The impact of public entertainments on dacha life are most strikingly illustrated by the case of Pavlovsk, a location that epitomized upmarket hauteur in the early nineteenth century and to a large extent retained this aura until the early twentieth.54 Built for the son of Catherine the Great who later became Paul I, the palace with its surrounding territory became the domain of Paul’s widow, Mariia Fedorovna, after his assassination in 1801. The select clans who were permitted to live at Pavlovsk had the opportunity to walk freely in the palace gardens and to observe the imperial family’s everyday habits at close quarters. Somewhat later, in the 1820s, many residents still had personal connections with the palace, and their households commonly adopted a style of open-house hospitality that implied membership in a close-knit community of social equals.55 Even in the 1840s, little seemed to have changed:
The Grand Prince, who owned Pavlovsk in those days, personally crossed off the names of dubious dacha ladies who wanted to move to Pavlovsk for the summer; every day he was handed a list of persons who wanted to rent a dacha in the spring. . . .
Not much of an audience came from the city on weekdays, so that all the regular attendees at concerts knew each other by face and by name.56
Old-style aristocratic sociability was, however, by now under threat in Pavlovsk. In 1837 the character of the settlement had begun to change with the opening of the Tsarskoe Selo railway. This new rapid transport link brought much closer together the“modern” city and the “Romantic” landscape of the palace ensembles; now these two contrasting worlds could no longer be conceived as being separate and sealed off from one another. In 1836 a competition was announced for designs for the station building, and the winning entry, that of A.I. Shtakenshneider, seemed to accentuate this meeting of two cultures: the station, a symbol of technological modernity, was in a thoroughly Gothic style.57 Pace modernist cultural appreciations of the railway, this was not at all an anonymous point of arrival and departure but a major social center in its own right. The station complex included a large hall for dinners, balls, and concerts, two smaller halls, two winter gardens, and forty guest rooms. The railway authorities also laid on station concerts that were free of charge for the audience and soon began to draw a regular public.
Over the following few decades music at the station brought more and more people together as a stream of musical celebrities passed through Pavlovsk. In the early 1840s Franz Liszt and Robert and Clara Schumann visited, but the mainstays of concert life were German conductors brought over with their orchestras to provide the requisite mix of classics and crowd-pleasers (usually weighted in favor of the latter). In 1856 Johann Strauss the younger arrived for the first of many concert seasons. It was Strauss who turned Pavlovsk into a proper concert venue, insisting that music be played in a separate concert hall instead of in the dining room, where the musicians had to compete with loquacious diners and waiters. He also insisted on more Wagner and Beethoven in the repertoire, and in this programming policy we can see evidence of a standard “middle-class” stage in cultural history taking place in Russia: the invention of classical music.58 Now people visited the Pavlovsk station not only for the sake of dinner and conversation in a social circle where everyone was at least a nodding acquaintance. The music was no longer merely a pleasing diversion but rather an exciting cultural experience in its own right: a performance that took center stage, not a melodious background hum. Strauss became a huge celebrity—to the extent that he was held personally responsible for pushing up Pavlovsk rents.59 Journalists and memoirists alike remarked on Strauss’s celebrity, his extravagant style of performance, and his appeal to the opposite sex. In 1857, apparently, he “literally did not know where to hide from his female admirers,” even if “on many people his affectations (his way of dancing along as he conducted) made an unpleasant impression.”60 The station concerts remained a commonplace topic for feuilletonists for several decades: in one story by the prolific sketch writer V. O. Mikhnevich, titled “Under the Bows of the Pavlovsk Violins,” the hero falls in love with a married woman, who tests the strength of his affections by insisting he sit through Pavlovsk concerts all week. He fails the test, complaining bitterly of the monotonous repertoire.61
Despite the mild notoriety that attached itself to Strauss, Pavlovsk remained a respectable and decorous place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had none of the unseemly behavior that was held to be characteristic of the immediate outskirts of the city, where urban popular culture regularly encroached on the sedate life of dacha settlements. The Pavlovsk concerts were certainly not mass entertainment. They were, however, a decidedly nonaristocratic phenomenon in a location that had from its earliest days been associated with the more enclosed and exclusive social rituals of the elite nobility. As such, they strengthened the dacha’s real and symbolic association with new, more “middle-class” habits.
Sociability: From Aristocratic Salon to Intelligentsia Enclave
Out-of-town recreations, formerly the prerogative of a high society that blended the mandarinic and the patrician, were now open to all those who could afford a ticket to the Pavlovsk station or the admission fee for the Petrovskii Park concerts. To be sure, court life followed its traditional course within and immediately around the imperial palaces, but these palaces no longer dominated the social scene or set the tone for urban people who sought convivial and culturally stimulating ways of spending their summers outside the city.62 Dachas were no longer polite exurban drawing rooms where entry was by invitation only and the rules of behavior were understood by all. Now nonaristocratic urbanites were taking up temporary residence in exurbia and seeking to cultivate acquaintances and pursue activities that would bring them pleasure and excitement while remaining harmonious and decorous.
This quest left its mark in literary accounts of the time, which, by rejecting the ambience and the poetics of the salon, may be said to have brought the dacha into the realist age. Ever since Mariia Zhukova received a favorable mention from the celebrated critic Vissarion Belinskii in the late 1830s (which, in typical style, he drastically revised a few years later), she has intermittently been regarded as a herald of the shift from Romanticism to realism; and her two best-known works are set at the dacha. In Evenings by the Karpovka (1837) she paints a picture of considerable social diversity on the Petersburg islands:
Barouches, carriages, cabriolets swept along the roads, colorful crowds strolled in the gardens, balconies turned into living rooms, whole families with their samovars and their numerous children and nannies hurried over to Krestovskii or to the hospitable garden of Countess L., they spread out with their cold supper, ice cream, and tea on the slope of the hill or under the dense lime trees on the very shore. You saw there a German craftsman and his good family, and high-spirited groups of young civil servants, and a Russian merchant with his wife and children of all ages, and two young artists discussing a forthcoming exhibition, and the chic mantilla of a high society beauty, and a servant girl’s pretty kanzu.63