Noble families, too, could show themselves to be alert to the commercial possibilities of their holdings. In the 1850s and 1860s, for example, landowners along the Nikolaevskaia railway line (between Moscow and St. Petersburg) were so keen to clear their land for sale that they met peasant resistance.25 The Nikolaevskaia line was subject to particularly intensive development, as land tended to be cheaper there than in traditional dacha locations.26 Another major focus for development was the Northern line from Moscow to Sergiev Posad, which opened in 1861. Pushkino, for example, became a thriving dacha colony in little more than a couple of years. Muscovites with spare cash were encouraged to build by the opportunity to obtain land on a ninety-five-year lease for 24 rubles per year per desiatina (a separate but lower charge was made for the forested land that dachniki were entitled to use).27
Dacha entrepreneurship, on various scales, was also encountered in more heavily developed locations nearer the city. In 1877, 1878, and 1882 the family of the young Alexandre Benois (subsequently a renowned artist of the fin de siècle) was at the Kushelev-Bezborodko dacha, formerly one of St. Petersburg’s elite suburban residences, which had just recently been sold off in lots; the previous owners had built a few villas in the grounds “partly for their own house guests and partly to let.” The dacha dwellers had as their immediate neighbors an English cotton factory, a paper factory, a brewery, and a rope factory (which had been started up by Benois’s uncle); the largest dacha on the site was rented as a community center for foreign workers at the rope factory. So Benois had as the aural backdrop to his summer vacation “a single, not unpleasant, blur of sound that resembled the noise of a waterfall.”28
The dacha of Rakhmanov fils
Owners of medium-sized and large estates in the Petersburg area found a wide variety of ways to generate income. Besides selling agricultural produce, they might earn money by providing a range of services and by renting out all manner of buildings: inns, mills, factories, and of course dachas. It was a rare estate that did not have at least a handful of houses for rent during the summer. Thus in 1886 Count Stenbok-Fermor used his estate of 4,148 desiatinas at Lakhta as follows: a total of twenty dachas were rented out; four houses were leased as inns for 760 rubles annually; one other house was rented as two shop premises; a bowling alley generated 750 rubles; sand was sold for 142 rubles; rights to fish and to collect fruit and mushrooms were also sold; finally, smithies and a raft for laundresses brought in 80 and 50 rubles respectively. The 385 desiatinas owned by Countess Orlova-Denisova at Kolomiagi had, albeit on a more modest scale, a similar range of commercial functions that included nine dachas rented out for a total of 1,735 rubles each summer.29
Changes in nineteenth-century dacha life on private estate lands are well illustrated by the case of Pargolovo, part of the Shuvalov estates to the north of St. Petersburg. Pargolovo became known as a faintly bohemian place in the 1830s, when students from St. Petersburg University would go there for noisy parties in the woods. Dacha life proper began around the same time, when the area began to attract significant numbers of summer visitors. Entertainments—boating, riding, fishing—were laid on by the owners of the estate, while food and accommodations were provided by the local peasants: “Not much tilling of the soil goes on here, and peasants mostly make a living by selling firewood and coal, as cab drivers, and by renting out their homes, as numerous inhabitants of Petersburg move here for the summer and all houses without exception get taken.”30 Then and afterward, although its clientele became extremely varied, Pargolovo had a reputation as a place for intellectuals of modest means. In 1845, for example, Vissarion Belinskii lived there; from 1878 to 1906 the renowned arts critic Vladimir Stasov rented each summer the same peasant-owned house in a village half an hour’s walk from Pargolovo; and the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was married in a church in the Shuvalov park. The population in 1882 was described as “tens of thousands of protean, variegated, but at any rate intelligentsia people.”31
The construction of the Finland railway line, completed in 1870, marked a new stage in the history of Pargolovo. Hitherto land in the prime dacha territory around the lakes had been rented out by the Shuvalov family on thirty-year leases.32 Now, however, it became potentially much more profitable and amenable to larger development. In 1877 it was decided to sell the land not as individual plots but in one chunk of over fifteen desiatinas. A company of seventy shareholders bought up this territory for 350,000 rubles. Other parts of the estate were given over to commercial development and rapidly subdivided for sale. The result was a series of densely populated summer settlements (including also Shuvalovo and Ozerki; Pargolovo itself was divided into three settlements—Pargolovo I, II, and III) made up of “several hundred dachas of varying size, from enormous, three-story buildings of the most fanciful rather than splendid architecture to hovels thrown together quickly from barge timber.”33 The pace of development in the northern suburbs of St. Petersburg is shown by the profitability of the Finland railway: the part of the line that ran through Russian territory (as far as Beloostrov) had receipts of 93,ooo rubles per Verst in 1897, while the more remote Finnish section was bringing in just 7,967 per verst.34 Petersburgers were attracted to buy plots here by the good transport links to the city, by the promise of unspoiled landscapes (Pargolovo was billed as “the Russian Switzerland”), and by perks such as street lighting and watchmen paid for by the company.35 The Petersburg press reported in 1880 that Samson’evskii Prospekt, leading north toward Pargolovo through the Vyborg Side, was crammed full of cartloads of furniture heading for the dacha. Land prices were going up accordingly, from 2.25 rubles per square sazhen to as much as 6 in Ozerki. The company formed to manage the Shuvalov dacha territories decided to raise the price of unsold land further, to pay a dividend of 10 percent to shareholders, and to provide electric lighting in Ozerki.36