Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This is Solzhenitsyn's most read short story. The narrator, a former prisoner of the gulag, longs to return to live in the Russian provinces. He takes a job at a school on a collective farm. Matryona offers him a place to live in her tiny, run-down home. They share a single room where they eat and sleep; the narrator sleeps on a camp-bed and Matryona near the stove. The narrator finds the farm workers' lives little different to those of the pre-revolutionary landlords and their serfs. Matryona works on the farm for little or no pay. Helping others one night, she is killed by a train. Her character has been described as "the only true Christian (and) the only true Communist" and her death symbolic of Russia's martyrdom.