There have, however, been distinguished exceptions to the general rule of public disapproval of the dacha. The first is that country houses inhabited by members of the intelligentsia have received more sympathetic treatment than average. Many of the writers who gave short shrift to dachniki in their articles and newspaper columns were themselves contentedly ensconced in summer houses. The double standard of a typical purveyor of doggerel was pithily laid bare by the prolific Soviet poet and translator Samuil Marshak:
There once was a man quite perverse
Whose practice was always to curse
From his dacha’s veranda
With unabashed candor
His neighboring dachniks in verse.6
Он жил на даче,
Но, одначе,
Разил он дачников стихом.7
The most successful means of legitimization for dachniki was to stress the permanence of their dwelling and their serious, long-term commitment to it both as a home and as a landholding. In the nineteenth century, this commitment led some dachniki to adopt the model provided by the country estate; in the twentieth, especially since the war, the well-appointed peasant izba has also been the object of emulation. The occupier of such a dacha, in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth, thought of himself as a khoziain, as an owner whose legal right to his property were less significant than the moral right conferred by his gainful use of it. Like so much else in Russia, the dacha has been caught between Westernizing and self-Orientalizing discourses. In the process, over the last two hundred years it has tended to follow a curious cultural trajectory: on attaining prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, it was seen as imitating, for better or for worse (usually, of course, for worse), Western models of civilized and leisured exurban life; but by the late twentieth century, in many people’s understanding, it had come to be the repository of the national popular spirit (narodnost’). In this respect it can be seen as inheriting and then refashioning the cultural legacy of the elite country estate, whose aristocratic Westernism in the eighteenth century did not prevent it from later becoming the icon of a vanished national past. The usad’ba has long been championed as a crucible of Russian subjectivity and cultural activity; perhaps the time has come to recognize that for the last 150 years the dacha has played this role more intensively, extensively, and interestingly.
The history of the dacha can be seen as a whole not only in cultural terms but also in more tangible ways. Underlying the dacha form of settlement has been a set of broad geographical factors: countries with harsh winters and short, hot summers and plenty of space (such as Russia, Finland, and Canada) are more likely to opt for apartment living for eight or nine months of the year and log cabins for the remainder. And then there is the public-health aspect: urban Russians have mostly lived in crowded and unsanitary conditions, and an outlet into the greenbelt has commonly been considered essential to preserve mental and bodily well-being. The compromise solution of suburbanization has never been successful because of the prevailing politics of land sale and distribution and the retarded development of transport in Russian cities. Equally, we should recall the simple fact that Russia, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a country subjected to a high degree of political centralization whose elites and subelites had an overriding centripetal attraction to the metropolitan civilizations of St. Petersburg and (latterly) Moscow. Perhaps the greatest irony of Russia’s exurban history is that, at bottom, the dacha does not represent estrangement from the city (or even ambivalence toward it) but rather is a way for people to guarantee themselves a foothold in the metropolis; a means of saving the money, gathering the strength, or (more recently) growing the food to sustain their next prolonged encounter with the big city.
Unsurprisingly, then, we can see a certain unity in the dacha’s social constituency since the early nineteenth century. Summer houses, both owned and (more commonly) rented, have tended to be the attribute of a section of Russian society that is not much talked about: urban nonproletarians. As this rather clumsy formulation suggests, there is no easy way of conceptually isolating this group. In Russia the conditions necessary for the creation of a “middle class”—and they are social, economic, and institutional as well as cultural—have never come together. One of the all too justified commonplaces of historical analysis has been that in Russia the urban middle strata remained disunited and lacking in self-consciousness. For the last century and a half the only thing they have shared, to my knowledge, is the exurban habit; if the tag “middle-class” refers to anyone in Russia, it is to the dachnik. Not that this observation can bring us much moral or intellectual succor. One could have no stronger confirmation of the enduring social weakness and political marginalization of this putative middle than the fact that so many of its members are called, every Friday night or Saturday morning, to don rubber boots and depart for their plot of land. In the modern dacha, if we care to look closely enough, we find much of what has made Russia in the last century so incredibly resilient and so disastrously dysfunctional. What it does not do, unfortunately, is suggest how the symbiotic relationship between these two characteristics can ever be broken.
1. A reference to Neokonchennaia p’esa dlia mekhanicheskogo pianino (1976), an earlier Mikhalkov film set at the dacha that was loosely based on works by Chekhov.
2. A. Arkhangel’skii, “Desnitsa i shuitsa N.S. Mikhalkova,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 3 (1995), 5
3. As Mikhalkov commented in an interview, “Burnt by the Sun is in many ways bound up with personal feelings, with the image of my home”: ibid., 10. He discusses his upbringing in an interview quoted extensively in his father’s memoirs: S. V. Mikhalkov, Ot i do. . . (Moscow, 1997), 387–94. For a critique of Mikhalkov’s easy equating of Chekhovian and Soviet intelligentsias, see, in the same issue of Iskusstvo kino, Iu. Bogomolov, “Kontsy v vodu—kompleksy naruzhu . . .”