RUSSIAN IZBA: FACTS AND FABLES

An izba, or a house made of logs, is the oldest Russian living place. The Russian izba is the soul of Russia on a small scale. Its fate repeats the fate of a Russian man: once being original, harmonious and durable, an izba turns now into a faceless mixture of ideas and notions about beauty, the surrounding world and living space.
This soulles cliche has been established solidly even in the remote corners of the great Russia. The same standard has spread over the minds of the great Russia. The same standard has spread over the minds of the majority of Russian people, slowly but confidently losing the habit of thinking deeply and figuratively.
All attempts to build something in the spirit of Old Russia fail: the feeling of harmony has been lost. The surface decoration and senseless ornamentation have distorted the strict proportionality of the whole and its parts.
The notion of the "Russian izba" contains not only the architectural methods of construction, but also the mode of life as a system of aesthetic and ethic norms, which were reared by the Russian earth and the Christian faith.
The revival is based not on a blind coping of forms, but on the understanding of the substance of architectural images. The gist of this substance, common for all monuments of medieval Russian wooden architecture and independent of their size and purpose, consisted in the unity of usefulness and beauty. The one could not exist without the other. Only that which could improve human life was considered useful and beautiful. The perfection of life was understood as spiritual progress of personality and his approach to the absolute ideal - God. The notions of freedom and human happiness and, consequently, of the beauty of life were inseparable from the concept of this ideal. Trifles, unimportant things and phenomena did not exist either in art or in the everyday life. All of them acquired meaningful significance as particles - steps of the developing consciousness. Not only peasant huts, but boyar and even tsar premises were built of wood in medieval Russia. The wooden palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in the Village of Kolomenskoye near Moscow deserves a special mention. It was being built for ever ten years, from 1667 till 1681, and was pulled down a century later.
By that time fashionable society in Russia disdained the carpentry work and wooden architecture as such and houses began to be built mainly of stone. Architects used wood merely as building material and, following the fashionable architectural style, carefully hid its texture under wall-paper, paints or plaster. Many contemporary wooden buildings looked fully stone-like. The palace in Ostankino, which belonged to Count Sheremetyev, can serve a good example of similar technique.
The century-old loyalty of Russian peasants to old Russian traditions helped preserve the qenuine national log huts - izbas - till the present time. In the remote regions of this country such dwellings were built right up to the revolutionary upheaval of 1917. Old izbas following the patterns of their earlier "predecessors", could be seen in Russian provinces some 15-20 years ago. They are available now only in the open-air museums, while the rare miraculously preserved specimens, remaining in their indigenous place have long been reconstructed beyond recognition. In connection with the above the archive collected by my father, Alexander Viktorovich Opolovnikov, a famous restorer of the masterpieces of early Russian wooden relics, throughout more than half a century, is unique. His archive served the basis for the scientific and practical potential of the "OPOLO" firm. Building technique and styles differed according to place and time of construction. In central Russia houses were usually much smaller than in the North where inhabitable premises and outbuildings were covered by a single roof. Houses looked rather peculiar in Siberia, where peasant farmstead, consisting of many dwelling and auxiliary buildings, formed a small fortress of sorts, surrounded by a blank wall. Severe and dangerous Siberian reality determined the peculiarity of local dwelling. Old English proverb "The Englishman's home is his castle" seemed to have moved to Siberian reaches. Hunter's log huts - zimovye - that can still be come across in the dense taiga forest give a graphic idea of the most simple type of izbas. Russian pioneers exploring and populating Siberia built similar huts, which were often fortified with loop-holes in the walls and additional smaller framework on the roof. Such types of houses have survived on the territory of Yakutia where they had been built till the middle of the 19th century. Siberian peasants continued to erect little zimovye huts in their farmsteads until recently. Explorers of old riverside villages on the Angara, sentenced to flooding during the construction of a regular hydropower station in the 1980s, often saw them in that region. Moreover, local peasants, keeping the old mode of life, which included moving from summer to winter homes, constantly used log huts. Ancient village baths, barns and chapels resembled small huts... It must be mentioned that architecture of Russian izbas, both big and small, is based on the principles and building methods typical of all Russian wooden architecture in the Middle Ages, including magnificient church architecture.
Stove has always been the centre (not geometrical but geopolitical) of the living quarters in a Russian izba. All life of a Russian peasant, from his birth to death, in all details was connected with the stove, which provided not only the heating of the house, but served for cooking, sleeping, drying clothes, fish and mushrooms... Russian stove can play the role of a wonderful non-standard fire-place under the present conditions (besides other practical functions topical even today). The example of Russian log houses vividly demonstrates Russian peasants' love for fine details and individual forms, especially those seen form everywhere. These include window frames, gables and chimney, stove and porch decoration. Separate decorative elements are the masterpieces of decorative and applied art. But beautiful as they are individually, no peasant hut can be complete without its decorative details because particularities are organically connected with the general scheme. The dwelling of Russian peasants was inseparably linked with the whole divine world as the small model of the Universe. The word "Universe" (Vselennaya) is derived in Russian form the verb "to lodge" (vselyatsya), mening to occupy a certain space.
Russian village was made of a number of log houses similar in style but never repeating one another. It was an architectural and natural ensemble centred around the church or chapel wiith a hovering cross. Called differently: "world-embracing assembly" (Prince Yevgeni Trubetskoi), "peasant's hut liturgy" (poet Sergei Yesenin) or "people's Jerusalem" (poet Nikolai Kllyuyev), it arouses association with another sacred place and brings to mind the name of the "log Jerusalem of Russia". It is disappointing that the majority of uilders erecting log houses in out time, do not take the fundamentals of medieval Russian wooden archtiecture into account and never base on the knowledge of its history. They cannot understand profound essence of its typically Russian imagery. Nobody gains from the architectural leveling of the earth surface happening today and equal to the depersonalization of human beings.