As the dacha became regularly the object of disparagement in the Petersburg press of the 1850s, so the dachnik tended to be treated as a figure of fun. Some of the stock characters created by the out-of-town feuilletonists were fanatical believers in the health-giving properties of water, air, and dew. Others were pretentious dacha owners who ruined the appearance of their homes by topping them with hideous cupolas and bedecking them with exotic fruits and flowers. Still others were ludicrous snobs whose aspirations to rusticity were allied to an obsessive concern with marks of social status.96 In a vaudeville of 1850, a not overly wealthy civil servant is begged by his wife and three daughters to rent a place for the summer. A dacha, they argue, is essential to uphold the family’s social prestige. But an inserted ditty puts their ambitions in an unflattering light:
For a rich man or aristocrat
It’s no sin to live at the dacha,
But for the likes of us
It’s quite strange and ridiculous.
Look at the next man renting a shack
Or some kind of barn
And shouting self-importantly to his friend:
Come and visit us at the dacha!
Богачу, аристократу,
Жить на даче не грешно,
А уж нашему-то брату,
Как-то дико и смешно.
Вон, иной наймет лачугу,
Иль какой-нибудь сарай,
И кричит преважно другу,
К нам на лану приезжай!97
Far from providing the necessary restorative for overwrought urbanites, dachas were often little better than shanties for the Petersburg office proletariat. Instead of providing a genuine alternative to urban existence, they were inhabited largely by people who could never hope to escape the physical and moral pollution of the city. For the first time, but by no means the last, the dacha was finding itself compromised by the discrepancy between its apparent aspirations to healthful exurban gentility and the less than genteel realities of life on the fringes of the city.
THE INCREASED importance of the out-of-town house in the middle of the nineteenth century received its most telling recognition in the appearance of a new cultural stereotype: the dachnik. At best vaguely delineated in the urban imagination of the previous generation, dachas and their inhabitants now gained sharper definition. The first satirical depictions of dacha folk appeared in the 1840s and 1850s, but they were good-natured and lighthearted in comparison with the more serious disapprobation that would be dispensed by the intelligentsia in the later nineteenth century. If dachniki found themselves in drafty, unhygienic houses at no significant remove from the city, that did not make them morally culpable—just unfortunate, foolish, or misguided.
The negative stereotypes of out-of-town life that were projected in the Petersburg feuilletons should not, moreover, be allowed to obscure the many things the dacha had in its favor. It offered health benefits to the inhabitants of crowded and unsanitary cities and provided a much appreciated amenity for an urban population that was moving decisively in the direction of apartment living. It also stood in gratifying opposition to the values of order, formality, and hierarchy that were embodied in the Russian imagination by St. Petersburg. The dacha, by contrast with the capital city, presented a site for untroubled family life, for open-ended interaction within small social groups, and for genteel (but markedly nonaristocratic) pleasures. In this respect, it can be seen as analogous to various sites in the United States and Western Europe of the same period where bourgeois habits and identities were constructed and consolidated: spa towns, vacation resorts, affluent suburbs.
These parallels should not be taken too far, however. Russia differed from Western “bourgeois” societies (and the Western societies, let it also be said, differed from one another) in two important respects. First, in the pattern of its urban and exurban development. As Russia’s major cities frayed at the edges, the dacha could no longer always be located safely on the far side of a sharp boundary between town and country. Other societies—notably the United States and England—were much more successful in creating and shoring up middle-class enclaves within a framework of high-speed urban expansion. Second, Russia differed in its social structures and ideologies. The middling urban-ites who formed the dacha’s largest constituency were a motley group whose most vocal spokesmen (often known as the intelligentsia) were becoming increasingly fractious and suspicious of any bourgeoisie that might coalesce under the watchful eye of an oppressive and autocratic state. The middle of the century may be regarded as a transitional period when the dacha gained by distancing itself from the upper-class entertainments of a slightly earlier age and thus positioning itself comfortably between the pompous court and the grimy city. By the 1870s this advantageous intermediate status was coming to seem extremely problematic, and by the end of the century it would be untenable, largely because it left the summerfolk unconnected to the vast rural world outside the court and the city. The history of the dacha was about to become a lot more complicated, contentious, and diverse.
1. Ot konki do tramvaia: Iz istorii peterburgskogo transporta (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1993), 10. The first intercity stagecoach (between St. Petersburg and Moscow) had started running in 1820; the first year-round omnibus routes in St. Petersburg were established in 1847.
2. V. Bur’ianov, Progulka s det’mi po S. Peterburgu i ego okrestnostiam, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1838), 3:4.
3. Spravochnaia knizhka dlia lits, poseshchaiushchikh peterburgskie dachi i zagorodnye uveselitel’nye mesta (St. Petersburg, 1858). The routes given in a slightly earlier guidebook are oriented more toward the west (the Peterhof direction) than toward the north (although mention is already made of a regular coach to Pargolovo via Kushelevka): see A. Grech, Ves’ Peterburg v karmane (St. Petersburg, 1851), 193–95.