical theme of the global flood sent to humanity as punishment for sins. But if in the Bible the righteous are saved, then in Rasputin it is they (grandmother Daria, Bogodul, Sima, Katerina and the boy Kolka - an innocent child) who choose death, preferring death to existence in an unrighteous world. The theme of the flood is also emphasized by the multiple descriptions of prolonged, “all-encompassing” rains at the beginning of the story. Water is opposed to the element of fire, the “consuming” fire, also a symbol of heavenly punishment: the houses set on fire by the dissolute Petrukha burn. Before the global flood, signs come and miracles happen. So, Grandma Daria talks to God: “I just came to my senses, and I’m talking out loud. It’s like someone was next to me, asked me, and I talked to him.” Another time she hears the voices of dead ancestors.
The episode with the cemetery is also symbolic.

They call their godless, blasphemous work “cleansing the territory.” The old women cast them out as they cast out evil spirits, calling them infidels. Let's remember Pushkin's lines:
Two feelings are wonderfully close to us - In them the heart finds food: Love for the native ashes, Love for the tombs of our fathers.
Life-giving shrine! The earth would be dead without them, Like a desert “without sources” And like an altar without a deity.
The newcomers, “by order of the sanitary and epidemiological station,” encroached on the very foundations of human existence. They don't see in dead alive, but Grandma Daria even sees in her hut live shower)". Before the inevitable burning of the house, she decides to "clean up" a hundred. "Without washing, without dressing in all the best, the deceased is not put in a coffin - this is the custom. And how can you give up your own hut to death, from which they carried out your father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, in whom she herself lived almost her entire life, refusing her the same attire? According to Rasputin,
lies in Daria moral ideal, in the story it is she who acts as the keeper of folk traditions.
Mythological images appear most clearly in the story of the “royal foliage.” The word “larch” is feminine, but it is obviously important for the author to show the masculine principle of this symbol of Matera: “...no, it was he, the “royal foliage” - so eternally, powerfully and imperiously he stood on the hillock, noticeable from almost everywhere and in the distance -washed by everyone." Of course, this image is associated with the image of the World Tree, connecting heaven and earth. “It is not known since when there was a belief that it is precisely with this, the “royal foliage,” that the island is attached to the river bottom, one common land, and as long as it stands, Matera will stand.” Since ancient times, it was treated as a shrine, and only in modern times did they begin to forget the tradition of festive offerings - so the connection with the origins is lost. The death of Matera and the death of the “World Tree” are inextricably linked.

They chop it with axes, burn it, pour gasoline on it, but it still stands. Even the product of human civilization - a chainsaw - failed to lime the foliage. The old birch - the only tree that the foliage allowed to grow next to it - undoubtedly personifies the feminine principle. This is indicated by the phrase: “...perhaps their roots converged underground.” Unable to cope with the foliage, the men, out of anger, “dropped” the birch tree, which was guilty only of standing nearby. The feminine principle, which gives life, has been destroyed. The foliage remained unbroken, “but it was empty around him.”
The days of Matera also end with emptiness and non-existence - this is manifested in the theme of the fog that shrouds the village. And you can only hear how the Master mourns his island: “... through the open door, as if from an open void, fog rushed in and a near-distant melancholy howl was heard - that was the Master’s farewell voice.”
Thus, we see that the use of mythological symbols turns the death of one village into the death of the entire God-given world.

Other works on this work

The plot of Rasputin’s work “Farewell to Matera” is based on parting with the “small homeland”, where grandfathers and great-grandfathers previously lived. And now this piece of land, which has its own invisible Master, must disappear due to the construction of a hydroelectric power station. The author skillfully shows how the new world gradually highlights spirituality and what was created by the ancestors, as well as the memory of them.

The only characters who remember their obligations to their ancestors and are not ready to part with their homeland are the old people. And “the oldest of the old women” is Daria Pnigina. It is she who becomes the main character of the story. Despite her advanced years, she is still quite strong, she still has strength in her arms and legs. In addition, the woman skillfully copes with “considerable housework.”

The image of Daria raises the problem of generations, memory and family ties. In this regard, the episode in the cemetery clearly stands out, when they began to destroy the graves. Here the extraordinary strength of spirit that the old woman showed was clearly visible. Not afraid of the “hefty man, like a bear,” the woman rushed to defend the holy place. After all, a cemetery is a sacred place for honoring ancestors, and destroying it is a sin and blasphemy. But for the new generation, the order from above is more important, and the affection of older residents to the land and respect for other people’s memory is alien to them.

Daria is the embodiment of spiritual ideals. It is she who constantly talks about fidelity, the meaning of human life, the continuity of generations and the human soul. The heroine had to live a difficult life, full of losses: the loss of her husband and the death of three children. However, this did not embitter her, did not drive her to despair, but, on the contrary, gave her strength, experience and the opportunity to understand the main thing in life. The most important thing for a person is his soul. It’s not for nothing that the heroine often starts conversations with her grandson Andrei. True, it is difficult for them to understand each other.

By creating the image of Daria, her son Pavel and grandson Andrei, the author shows how from generation to generation a person degrades mentally. And if in Pavel we see at least some sympathy and pity for Matera, then Andrey doesn’t care anymore. Leaving the village, he didn’t even want to walk through the places of his childhood and say goodbye to his “small homeland.”

Daria has a completely different attitude towards Matera and every house and corner in the village. This is her native, living and full-fledged world. They burn down the mill, the heroine goes to see her off, thinking how much good she has given her. Before they were going to burn the heroine’s hut, she whitewashed it and tidied it up, as if she was performing a ritual over a dead person. And before leaving her home, the woman locks it so that strangers do not desecrate it.

The author endowed his heroine with true folk strength and spirituality. This unimaginable power of character is based on connection with the past, on the veneration of ancestors, on gratitude to the native land. It is these values ​​that V.G. praises. Rasputin.

In his story “Farewell to Matera,” V. Rasputin explores the national world, its value system and its fate in the crisis of the twentieth century. For this purpose, the writer recreates a transitional, borderline situation, when death has not yet occurred, but it can no longer be called life.

The plot of the work tells us about the island of Matera, which is about to sink due to the construction of a new hydroelectric power station. And along with the island, the life that has developed here for three hundred years will have to disappear, that is, plot-wise, this situation depicts the death of the old patriarchal life and the reign of a new life.

The inscription of Matera (the island) into the infinity of the natural world order, its location “inside” it, is complemented by the inclusion of Matera (the village) in the movement of historical processes, which are not as coordinated as natural ones, but along with them are an organic part of human existence in this world. More than three hundred years old Matera (the village), she saw the Cossacks sailing to settle Irkutsk, she saw exiles, prisoners and Kolchakites. It is important that the social history of the village (Cossacks setting up the Irkutsk prison, merchants, prisoners, Kolchakites and Red partisans) has a duration in the story that is not as extended as the natural world order, but presupposes the possibility of human existence in time.

Combining, the natural and social introduce into the story the motif of the natural existence of Matera (islands and villages) in a single stream of natural and historical existence. This motif is complemented by the motif of the ever-repeating, endless and stable cycle of life in this repetition (the image of water). At the level of the author’s consciousness, the moment of interruption of the eternal and natural movement opens, and modernity appears as a cataclysm that cannot be overcome, like the death of the previous state of the world. Thus, flooding begins to mean not only the disappearance of the natural (Matera-island), but also the ethical (Matera as a system of generic values, born both from being in nature and being in society).

In the story, two levels can be distinguished: life-like (documentary beginning) and conventional. A number of researchers define the story "Farewell to Matera" as a mythological story based on the myth of the end of the world (eschatological myth). The mythological (conventional) plan is manifested in the system of images and symbols, as well as in the plot of the story (the name of the island and the village, Larch, the owner of the island, the ritual of seeing off the deceased, which is the basis of the plot, the ritual of sacrifice, etc.). The presence of two plans - realistic (documentary-journalistic) and conventional (mythological) is evidence that the author explores not only the fate of a particular village, not only social problems, but also the problems of human existence and humanity in general: what can serve as the basis for the existence of humanity, current state existence, prospects (what awaits humanity?). The mythological archetype of the story expresses the author's ideas about the fate of the "peasant Atlantis" in modern civilization.

In his story, V. Rasputin explores past national life, traces changes in values ​​over time, and reflects on the price humanity will pay for the loss of the traditional value system. The main themes of the story are the themes of memory and farewell, duty and conscience, guilt and responsibility.

The author perceives the family as the basis of life and the preservation of tribal laws. In accordance with this idea, the writer builds a system of characters in the story, which represents a whole chain of generations. The author examines three generations born on Matera and traces their interactions with each other. Rasputin explores the fate of moral and spiritual values ​​in different generations. Rasputin is most interested in the older generation, because it is they who are the bearer and custodian of national values, which civilization is trying to destroy by liquidating the island. Older generation The “fathers” in the story are Daria, “the oldest of the old,” the old woman Nastasya and her husband Yegor, the old women Sima and Katerina. The generation of children is Daria's son Pavel, Katerina Petrukha's son. Generation of grandchildren: Daria’s grandson Andrey.

For the old women, the inevitable death of the island is the end of the world, since they cannot imagine themselves or their life without Matera. For them, Matera is not just land, but it is part of their life, their soul, part of the common connection with those who have left this world and with those who are to come. This connection gives the old people the feeling that they are the owners of this land, and at the same time a sense of responsibility not only for their native land, but also for the dead who entrusted this land to them, but they could not preserve it. “They’ll ask: how did you allow such rudeness, where did you look? They’ll say they relied on you, what about you? But I can’t even answer. I was here, it was up to me to keep an eye on it. And if it gets flooded with water, it seems like it’s also my fault,” - Daria thinks. The connection with previous generations can also be traced in the system of moral values.

Mothers treat life as a service, as a kind of debt that must be carried to the end and which they have no right to shift to anyone else. Mothers also have their own special hierarchy of values, where in the first place is life in accordance with conscience, which used to be “very different”, not like in the present time. Thus, the foundations of this type of folk consciousness (ontological worldview) are the perception of the natural world as spiritual, recognition of one’s specific place in this world and the subordination of individual aspirations to collective ethics and culture. It was these qualities that helped the nation continue its history and exist in harmony with nature.

V. Rasputin is clearly aware of the impossibility of this type of worldview in new history, so he is trying to explore other variants of popular consciousness.

A period of heavy thoughts, vague state of mind Not only the old women are worried, but also Pavel Pinigin. His assessment of what is happening is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is closely connected with the village. Arriving in Matera, he feels like time is closing behind him. On the other hand, he does not feel the pain for his home that fills the souls of old women. Pavel recognizes the inevitability of change and understands that the flooding of the island is necessary for the common good. He considers his doubts about resettlement to be a weakness, because young people “do not even think of doubting.” This type of worldview still retains the essential features of ontological consciousness (rootedness in work and home), but at the same time resigns itself to the onset of machine civilization, accepting the norms of existence set by it.

Unlike Pavel, according to Rasputin, the young people had completely lost their sense of responsibility. This can be seen in the example of Daria’s grandson Andrey, who left the village a long time ago, worked at a factory and now wants to get into the construction of a hydroelectric power station. Andrey has his own concept of the world, according to which he sees the future exclusively as technological progress. Life, from Andrei’s point of view, is in constant motion and one cannot lag behind it (Andrei’s desire to go to the hydroelectric power station - the country’s leading construction project).

Daria, on the other hand, sees the death of man in technological progress, since gradually man will obey technology, and not control it. “He’s a small man,” says Daria. “Small”, that is, one who has not gained wisdom, far from the boundless mind of nature. He does not yet understand that it is not in his power to control modern technology, which will crush him. This contrast between Daria’s ontological consciousness and the “new” consciousness of her grandson reveals the author’s assessment of the technocratic illusions of the reorganization of life. The author's sympathies are, of course, on the side of the older generation.

However, Daria sees not only technology as the cause of a person’s death, but mainly in alienation, his removal from home, his native land. It is no coincidence that Daria was so offended by Andrei’s departure, who did not even look at Matera once, did not walk over her, did not say goodbye to her. Seeing the ease with which the younger generation lives, getting into the world of technological progress and forgetting the moral experience of previous generations, Daria thinks about the truth of life, trying to find it, because she feels her responsibility for the younger generation. This truth is revealed to Daria in the cemetery and it lies in memory: “Truth is in memory. He who has no memory has no life.”

The older generation in modern society sees the blurring of the boundaries between good and evil, the combination of these principles, incompatible with each other, into a single whole. The embodiment of the destroyed system of moral values ​​were the so-called “new” masters of life, the destroyers of the cemetery, who deal with Matera as if it were their own property, not recognizing the rights of the elderly to this land, and therefore, not taking their opinions into account. The lack of responsibility on the part of such “new” owners can also be seen in the way the village was built on the other bank, which was built not with the expectation of making life comfortable for people, but with the expectation of completing the construction faster. Marginal characters of the story (Petrukha, Vorontsov, cemetery destroyers) - the next stage of deformation folk character. The marginalized (“Arkharovites” in “Fire”) are people who have no soil, no moral and spiritual roots, so they are deprived of family, home, and friends. It is precisely this type of consciousness, according to V. Rasputin, that is being generated by the new technological era, which ends the positive national history and signifies the catastrophe of the traditional way of life and its value system.

At the end of the story, Matera is flooded, that is, the destruction of the old patriarchal world and the birth of a new one (village).