Censorship of “Matryona’s House” : Focusing on the Difference before and after Censorship

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn finished his early work Matryona’s House in 1959. However, it was in 1963 that this short story was published in a Russian literary journal, “Novy Mir”, the editor of which was Alefsandr Tvardovsky. The paper revisits Solzhenitsyn’s way of understanding the world presented in “Matryona’s House.” This theme has often been especially discussed around his Russian and religious identity. The paper attempts to make a contribution to this research by considering two texts of this short work comparatively: the original 1959 text and the censored 1963 text. After the amendments by the editor Tvardovsky, the Soviet Union authorities censored the text. The paper tries to understand what the original text presented and what the censored text hid from readers so as to clarify a Solzhenitsyn’s worldview