43. J. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), 34–35.
44. One such village is the setting for an episode in Faddei Bulgarin’s engaging picaresque Ivan Vyzhigin (1828): see Bulgarin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1990), 323–25.
45. See A. Fon-Gernet, Nemetskaia koloniia Strel’na pod S.-Peterburgom, 1810–1910 (St. Petersburg, 1910); Amburger, Ingermanland, 1:271–81; and T.A. Shrader, “Pravovaia i kul’turnaia adaptatsiia nemetskikh kolonistov v peterburgskoi gubernii v poreformennoe vremia,” in Peterburg i guberniia: Istoriko-etnograficheskie issledovaniia, ed. N. V. Iukhneva (Leningrad, 1989). For a clear summary of the early German immigrants’ privileges, see R. P. Bartlett, Human Capitaclass="underline" The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge, 1979), 47–48.
46. A short posthumous biography recounts how Krylov, renowned for prodigious feats of gluttony, uncharacteristically acted on the advice of his doctors and took to visiting dachas. Priiutino was farther from the city than most such places, but it was a “dacha” none the less. See M.E. Lobanov, “Zhizn’ i sochineniia Ivana Andreevicha Krylova” (1847), in I. A. Krylov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, eds. A.M. Gordin and M.A. Gordin (Moscow, 1982) 73.
47. Dnevnik Anny Alekseevny Oleninoi (1828–1829), ed. O. N. Oom (Paris, 1936), xv–xvi.
48. N. I. Gnedich, “Priiutino,” in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1956), 117–21. Gnedich was also the author of “Rybaki” (1821), a longer poem that on first publication was billed as “the first attempt at a Russian national [narodnoi] idyll” (ibid, 195–204). He takes a dachnik’s viewpoint, conveying the idyllic quality of the national landscape by focusing on a pastoral space that derives its meaning above all from its proximity to the city. The spire above the Peter and Paul Fortress, for example, is contrasted to the empty and unspoiled banks of the Neva.
49. K. Batiushkov, “Poslanie k A.I. Turgenevu” (1817–18), in his Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964), 235–36.
50. Moscow’s bucolic environs could also inspire early-Romantic rapture, as in A. Raevskii, “Okrestnosti Moskvy,” Syn otechestva, pt. 25, no. 40 (1815), 53–65.
51. On the exurban habits of the Moscow nobility in the early nineteenth century, see D. Blagovo, Rasskazy babushki; Iz vospominanii piati pokolenii (Leningrad, 1989), 158–63.
52. This conclusion is based on a general reading of Moskovskie vedomosti in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
53. Moskovskie vedomosti, 15 Mar. 1833, 1000.
54. First Love was apparently Turgenev’s favorite of his own works because it was not “made up.” On the autobiographical resonance of the story, see the notes in the standard Russian edition: I. S. Turgenev, Pervaia liubov’, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1978–86), 6:479–80. The dacha location featured in Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin, the village of Emel’ianovka on the Peterhof Road, is the venue for another scene of acute tension brought on by social misrecognition (an orphan girl from a noble family fallen on hard times is insultingly propositioned by a lecherous older man who, it turns out, was instrumental in ruining her mother): see Bulgarin, Sochineniia, 328–29.
55. The first signs of this practice can be dated even earlier. It seems that the Sheremetevs rented out buildings on their Ostankino estate as early as the 1810S, though the occupants at that time resembled more closely “paying guests” than impersonal “tenants”; the beginnings of a “dacha industry”—the construction of houses specifically as dachas on plots belonging to house serfs—would have to wait until the 1830s. See E. Springis, “Moskovskie zhiteli v sele Ostankine: K istorii dachnoi zhizni stolitsy serediny—vtoroi poloviny XIX veka,” Russkaia usad’ba 5/21(1999).
56. PSz, ser. 2, 9, no. 7464 (16 Oct. 1834). An 1843 account of life in Lesnoi Institut is quoted extensively in Amburger, Ingermanland, 1:563.
57. [S. Engel’gardt], “Iz vospominanii,” Russkii vestnik 191 (1887): 703.
58. PSZ, ser. 2, 9, no. 6882 (5 Mar. 1834). A general history of the park can be found in S. Malafeeva, “Poltora veka Petrovskogo parka,” Moskovskii arkhiv 1 (Moscow, 1996): 107–17.
59. M.A. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni (Moscow, 1998), 278. The emergence of Petrovskii Park as a dacha location was mentioned by one contemporary observer as an important step in the direction of the Petersburg model of exurban development, although dachas were still considered to be a much less commonplace phenomenon in Moscow than in the imperial capital (see V. M-ch, “Peterburgskie i moskovskie dachi,” Severnaia pchela, 17 Aug. 1842, 723–24). The significance of the creation of Petrovskii Park and the role played in it by the entrepreneurial A. A. Bashilov are noted in Blagovo, Rasskazy babushki, 1:160–2, and in S. M. Zagoskin, “Vospominaniia,” Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 1 (1900), 60–61.
60. P. Vistengof, Ocherki moskovskoi zhizni (Moscow, 1842), 90. Of the thirty-four dachas listed in one guidebook of the late 1840s, twenty-six were in Petrovskii Park or “beyond the Tver’ gates”: see M. Rudol’f, Moskva s topograficheskim ukazaniem vsei ee mestnosti i okrestnostei (Moscow, 1848), 31–34·
61. M. Wilmot and C. Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, ed. The Marchioness of Londonderry and H.M. Hyde (London, 1934), 48, 195, 223.
62. V.A. Sollogub, Vospominaniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931), 213. Sollogub goes on to emphasize the point by recalling a trip to an estate his mother had just bought in Simbirsk province, where he learned that “besides the world of the court . . . there was another world too, a world with deep Russian roots, the world of the common people” (219).
2
Between City and Court
The Middle Third of the Nineteenth Century
The year 1837 provides a convenient starting point for the next phase in the history of the dacha. The chronological marker is, for once, provided not by the death of Pushkin but rather by the completion of Russia’s first railway— line from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk. This technological advance had immense practical and symbolic value. The formerly exclusive enclaves of the out-of-town imperial palaces and their adjoining settlements were now made accessible—at least in principle—to a much more broadly construed urban society. Not that the train was the only way to escape the metropolis. The development of the city outskirts as a recreational zone had already been encouraged by the creation of a public transport system. In 1832 came the first coach routes from the city to outlying areas (Krestovskii Island and Novaia Derevnia).1 An eyewitness account of St. Petersburg in 1838 noted no fewer than twenty forms of horse-drawn transport.2 In the late 1850s coaches with room for sixteen passengers were running to the factories on the outskirts of the city and to northerly outskirts such as Lesnoi Institut (the Forestry Institute), Kolomiagi, and Pargolovo; during the day they departed every thirty minutes or so on the more popular routes.3 Moscow’s first suburban railway line came in 1862 (the Northern line, to Sergiev Posad, built largely to profit from the traffic in pilgrims to the monastery located in that town). In the mid-nineteenth century the development of railways was still much slower in the Russian Empire than in Western Europe; as of 1866, there were only a handful of lines under one hundred kilometers in length. Yet these routes (from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Oranienbaum, and Krasnoe Selo, and from Moscow to Sergiev Posad) brought a range of out-of-town locations unprecedentedly close to city dwellers.4