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 in a small scale. Its fate is very much alike the fate of a Russian man: once being an original, harmonious and durable an izba turns now in a faceless mixture of ideas and notious about the beauty, the surrounding world and living spaces.
This soulles cliche has been established solidly even in the very far corners of the immense Russia. The same standard has been spread over the minds of the majority of the Russian people, little by little, but confidently, losing the habit of thinking deeply and figuratively.
Even in the attempts to build something in the spirit of the Russian antiquity, nothing is getting out: the feeling of harmony has been lost. The surface decorations and, sometimes, senseless ornamentation have changed the strict proportionality of the parts and the whole.
The notion of the "Russian izba" contains not only the architectural methods of construction, but also the way of life as a sysstem of aesthetic and ethical views, which were reared by the Russian carth and the Christian faith.
The revival is based not on a blind coping of forms, but on understanding of the architectural images'substance.