Izba

TASS

Teremok in Talashkino, Smolensk region, the former estate of Princess Maria Tenishcheva.

IZBA THE LIFE AND TIMES

OF THE RUSSIAN PEASANT HOUSE — by Nancy Cooper Frank —

Constructed from a sturdy framework of interlocking, axe-hewn logs, the Russian peasant’s house —the izba—did a respectable job of keeping rain and snow out and the stove’s warmth in. But like any dwelling, no matter how simple, it provided much more than shelter. Rituals, customs, and beliefs, as well as the sometimes elaborate decoration of the izba (plural: izby), reflected the many meanings and functions its inhabitants attached to it.

Log houses dotted the Russian countryside for centuries. Even now, many wooden buildings in Russia retain something of the spirit of old-fashioned izby, echoing their silhouettes and carvings. The peasant’s log house also lives on in literature and art. Calling up so many facets of traditional rural life and lore, it remains part of the cultural landscape.

y the second half of the eighteenth century, when researchers started taking an interest in them, the oldest izby still standing probably dated from the eighteenth century.

Certainly the pedigree of extant log houses reaches much further back, but it is not clear how much the details had changed since earlier eras. In any case, the izby that have come down to us follow basic principles of log construction long used in Russia for all kinds of buildings, in town as well as village.

Folk traditions in architecture persisted the longest and flowered into the greatest variety of forms in the European Far North. This region had the luck to escape the physical and cultural disruption of Mongol occupation. The population consisted of peasants who were not serfs and who only paid a land-tax to the state.

Wood was plentiful. Nineteenth-century movements in other parts of the country to reform and rationalize the layout of villages left the North untouched.

In Central Russia, a fence enclosed the peasant’s house and assorted agricultural buildings. But in the North, stables, cattle-sheds, haylofts, and agricultural storage rooms were often joined under a single roof with the family’s living space.

(The stronghold-like farmsteads of Siberia represented yet another regional variation.) The combined house-andcovered-yard arrangement made sense in the harsh climate.

Naturally, the size of the izba depended on the prosperity and size of the household, which might be a nuclear or multigenerational family, or a set of brothers with their wives and children. In any case, the northern “huts” in particular could be massive. Sometimes the living quarters and the more extensive covered farmyard were joined end-to-end in one elongated rectangle. Or the farming and living sections met at a right angle, forming an “L.” In the two-story koshel or “basket” house, the ridge of the roof marked the divide

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A prosaic scene. The interior of an izba in Arkhangelsk region, by Nikolai Zaitsev (1986).

The comforts of home. A traditional izba interior, shown at the Museum of Folk Art, Isetsky district, Tyumen oblast.

ALEXEI SCHUKIN

between the living quarters and the agricultural spaces.

The koshel was recognizable by its asymmetrical roof: a steep, short slope covering the house proper, and a longer slope stretched over the enclosed farmyard.

In all regions, the presence of a stove defined a habitation. The word izba, related to the verb istopit “to heat [a stove],” referred both to the structure as a whole and any heated room within it.

A simple house had only one of these multi-purpose rooms used for cooking, other domestic tasks, eating, and sleeping; a larger one could have two or more.

In a “smoky” (kurnaya) izba, smoke from the stove rose through the room above head level to collect under the high, trapezoidal ceiling and escape through a slit. These chimney-less or “smoky” houses continued to be built until the mid-nineteenth century, co-existing with chimney-ed houses.

Restorers have salvaged a scattering of peasant log houses, mostly from the nineteenth century, along with log churches and other structures, and have transported many of them to regional open-air museums. One of the richest ensembles graces the island of Kizhi on Lake Onega. There are notable collections of folk architecture in Novgorod, Suzdal, and near Irkutsk, to mention a few. Equipped with stove, cooking pots, brass icons, looms, brightly painted spindles, shelves for sleeping and builtin benches, some of the exhibits look ready for their next tenants. Handsome as these houses are, their present museum-piece status can only hint at the role they once played in everyday life.

Fortunately, many of the rituals, customs and beliefs centering on the dwelling were documented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with some supporting archeological evidence for earlier periods.

The Creation of the World As in cultures around the world, so in traditional Russian peasant society, building a place to live was symbolically equated with the creation of the world. Putting up a house meant constructing a cosmos—an ordered, sacred space—so it demanded special rituals. As in the Chinese art of feng shui, there were unlucky and lucky spots. Prudent builders avoided a site exposed to invisible dangers, such as a place where a road had once run, where a house had burnt down, or where a bathhouse (haunt of evil spirits) had stood. Sometimes divination with bread or grain helped determine the proper site. Peasants took similar care, for both practical and symbolic reasons, to choose unblighted, “living” wood, cutting trees down in the fall and allowing them to season over the winter.

Erecting a house was a communal effort punctuated with feasts for all the helpers. There was food and drink all around after the first interlocking row of logs was set in place, and again to celebrate the raising of the matitsa—the main ceiling beam.

The builders enjoyed the third communal meal after they’d put the topmost roof beam—the konevaya slega or “horse-beam,” in place. For good measure, one more meal marked the completion of building.

These feasts harked back to much earlier house-foundation rites based on animal sacrifice. Archeologists have found horses’ skulls and chicken’s heads under the log frameworks of houses in medieval Novgorod. Back in those days a ceremonial meal would have accompanied the sacrifice.

It was a practice derived from ancient beliefs that the world emerged from the body of a slain human or animal.

By analogy, the cosmos that was the new dwelling grew from the creature that donated its spirit to the house.

Later, for example in Vladimir province, a small tree placed in the ground at the building site sometimes filled the role of sacrificial victim.

Centuries after builders had ceased to bury horse’s skulls under house foundations, the main roof beam was still called the “horse beam.” This is just one way in which the sacrificial beast of long-forgotten foundation rituals lived on in generations of peasant houses.

Both decorative carvings and words used for parts of the izba strengthened the identification of the house with a living thing. It was at the same time human-, animal-, bird- and tree-like, a hybrid creature or an entire microcosm of creatures.

The izba frequently appeared as a living being in the work of “peasant poet” Nikolai Kliuev (1884-1937), who soaked up the lore of his native Olonets region in Northern Russia, along with everything from Eastern mythology to avant-garde artistic currents of Moscow, St. Petersburg and points West. Kliuev’s house could wear the most exotic of colors, becoming a “peacock-izba” standing “beneath a fiery baobab.”

But at the core of Kliuev’s image of the izba stand Russian folkways and folk speech related to building. For example: Na brevenchatykh, tyazhkikh lapakh Vosplyasala moya izba. ◆

On timbered, cumbersome paws My izba broke into a dance.

The Russian word for ‘paw’ (lapa) appears in the building term v lapu describing an arrangement of interlocking logs, trimmed so that their ends didn’t project. So, yes, an izba could stand— if not dance — on four “paws.”

The Russian language gave the izba a “forehead” (chelo for gable) and a “helmet” (shelom, a name for the hollowed log covering the top roof beam), even eyes (okno “window” is etymologically related to oko “eye”). The roof was home to a flock of “magpies” (soroki), the fat wooden pegs holding the “helmet” log in place. Below these roosted two rows of “chickens” (kuritsy): tree trunks with one root left intact, jutting out at the bottom of either side of the roof to support other elements of the nail-less roof.

Capping the main roof beam and crowning the front gable was the konyok (“little horse”), often carved in the shape of a horse’s head, or two horse’s heads facing in opposite directions, or a bird. The konyok was identified with the house as a whole, again recalling a sacrificial creature imparting its life to the structure. Many researchers, notably archeologist B.A. Rybnikov, have also considered the konyok to be a solar symbol, remnant of myths depicting horses or birds drawing the sun across the sky. Aware of this interpretation of the konyok, Kliuev turned the izba itself into a solar steed: Solntse izbu vznuzdalo— Brevenchatovo zherebtsa. ◆

The sun bridled the izba— The timbered stallion.

Just below the konyok, hanging down from the tip of the gable, a decorative board typically displayed a rosette that appears to have been another solar symbol. On either side, carved boards covering the ends of the eaves also bore solar discs. Together, the three circles represented the sunrise, the sun at its zenith, and sunset.

Through these symbols, the sun lent its life-giving and protective powers to the house.

The house needed protection from malignant forces. The doorway was

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Home of the Kolchins, in the village of Gumnishchi, Chkalovsky district, Nizhny Novgorod region.

Pen and ink by Nikolai Kovalchuk (1949).

SMALL PHOTOS, THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE: RASIM FARVAZITDINOV

SUGGESTIONS FOR ADDITIONAL READING

particularly vulnerable, so sometimes people buried talismans or sacred writings under it. A Kliuev poem alludes to this custom, invoking the protection of a copy of the popular religious legend “The Dream of the Mother of God” buried under the threshold.

Moving in was fraught with danger.

Before crossing the threshold of their new home, the family released an animal—often a cat—or a rooster inside.

Behind this custom lingered the idea that establishing a new home somehow invited or required a death, in particular that of the head of the household. The animal deflected the danger onto itself.

◆ William Craft Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge UP, 1993) and Landmarks of Russian Architecture: A Photographic Survey (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1997). ◆ Alexander Opolovnikov and Yelena Opolovnikova, The Wooden Architecture of Russia: Houses, Fortifications, Churches. David Buxton, ed. and introd. Color photos by Vadim Gippenreiter. (NY: Abrams, 1989). ◆ Elizabeth Gaynor and Kari Haavisto, with essays by Darra Goldstein, Russian Houses (New York: Stewart,Tabori & Chang, 1991). [Includes chapter on Novgorod’s restored log houses and chapter on twentieth-century wooden village houses.] ◆ Evgenia Kirichenko, Russian Design and the Fine Arts 1750-1917. Compiled by Mikhail Ankkst (New York: Abrams, 1991). [Includes influence of folk architecture on professional architecture and the fine arts.] ◆ Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989). [With sections on the domovoi and other place-spirits.]

ALEXEI SHCHUKIN

table, the head of the household took his place nearest the icons.

The stove corner, in contrast, was also called the “woman’s corner” (bab’ii ugol). Here women cooked, spun and did other work. In a kind of sympathetic magic, to aid a difficult childbirth the door to the stove as well as the doors, windows, and gates to the house were flung open.

As the Russian expression had it: “The stove is our own mother” (Pech’ nam mat’ rodnaya). The “motherstove” in Kliuev’s poetry naps, “snores in the half-darkness,” hums to herself, worries about keeping the house warm.

Upon entering a new dwelling, a family immediately attended to the two “centers” of the house. The man set the household icon or icons in place. The woman of the house performed the moving-in rituals for the stove, which included lighting the fire for the first time, or transferring coals from the old stove to the new.

Sometimes she started preparing a pot of kasha in the old house, and finished cooking it in the new.

Another symbolically important part of the house was the matitsa (etymologically related to mat’, “mother”), the main ceiling beam. Like the stove, it could stand in for the dwelling as a whole in rituals. The matchmaker from the prospective groom’s family didn’t cross under the matitsa of the bride’s family

30 • Russian Life

Folk motifs loom large on izba exteriors, as in these examples from Yakutorovsk, Tyumen region (above) and Arkhangelsk region (right).

Life Becomes Art Grandfather domovoi; the custom of carrying the hearth-coals from the old house to the new one; carvings following folk motifs: all of these represented the continuity of past and present. Yet the world of the Russian izba, including the

ANATOLY MORKOVKIN

Inside, the most important parts of the izba were the stove and the “red corner”—the krasny ugol (krasny “red” originally meaning beautiful). Life in the house revolved around these two “centers,” which invariably stood diagonally across from each other.

The “red” corner was the icon corner and functioned as the domestic altar. It had pre-Christian origins as a sacred space, but any specifically Christian household rituals tended to center on it.

The stove had immense practical significance, of course, for cooking as well as for heating. Reverence for the stove derived from pre-Christian belief in the sacredness of the hearth. In folk speech and rituals, the stove could stand for the house as a whole. The “red” corner was associated with light, the sun, and the directions east and south; the stove was associated with darkness, the earth, and the directions west and north.

The “red” corner was considered a primarily masculine realm. At the family

house until after a particular point in the prenuptial negotiation ceremonies. A bride touched the stove and the matitsa of her husband’s house. Travelers touched the matitsa before setting off.

A resident spirit, the domovoi, watched over the house from his favored haunts under or behind the stove, under the floorboards or up in the attic. As house spirit, the domovoi had close affinities with the animal who in earlier times was thought to lend its spirit to the house. He was often associated with horses, his favorite animal, or roosters, his favorite bird. The domovoi liked to be addressed as “grandfather” or as “master” (khozyain) of the house; he was both an ancestor figure and a shadowy double of the head of the household. Essentially benign, he grew testy when he or his house suffered neglect. When moving, the family had to make a special point of inviting the domovoi along, or it would have no peace. In short, the domovoi embodied the protection and continuation of the dwelling, the household and the family along the male line.

NIKOLAI MOSHKOV

appearance of the house itself, was hardly immune to change. As William Brumfield notes, the traditional carvings grew more intricate and profuse during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the same time that the influence of urban architecture increased.

Newfangled flourishes, such as “baroque” curves on window surrounds, appeared and people started adding paint to carvings. In central Russia, raftered roofs, replacing the complicated and distinctive Russian nail-less roofs, became more and more common from the first decades of the nineteenth century on. When plank gables replaced log gables, carvers lavishly ornamented the gables as if to compensate for the plainness of the planks. Lower prices for glass allowed bigger windows. Changing the look even more, some log buildings were clad with boards.

While outside forces were helping to change peasant houses, another, opposite trend gained strength. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a growing interest in folk architecture and craft among Russia’s educated classes, making the peasant hut a symbol of national pride and identity. Architects working in wood built everything from schools to hospitals to restaurants to summer cottages unmistakably, if loosely, inspired by the traditional peasant hut.

Expeditions to record and preserve old log buildings formed a part of a broader rediscovery of native traditions.

Professional and amateur scholars documented oral literature, beliefs, rituals, and customs, including those that illuminated the role of the dwelling. The influential art critic V.V. Stasov promoted folkinspired architecture and investigated the pre-Christian symbolism behind such features of house decoration as the konyok. For Stasov and many others in the nineteenth century, the study and adaptation of folk art and architecture offered a way to bridge the gap in Russia between folk and “high” culture.

Members of the artist’s colony of Abramtsevo (see story, page 44), inaugurated in 1875 by industrialist Savva Mamontov and his wife Elizaveta Mamontova, collected, studied and drew

Working to restore the facade of a late 19th century izba, Nizhny Novgorod. inspiration from folk crafts of all kinds, including log architecture and woodworking. The grounds around the main house filled up with pavilions and workshops designed in a stylized “neoRussian” folk idiom. Izby of the Russian Far North—along with the log churches of that region—received special attention because they represented the “purest” and oldest building traditions. In the 1890s, in another estate that became an

influential artists’ colony, Princess Maria Tenisheva had guest cottages built to look like northern log houses.

In art, the izba had a dark and a bright face. In village scenes by nineteenth-century realists, clusters of brown huts radiate a humble and subdued charm at best. Interiors show darkness and poverty if not outright squalor, though sometimes there are glimmers of domestic continued, page 61 MARCH/APRIL 2002 • 31

IZBA (continued from page 31) beauty, in details such as embroidered linen towels carefully hung on the wall for a special occasion. In fin de siecle and early twentieth century modernist art, on the other hand, gaudy and festive log houses crowd out somber ones. If the newer approach was less realistic in some ways, it also represented an attempt to capture the aesthetic spirit of peasant decorative arts. For example, the illustrator Ivan Bilibin put a good deal of imagination into his fairy-tale izby. It was an imagination fired by his pilgrimages, in the first decade of the twentieth century, to the far North, where he studied traditional artifacts, including buildings and their carvings. A strong strain of interest in folk and “primitive” objects, including the izba, continued to run through the teens and twenties. In this vein, a vibrant stage design by Natalya Goncharova for an unknown production (1913-1914) features an izba surrounded by its individual elements—doors, windows, details of carvings—shuffled, skewed and magnified to dwarf the house itself.

Both Kliuev and his fellow “peasant poet” Sergei Esenin approached the izba as an esoteric text made of symbols passed down over generations. In a lyric essay of 1920, Esenin wrote: “The red corner, for example, in an izba represents the dawn, the ceiling—the vault of the heavens; the matitsa—the Milky Way.” If the horse was a symbol of “aspiration” in Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythology, wrote Esenin, “only the Russian peasant got the idea of placing it [the horse] on his roof,” turning his house into a chariot. Where others saw a prosaic, earthbound hut, both Esenin and Kliuev saw a symbol of striving after the infinite, an inheritance from nomadic Scythian forebears.

In Kliuev’s apocalyptic vision, the izba united earth with the heavens, the human sphere with nature environment, and Russia with the world. After the Revolution, it was also supposed to link the rural past with an imminent “peasant paradise”—a dream that had collapsed by the time of his execution (for membership in a nonexistent anti-Soviet organization) in 1937. Kliuev’s izba also had a more personal, intimate connec-

tion to memory and the past, in poems written after the death of his mother. In “Songs of the Izba,” the house and all the beings it shelters—the “orphaned” stove, the painted and carved animals, the domovoi, the saints on the icons—mourn the death of their mistress. In an echo of folk beliefs, she returns to her house one last time after death to bless it.

For the “village prose” writers of the 1960s and 70s, rural wooden houses evoked powerful but vanishing ties between the past and the present. Their work is haunted by ruined or involuntarily abandoned izby, conveying a cultural and spiritual loss that resonates quite independently (as Kathleen Parth has argued in Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past) of the controversial nationalist views expressed by members of this school. In Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora (see page 16), an old settlement must make way for a hydroelectric station. One of the villagers thoroughly cleans her izba one last time before seeing it off with prayers as if paying her last respects for a loved one.

More recently, the izba has cropped up in the work of Siberian-born French writer Andre Makine. In his 1995 Dreams of My Russian Summers, the narrator retraces the fortunes of his family from just before 1917 to just after the fall of the Soviet Union. Makine’s Siberian log house (there are actually two of them in the story, but their identities merge) is a dark, fusty, “wrinkled,” sagging hulk.

But it keeps its inmates alive and imbues them with its own stubborn vitality, its dogged genius for survival. The following passage refers to a period of famine in Siberia the early 1920’s, as experienced by the narrator’s French greatgrandmother and grandmother:

era apartment block and is threatened with demolition. (There’s some hope, though; the apartment dwellers have banded together, in a “support group, or whatever,” as one character carelessly reports, to try to save it.) It is pushing two centuries, above the normal upper limit for a heated log structure. But the image of the izba in Russian culture has lived much beyond this span and shows no signs of disappearing. RL

Nancy Cooper Frank received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Brown University.

She has done research in Russia on Kliuev and the peasant poets and is currently a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The St. Petersburg Times (Florida), Islands Magazine, and elsewhere.This is her first article for Russian Life.

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It was above all the izba that saved them.

Everything in it had been conceived to resist endless winters, bottomless nights. Even the wood of its great logs was imbued with the harsh experience of several generations of Siberians. Albertine had sensed the secret breathing of this ancient dwelling, had learned to live closely in tune with the slow warmth of the great stove that occupied half the room, with its very vital silence.

At the end of the tale, Makine’s izba lingers on in the courtyard of a Soviet-

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MARCH/APRIL 2002 • 61