The increasingly differentiated requirements of the dacha market are reflected in the articles and books on dacha design and construction that proliferated in the 1890s. Architects, like advertisers, began to employ subtle distinctions among the “dacha,” the “house,” the “dacha house,” the “detached house,” and even the “detached dacha house,” with variations in price to match.11 They also showed increasing awareness of the material constraints and other practical difficulties likely to be facing their customers, who by and large represented an identifiably new type of dachniki: “working people who don’t possess large financial resources and who therefore aim to build themselves a dacha or a house as economically as possible.”12 Many such volumes of the 1900s contained detailed advice on building materials and instructions on how to draw up agreements with contractors. The dacha neophyte would also be advised on interior and exterior decoration. Indoors, wallpaper might be hung or patterns stenciled on the walls; for the outside, yellow was the recommended color.13 Instructions were also given on the design of gates, benches, pavilions, terraces, and verandas.14
From the early 1870s many traders addressed themselves specifically to the dacha consumer. The market in consumer goods included garden furniture, clothing, cutlery, and bathroom appliances (with water closets, perhaps unsurprisingly, represented most prominently). By the 1890s a much greater spread of goods was being offered, and emphasis was increasingly placed on modern convenience and functionality. General advertisements for furniture and baths were replaced by specifics: fold-away storage cupboards, electric bells, steel cutlery, nails, hammocks, bidets, “American trays,” spades, and coat hangers. Among the less functional goods offered were terra-cotta vases, ladies’ pelerines, and candleholders. The dacha gourmet might be tempted by hampers stuffed full of delicacies such as olive oil from Provence and Scots porridge oats.
Life at the dacha was not, however, a consumer goods paradise; it entailed significant practical difficulties. First among them was the ordeal of searching for a place to rent. By 1880 St. Petersburg had an agency dealing with dachas, but most people chose less formal channels: they simply went to a village or settlement where they wanted to spend the summer and negotiated directly with potential landlords. The dacha search could, by all accounts, be a time-consuming and frustrating business, but often it was unavoidable. Urbanites needed to make a good choice, as in many cases the dacha would become a family’s main or only residence over the summer months. To retain an expensive city apartment during the dacha season was a luxury that relatively few could afford. The tendency was, it seems, for cashstrapped dachniki to spend longer and longer time in the country each summer so as to delay their return to the urban rental market with its inflated prices.15 But this practice made finding a new apartment, given the housing shortage in the major cities, even more problematic. An editorial of 1912, for example, contrasted the “torment” of looking for an apartment in St. Petersburg in the autumn with the ease of finding accommodations in a town in Ohio that was much smaller but had an efficiently functioning real estate office.16
The difficulties did not end even after city dwellers had found a dacha to rent. They then had to move their furniture and other possessions to their summer house. Departing dachniki might hire movers—although, to judge by most accounts, they had few guarantees that their furniture would arrive intact. Journalists delighted in making puns on the term lomovoi izvozchik (which means moving carter, although “lorm-’ is the root of lomat’ “break”).17 To judge by newspaper reports and the advice dispensed in the press, dachniki did themselves no favors by piling their carts too high.18 It was only the wealthier dachniki who could afford to leave much of their furniture behind in the city. A typical bourgeois or petit bourgeois family might rent unfurnished dachas in several locations over the years; only if their material situation became more secure did the spring ritual of moving out of town become less onerous.19
A modest design of the 1870s (from “Arkhitekturnyi sbornik” sel’skikh postroek i modnoi mebeli [Moscow, 1873])
A more elaborate dacha of the late imperial era (from A.I. Tilinskii, Deshevye postroiki [St. Petersburg, 1913])
And then there was the problem of keeping the household running through the summer in the absence of an urban range of shops and services. To a large extent summer visitors were at the mercy of the local population, who were able to ask high prices for basic foodstuffs and services. Take the following description of a dacha landlord in the mid-1870s: “When renting the place out she promised everything you like—a laundry, a barn, an icehouse—but once she’d got the deposit and the money in advance, she didn’t even begin to think that her tenants wouldn’t find any of these things at her dacha.”20 In view of such cases, one household magazine urged dachniki to discuss the provision of basic services (laundry, firewood) in advance, and under no circumstances to rely on caretakers or watchmen. Summer visitors were also advised to check the details of their accommodations before arrival, as landlords—like landlords the world over—were liable to pass over in silence inconvenient details. Dacha owners liked to create more rooms for rent, and so more windows were installed and insulation deteriorated; the best safeguard against dank rooms was to heat the dacha through and give it an airing in advance of arrival.21
The Growth of Dacha Settlements, 1860S-1890S
The main casualty of the dacha boom is often assumed to be the country estate. From well before Emancipation observers bemoaned the decline of the landowner lifestyle and its replacement, under economic pressure, by more densely populated forms of settlement. Regrets of this kind gathered force over time. When Anton Chekhov’s Lopakhin purchased Ranevskaia’s estate, complete with its cherry orchard, he was setting the terms for much subsequent discussion of the “decline” of the Russian nobility in the second half of the nineteenth century. Opinions differ on the nature of this decline—it is unclear, for example, whether the sale of estates by noble families should be seen as a symptom of socioeconomic crisis or as a rational response to changing economic conditions after 1861— but its role in furthering dacha entrepreneurship is undeniable.22
On occasion the development of new dacha settlements did conform to the Cherry Orchard model. One example was Koz’ma Soldatenkov (nicknamed Koz’ma Medici), who bought the Naryshkin estate at Kuntsevo in 1865 and promptly started renting out plots of land to wealthy merchant families.23 But other scripts were also possible. Most merchants were nowhere near as wealthy as Lopakhin or Soldatenkov, and bought themselves quite small plots of land that met only the needs of their own extended family. And well-to-do urban families might lease land directly from a village in order to build themselves country retreats. One example was the merchant and Old Believer Sergei Karlovich Rakhmanov, who in 1870 built a dacha for his son in Dunino, a village in a scenic spot at the western end of Moscow guberniia. The son subsequently married the manager of the Rakhmanov dachas in the village. The house of Rakhmanov fits had around ten spacious rooms; it also had a room for a live-in servant and came with several outbuildings. Sergei Karlovich’s own dacha next door was even grander: in Soviet times it served as several discrete family dwellings. By the 1900s the village existed primarily to service the dachniki, who had taken the most picturesque sites overlooking the river.24