TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters

[Mark Kohut]

Re: Matronya

"Matronya's Home" or "Matronya's House" is one of Solzhenitsyn's more famous short novels...about a woman who, as the last lines indicated, was one of the secret doers of good---one of the humble righteous---without which no village, nor land, stands.

Allusion?. [slight spoiler]. Daughter of her mother? 

Orig 1963...In English, early 70s. Coetzee reading hard then, it would seem.

More on Anna later.



--- On Sun, 9/21/08, Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
> Subject: TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters
> To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, September 21, 2008, 5:03 AM
> By the end of Chapter One ("Petersburg") of The
> Master of Petersburg, we've met the four of the
> characters who will be crucial to this story - namely:
> 
> Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky - 47, already a famous
> writer at the time of TMoP.  The historical Dostoevsky would
> have by this point published much of his greatest work,
> including Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and
> The Idiot (this last appearing in the year in which TMoP is
> set.)  For those who know the details of the historical
> Dostoevsky's biography, Coetzee immediately begins
> leaving clues that the novel's Dostoevsky is
> emphatically NOT to be identified with his "real
> world" counterpart.  Most significant of these
> biographical divergences is the fact that the historical
> Doestoevsky's stepson outlived the novelist.     
> 
> Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev -  Dostoevsky's deceased
> stepson.  Dead under mysterious circumstances, though the
> possibility of suicide is strongly implied.
> 
> Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina - Mid 30s, Pavel's landlady
> at his final residence, 63 Svechnoi Street in the Haymarket
> district of St. Petersburg.
> 
> Matryona ("Matroyosha") - Anna Sergeyevna's
> daughter.