The style of dacha life cultivated in mid-century at Peterhof emerges in greater detail from the papers of one particularly well placed landlord, Aleksandr Pavlovich Kozhevnikov (1807–1875). In 1843, Kozhevnikov became the councilor of the Peterhof palace administration; his duties included supervision of Peterhof hereditary lands (votchiny) and of the towns affairs more generally. While in the job, he set about acquiring dachas of his own for rental, later complaining that his official salary was too low to cover his expenses. One of these houses, a stone residence facing the sea, with twenty-four rooms, brought in 1,200 rubles a year fully furnished. Kozhevnikov also owned two other stone houses of thirteen rooms and two wooden houses of nine and seven rooms. He catered to tenants with high expectations. In 1848, for example, one of his houses was rented by A. F. L’vov, director of the court choir. In a letter to his landlord, L’vov mentioned several pieces of furniture and other household items that he was having sent to supplement the furnishings provided (these included carpets and a bronze clock); he also requested that the gardener make fresh flowers available and hinted that Kozhevnikov should help to get the interior in order.22 For L’vov, as for other residents of upmarket settlements such as Peterhof, the dacha, despite its distance from the metropolis, was synonymous with cultivated domesticity.
The Dacha and the Natural World
The mid-century model of the dacha implied not only a new, more attentive and imaginative attitude to domestic space but also a different quality of engagement with the wider environment. The architectural recommendations were joined and amplified by public discussion of leisure and its relation to the natural world. Furmann’s encyclopedia was in step with the times when it defined “dacha” as “a house out of town where city dwellers repair for the summer period in order to have a rest well away from the dust, noise, and bustle of the city and to enjoy the fresh delights of the fields and woods.”23 This was a rationale for the dacha that would be heard with ever greater frequency over the next few decades: human beings, born as part of the natural world, must not allow themselves to overexercise their rational, intellectual faculties, and must take time to enjoy—even if only intermittently—the rural “good life.” A dacha, then, not only made people cultivated and contentedly domestic, it also made them physically and morally robust.
The desirability of summer recreation out of the city was further emphasized by the prominence given to Russian sea resorts. Once again a precedent was set by Nicholas I, who was the first tsar to acquire a permanent residence in the Crimea, and whose public association with the Peterhof ensemble and consequent proximity to the sea fed the image of him as a Romantic individual as well as a good family man.24 The tsar’s efforts at selffashioning were complemented and amplified by the first serious reports on Russian sea resorts. Spa towns—the aristocratic resorts of the Caucasus and the provincial mineral source in Lipetsk—first emerged in the early nineteenth century, at a time when “taking the waters” was becoming one of the most fashionable pastimes of the European aristocracy. The 1830s were associated with the rise of a more northern set of locations that catered more to an urban elite than to a landed gentry. Here again Faddei Bulgarin was a herald of social change. The sea baths at Helsingfors (Helsinki), he proudly declared, were “without any exaggeration one of the best institutions of their kind not only in Russia but in the whole of Europe.”25
According to another contemporary, visitors were divided into three main categories: those taking the waters (both marine and mineral), those coming to Helsingfors out of curiosity, and younger people who were attracted by the social scene (especially the wellattended balls). At any one time more than 300 people would be taking cures, but the main building of the mineral waters complex was equipped for a rather broader public: it had a large hall (in which there was often dancing in the evenings), a billiards room, and a restaurant. For the summering Petersburger Helsingfors had the advantage of being clean, law-abiding, and cheap. New accommodation was created as the leisure industry grew, so that visitors no longer had to settle for a guesthouse: “The space separating the building of the [mineral] waters from the bathing booths is now beginning to fill up with dachas, and we can expect to see soon a continuous chain of pretty cottages that will replace the present view of the cliffs.”26 Certain resorts were by now so well established that their medical functions were taking second place to their social amenities. One Petersburg civil servant hoped to spend the summer of 1834 in Revel’ (now Tallinn) recuperating with his wife, who had just given birth. What he found on arrival was a microcosm of well-to-do Petersburg society; as a result, he felt unable to shed urban formalities and to take full advantage of the setting, which he admitted was splendid.27
In general, however, medical and social attractions seem to have been considered not contradictory but complementary. The vacation habits of the Russian leisure class in this period fitted a pattern identified by Dominic Lieven in his study of the nineteenth-century European aristocracy: small-town spas came to be regarded as an agreeable hybrid of the high society of the capitals and the quieter lifestyle of the country estate.28 The rise of the spa town brought with it an emphasis on a different range of pastimes: a vacation by the sea was expected not merely to replicate the entertainments afforded by the salon and the ball but also to provide opportunities for mental repose, healthy physical exertion, and untroubled and “democratic” socializing. Bulgarin made a point of praising, besides the health-giving properties of the local water, the hospitality of the Finns and the openness of Finnish high society. Another observer concurred, noting that “in Helsingfors all ages and classes of people can find themselves the appropriate entertainments and spend the summer as they please, without constraint, enjoying complete freedom in all places and at all times.”29 Similar benefits—hygiene, public order, relaxed entertainment, and healthy lifestyle—were promised in Revel’.30 In July 1829 the young Nikolai Gogol, at the end of his tether after a few months in St.Petersburg, took a trip to Lübeck, where he was favorably impressed by the neat and well-appointed dacha hamlets outside the town: “The cottages spread out beyond the town are planted and entwined with trees, bushes, and flowers; they are delightful and very similar to Petersburg dachas.”31
Gogol was doubtless extreme in the violence of his rejection of St.Petersburg, but he was by no means exceptional in taking a dislike to the place. In the 1830s and 1840s attitudes toward the city became more self-conscious and, in general, more hostile; attention was increasingly drawn to its “contradictions.”32 Petersburg became an unwholesome and treacherous place, and trips to the dacha were regarded as an essential outlet. In other words, the dacha gained definition as a space with a set of values not only different from but also opposed to those of the city. In the summer Petersburg was left for unstable dreamers such as the narrator of Fedor Dostoevsky’s White Nights (1848), who spends much of the opening pages of that work conveying his obsessive sense of abandonment as his not even nodding acquaintances from Nevskii Prospekt all depart for their dachas; with similar dismay he observes the long procession of carts piled high with furniture and household items and the fleets of boats similarly loaded up crossing the river to Chernaia Rechka or one or other of the Neva islands.