ABSTRACT
Peasant dwellings have tended to be overlooked by architecture scholars. This is just as true of Russia as it is of anywhere else. Historians generally agree that the reforms of Peter the Great resulted in the relatively superficial Europeanization of the Russian elite. The wooden houses inhabited by ordinary people in Russia before the beginning of the eighteenth century literally had no windows in the modern sense of the word. Brick stoves with brick chimneys were not energy-efficient, as they consumed a relatively large amount of wood during the winter season. Traditional Russian log-houses were depicted on icons, plans, drawings, etc. These depictions generally suggest that houses of the rich were endowed with relatively large windows, whereas poor dwellings had much smaller windows.
