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After the terrible devastation of the Polish-Lithuanian rule in the first quarter of the XVII century, Russia was dominated by chaos and lawlessness. The state body was disintegrated and took a formless image, becoming ugly.
 One of the first efforts of the young Mikhail Romanov to return to the state and government was his order for the census. Besides other information about population, those census books also show that the wooden churches in the early XVII century were two types: dome and rectangle-based.
 In all probability, in the XVII century and earlier in Russia, many wooden churches were built using both right and obtuse angles. The wooden churches of the North breathed, gave light, and led the conversation with a man on owning their own ground, together with houses, threshing floors, bathhouses. They seemed the only natural along with the village, which has been completed and crowned by it.
 No wonder the concept of composition is inherent in such eternal types of human activities, like literature, music and architecture. Compositional perfection cannot be achieved only by knowledge of mathematical laws; we must have more special flair, a sense of rhythm, imagination, in short, the talent of the builder.
Proportionality ... The sense of beauty - it must be repeated repeatedly - does not depend on the greatness of the structure. The enormous size and emphasized the smallness of (the shod flea, the city in a matchbox, etc.), although appealing to the sense of beauty, remains outside of aesthetics. In their pure form, they impress us with something else, without regard to the artistic way. Similarly, a talent-less singer or a talent-less band compensates for the lack of performing talent and skill of a microphone, amplifiers, speakers, naively assuming that the louder, the more beautiful and exciting.
A sense of architectural proportionality is probably preceded by an unerring ability to set the height, width, length, amount of volumes, and lines and planes, in particular, only a right relationship with each other. Until now, we hope that this will not happen in the future; no most powerful computer cannot replace the architect's intuition.
Is the church of the Intercession on the Nerl-river big? Suzdal city was built only in one-, two-, three-story buildings.
It is noteworthy that when it comes to the size, many of the masterpieces of stone architecture (at least in Kirillov or in Pereslavl) are much smaller, for example, the wooden church of the Assumption or now destroyed Anhimov many-headed temple. Yes, and the principal monuments of the Kizhi museum-reserve suggest that Russian carpenters were not afraid of heights. But, of course, a significant height will not impede the talented architect, but he will not be embarrassed by the small size.
Museums are dead and silent; exhibits rarely speak and do not speak to all the people. However, an excellent museum of architecture in the Small Korella nearby Archangelsk still gives some idea of the Russian villages, which lie thousands of boundless North in the days of the Novgorod Republic.
 In their ancient boundaries, the villages surrounded by the native landscape tell the soul more than the wealthiest museum. And you still need to have some imagination to see the overall architectural appearance of the Northern village, even of the pre-war period. The image formed not only with the construction of houses, chapels, mills and churches but of other architecturally significant sites.
Threshing floors were built separately but stood nearby with slightly higher barns surrounding each village, stretching one, two (and sometimes three) parallel rows. The rows were not always straight; they repeated the bends of rivers to adjust to the terrain. Haylofts ran far into the fields close to the forest, barns were built closer to the houses. Bathhouses, standing side to side to each other, clung close to the water, on the slopes of the hills, descending to the shores of rivers or lakes.
In the village center, especially when they started to set up collective farms, men built a wooden scale for weighing loaded carts. The weights were carefully balanced boulders. Large covered carved crosses were set up at the roadside and on the crossroads.
It is difficult to imagine the village's architecture without the well's cranes, cellars, nurseries, hedges with bends and seams, and bridges and lavas of various sizes.
Large covered carved crosses were placed on the roads and at crossroads. The hop yards at the houses and circular swings decorated the street, and haystacks at summer meadows and straw stacks in fields in fall changed the surrounding view.
In the total dominance of wooden architecture, the stone architecture and the associated stone art held in people's lives, apparently, a few unique places. Among carpenters ' teams, a crew of mason architects looked something like a stone church among the wooden houses. All the male population mastered carpentry skills, but masonry studied comparatively few. This is not inferred that the stone architecture in Russia was at a disadvantage.
However, under a good, regularly maintained roof, the wooden building lives up to two hundred years and more. Rotting came from earth because the ancient builders cut short with ventilated foundations. Wood, as already stated, can not coexist with the soil, so the land and the building would be connected with the stone, which feels the same way in the ground and on its surface. Standing on these rocks, a house or a church hung in the air, sailing into the wind. The better was the roof, the longer it lasted for such a voyage. Boarding also improved the durability of the building, but with a very different, not suitable old carpentry architectural style.
Traditions of stone and wooden construction in Russia are mutually intertwined. The presence of beautiful pre-Mongolian monuments of stone architecture speaks for itself.
Even after the Mongol-Tatar yoke stone building could not come from nothing, from scratch. Apparently, the Russian national genius in the period of military and economic subjugation kept the main "gene pool" of original artistry in architectural art. Otherwise, we would not see churches in Belozersk, Kargopol and Vologda - these fantastic, like sale ships creations of unknown architects. There would probably not be Totemski churches with their unique style, no strong Solovetsky island ensemble, nor lyrically serene Ferapontovski ensembles …