**NATIVE NEST *

 Place, landscape, neighbourhood, and all the land, water, and sky were called a generic word - Nature. Yet, who needs to understand that beauty is different in different places? There is the spread of a bog with stunted pines; over there are surging hills, overgrown with magnificent pine trees. In one place, there is not even a tiny stream; the water is used from the wells, and in another, there is a river and a lake, and more than one, and also at different levels, like in Ferapontovo.
The natural beauty of one or another parish positively affects ordinary people's feelings. But never and nowhere had it influenced their sense of homeland. Impressions of the native nest and the enthusiasm of infant, child and adolescent experiences are born spontaneously.
 Local nature, like a mother, exists only in the singular. The world's wonders and beauty cannot replace some nondescript hill with a river bend where a birch or willow tree grows. The saying on this occasion says succinctly: "It is not lovely because it is good, but it is good because it is lovely."
 Homeplace will become even closer when men put their hands to it when every inch of the surrounding land is familiar to the touch and connected with clear household memories.
    The homestead and inside of the home, the hearth and the red corner were the focus of economic life, the center of the peasant world. This world is in the material, and moral sense was consistently expanding circles, which included the dwelling first, then the whole house. Then, finally, the farm, field, pasture, the long-burning and forest meadows located from the village for ten or fifteen miles.
 Nature begins immediately behind the gate. But the farther from home, the more independent it becomes and the wilder it grows. In remote, inaccessible places, the most subtle traces of human hosts received special significance: score, barely beaten path, just a stone in a stream or perceptible place where people rest. A forest's unspoiled wilderness, combined with such rare details and various incidents (for example, an encounter with a bear), becomes an exciting and unique experience with a strange intimacy. Such forest frightened, soothed, tortured, caressed, oppressed, and cheered. The man has the same way as urge to communicate and an inherent desire for solitude. These centripetal and centrifugal forces (if you speak the language of physicists) are balanced in the peasant household by the same opportunities. Needs for both communication and solitude manifested themselves from very early years.
In childhood, the desire for solitude is noticeable, for example, in the game "in a cage" when the child plays in a small but still his own "house." The need for privacy, mainly girlish, burns even brighter in youth. It is very noticeable in old age, not to mention the period of married life. The forest gives a person an excellent opportunity to be alone, philosophize, calm down, and reflect on their relationships with people. Such thoughts, however, were never an end in themselves. They have invariably accompanied some work.
The most challenging thing in the woods - is stubbing for arable land. The easiest is picking mushrooms and berries. Mikhail I. Kuznetsov, a great connoisseur of material and consumer culture of the Russian North, wrote: "A rare case where a resident of the North, who lives in the surrounding woods, will not find opportunities to replace the metal with wood. What's missing in the fir grove, in the riverside willow and elderberry bushes, he invariably found in a birch grove. This is a vast storehouse for him, where it was all he needed: blades, pitchfork, rake, handle, shaft, rocker and any size, slender, not yet had time to turn white birch. From birch twigs were woven rope belts to the plow. Rings were made from a jeweller's small size to half-meter diameter. These intertwined, coiled birch twigs tie logs in the rafting timber. The rings were required very often and a lot ...»
 The land reclaimed from the forest is called differently: burning, hooked, clearing.
All of this also had their own names, sometimes quite poetic. A wild and distant forest landscape, ennobled by mowing, a cozy bridge across the creek, lava through the bright and rocky, then calmly-sedge river, became very dear, like all places close to home. A lateral dike through the swaps in the faraway yielded a feeling of security and sustainability of life. A fire pit or firewood pile in the woods can be calming if one gets lost. A morsel of willow bark, a mark on a young birch tree, a familiar stump or an old log has strengthened the invisible connection between man and nature. But nothing has so ennobled the environment as the cut-out shed, the primary element of this ancient architecture and the whole economic system.