This austere lifestyle (not, let it be said, adopted by choice) became one of the emblems of the radical tradition of which Belinskii was the founding father.
Suburbia Prefigured
Belinskii’s dacha experiences reflect a wider trend whereby dachas in St. Petersburg’s closer environs underwent a radical change in their function and character. Take the Koltovskaia district on the Petersburg Side, whose boundaries were the Karpovka to the north, the Zhdanovka to the southwest, and Bol’shoi Prospekt to the southeast. Briefly, in the 1820s the Koltovskaia was among the smartest dacha locations (note that it contained the dacha of Mariia Aleksandrovna Naryshkina, mistress of Alexander I). By the 1840s, however, it was mainly the preserve of middling and hard-up civil servants, whose poor living conditions and difficult rental arrangements formed commonplaces of popular journalistic accounts of the time.83 The Petersburg Side as a whole had plunged downmarket since its early days, when Peter I built himself a palace there. In a contribution to 53 Nikolai Nekrasov’s seminal almanac The Physiology of Petersburg (1845), E.P. Grebenka, commenting on the “dacha mania” of the time, wrote:
The richer people [get] farther away [from the city], but the poor folk head for the Petersburg Side; they say it’s just the same as the country, the air there is clean, the houses are made of wood on the whole, there are plenty of gardens, it’s close to the islands, and, above all, it’s not far from the city. . . .
Because of these considerations, all the houses and cottages, all the mezzanines and attics are occupied by dacha folk; shopkeepers lay in three times more supplies than usual; on Klavikordnaia Street, which leads to the Krestovskii ferry, carts thunder along and countless traders and manufacturers take up residence; every evening the streets and alleys come alive with people out for a stroll, with crowds of colorfully dressed ladies and their gentlemen.
And a little later in his article Grebenka has this to say about the houses on the Petersburg Side inhabited by dachniki and permanent residents alike: “Everywhere [you see] identical or almost identical little houses with or without mezzanines, front gardens with two lilac bushes, or a yellow acacia.”84
Several things catch the eye in this account: the opening up of the dacha to a less well heeled public, the existence of such a low-grade dacha location so close to the elite areas of Kamennyi Island and the Karpovka, and its amazing proximity to the city center. Another noteworthy development is the intermeshing of the dacha with suburbia, both physically (in the sense that the Petersburg Side was both a dacha settlement and a low-rent suburb, and a single street could belong to both) and culturally (in the sense that these dachas, with their front gardens, lilac bushes, and dark-green wallpaper with scenes from ancient mythology, conform so closely to Western stereotypes of lower-middle-class life). In the culminating passage of Grebenka’s article, the petit bourgeois domestic impulse is taken to an unsightly extreme: one resident of the Petersburg Side, determined to beautify his front garden, diverts the contents of his drainpipes into a large barrel in order to create a fountain—which spouts green water.85
Until the 1860s the Petersburg Side remained remarkably underdeveloped; its ad hoc arrangement of streets was in striking contrast to the ordered planning of the city center, on the other side of the river.86 In 1864 the Koltovskaia district was finally paved, and the roads became more or less passable. But the area had already acquired a quasi-bucolic image that it could not properly shake off. In his epic of the 1860s, Petersburg Slums, Vsevolod Krestovskii takes a break from his main themes (illegitimate children, fallen women, night life in Petersburg dives) in order to show us the charming old Povetin couple, who have lived in Koltovskaia forever, have their own kitchen garden and chickens, and lead a life of untroubled domesticity (quite an achievement in the nineteenth-century novel, especially in the Russian tradition). Koltovskaia has become gently rundown since the days when it was a luxury dacha location: it is now teeming with “numerous breeds of civil servant, from collegiate registrator to court counselor inclusive,” who are divided into those rushing about their official business and those “resting in the bosom of their families after the end of their official career.” The houses reflect the conservative values of the population:
little cottages, with three or five windows, with a mezzanine, with green shutters, the obligatory patch of garden and the dog chained up in the yard. In the windows with their prim curtains you’ll see pots with a geranium, a cactus, and a Chinese rose, some kind of canary or siskin in a cage, in a word, wherever you turn, whatever you look at, everything makes you think of a kingdom of peaceful, quiet, modest, family-based, patriarchal life.87
The image of dacha folk projected in the press overlapped to a significant extent with Krestovskii’s depiction of the Petersburg Side. In newspapers of the 1850s the dachnik emerged as a cultural personage in his own right, characterized, in the more approving accounts, by modest, restrained tastes, by a sense of responsibility for his property, and by a concern for his family’s well-being. Dacha dwellers did not require “salon-style comfort”; all they needed was a small patch of land with a rowan tree. As usual, the Teutonic population was held up as the ideal of modest, well-ordered domesticity, a stroll through the German section of Krestovskii Island presented the visitor with “images of family tranquility, of peaceful home life, just like the cover illustration of Gartenlaube, which is the favorite publication of these dachniki.”88 In 1850, similarly, in the “Miscellany” section of Sovremennik, a journalist described wandering into Novaia Derevnia and finding a "huge row of miniature cottages with microscopic patches of garden.”89 His impression was corroborated by other writers of the time, for whom this location was the embodiment of a not altogether admirable neatness and orderliness.
A correspondent of the prominent newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti was in 1850 already able to say that the dacha was a tired theme for the feuilleton.90 Another journalist commented eleven years later that the humbler dachas should not be denigrated, as they brought much joy to the “laboring class of the Petersburg population.”91 Neither of these opinions was much heeded by the bulk of their colleagues in the city’s newspapers and journals. By the early 1860s, dachas had received an extraordinary amount of verbal punishment in the press; derogatory names attached to them included “houses of cards,” “toothache resorts,” “reservoirs of rheumatism,” “undertakers’ delight,” and “sideshows of vanity.”92 These jocular designations were complemented by more serious apprehensions concerning the changing character of dacha settlements close to the city. As the censor Aleksandr Nikitenko noted in his diary for 1854: “I’ve grown awfully sick of Lesnoy Korpus. Everything has changed—the woods have been destroyed, the fields taken up with kitchen gardens, the population has grown, taverns have multiplied—in a word, it has turned into a wretched little town.”93 The outskirts of St. Petersburg were in the 1850s and 1860s becoming much more intensively developed for leisure purposes, and Isler’s pleasure garden was fast being overtaken by a wide range of other entertainments, which included, for the lowbrow audience, Italian organ grinders, drunken bears, monkeys, and mouth organs.94 If dacha locations were not derided for their conservative and bourgeois profile, they might be disdained as hotbeds of proletarian rowdiness.95