Opportunities to meet aspirations of this kind were offered most obviously by architecture. The late imperial era entertained a widening eclecticism that allowed everyone from the urban dachnik to the rural landowner to choose styles ranging from the English cottage to Mauritanian Gothic. But this eclecticism had rather different priorities from those of Kukol’nik and Furmann in the 1830s and 1840s. It formed part of a national revival whereby details of izba architecture might be appropriated by wealthy estate owners (as, for example, in the various outbuildings at Savva Mamontov’s Abramtsevo) or by exurbanites less well endowed with land and money. By the 1870s, although neoclassical symmetries still retained some prominence in dacha designs, they no longer enjoyed supremacy. The emphasis had firmly shifted to wood instead of brick as the building material of preference and to vernacular styles instead of the Palladianism that had still been current in the 1840s. Pattern books of the 1870s suggest strongly that the boundary between the “rural house” (sel’skii dom) and the dacha had become blurred. Dachas, in other words, were not mere villas or “out-of-town” houses, whose main function was to provide a brief respite from the rigors of the city; rather, they were properly embedded in the rural landscape and represented a more substantial commitment by city dwellers to an alternative lifestyle.1 By the 1880s, in the words of one scholar, “cottage life became estate life writ small.”2 Thanks at least in part to an emerging arts and crafts movement, rusticity gained further ground in house design and interior decoration in the last part of the nineteenth century; by the early twentieth, it found a home on the pages of so Westernized a publication as the lavishly illustrated lifestyle magazine Stolitsa i Usad’ba, which in general projected itself as an arbiter of taste for the anglophile moneyed classes. In between advertisements for cigars and automobiles could be found recommendations to patronize the vernacular culture: “any remotely cultured family that does not want to ‘fall behind the times,’” the magazine informed its readers, should without fail acquire at least a few pieces of antique Russian furniture.3
But, as one recent historian of the usad’ba is at pains to point out, even if the architectural forms of the dacha sometimes bore a resemblance to those of the country estate, its “culture” was still of a rather different order:
It is important to emphasize that, when touching on the theme of the gradual increase of typical dacha features in wooden buildings on country estates, we need to be clear that this kind of architecture by no means always served to facilitate the operation in its environment of the superficial, unreflective, banal everyday life characteristic of the dacha.4
Of course, the line between banality and originality is not always easy to draw (particularly in an era of eclecticism), so it is little wonder that some property owners self-consciously took on the role of landowner (pomeshchik) in preference to that of dachnik. The property of Shakhmatovo, acquired by Aleksandr Blok’s maternal grandfather, A.A. Beketov, in 1875, was deemed by its owners to be a landed estate (pomest’e) although its architecture and landholdings easily qualified it to be categorized as a dacha. In the words of Blok’s cousin: ‘It was always emphasized that we live ‘in the country’ and not ‘at a dacha.’ The dacha way of life was a synonym for vulgarity.”5
A floridly rustic dacha of the 1870s (from N. Zheltukhin, Prakticheskaia arkhitektura gorodskikh, zagorodnykh i sel’skikh zdanii [St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1875])
The Beketovs were a well-established noble family who had fallen on slightly hard times after 1861; by the 1870s their social and cultural allegiances made them members of the “old” intelligentsia rather than of the nobility. Their preference for the estate over the dacha was shared, if for rather different reasons, by Anton Chekhov, very much a member of the “new” intelligentsia. Driven by the need to conserve his health and to save money (the cost of maintaining an extended household in Moscow was stretching his means to the limit), but also by a long-standing aspiration to own and maintain an independent rural landholding, Chekhov bought in 1892 the estate of Melikhovo, located in Serpukhov uezd, at the southern end of the Moscow region. But even before that, in the 1880s, the “dachas” that Chekhov rented had tended to resemble usad’by: most of them were buildings rented from estate owners and were remote enough to require an arduous journey. The Pasternaks, who in many ways resembled the Chekhovs (their family too was headed by a brilliantly successful self-made artist from the periphery of Russia), were similarly able to experience the splendid isolation of estate life while holding the formal status of dachniki: from 1903 on they rented a house on a near-deserted and agriculturally inactive usad’ba located one hundred versts southwest of Moscow and owned by one of the princes Obolenskii.6 For those summerfolk willing to make a more long-term commitment to country life, the ideal was to buy up a neglected manorial estate trimmed of its serf landholdings, to repair as necessary its crumbling main residence, and to restore its social and economic vitality.7
A dacha was defined less by the size or design of a house or by the layout of its grounds than by the way its occupants used it. The Melikhovo estate, for example, had become more like a dacha after the residence of its previous owner, the stage designer N.P. Sorokhtin, who had installed an overelaborate carved porch and neglected the landholdings. The Chekhov family directed Melikhovo back toward its function of usad’ba by planting trees, carrying out noncosmetic repairs, and taking very seriously their role as owner-managers. But even so, their lifestyle retained something of the dacha in that they received a steady stream of visitors from Moscow, and Melikhovo became a focus for the informal sociability with which the dacha even then had become synonymous.8
Despite this point of resemblance, the Chekhovs were keen to dissociate themselves from the dacha. In the words of Chekhov’s sister, “Our country life on our own estate, surrounded by forests and fields, was better than any ‘dacha’ life that we had experienced previously.”9 This attitude was hardly untypicaclass="underline" the culture of the time regularly presented the dacha as a meretricious, low-grade alternative to the country estate, as at best a stepping-stone to the usad’ba. In one of the situation comedies that were a staple of prerevolutionary theater, a disenchanted dacha resident reflects regretfully on his decision to sell his ancestral estate so as to move to Moscow. Now he is renting a drafty and overpriced dacha and enduring an unpleasant daily commute. His wife, by contrast, adores the new arrangement, as she has entertainments at hand and the opportunity to amuse herself by speculating in stocks and shares.10 The uneasy relationship between the world of the traditional landed nobility and that of the dachnik is captured more subtly in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, where the unsympathetic narrator recalls how, as the adolescent son of the lord of the manor, he haughtily turned down his hero’s awkwardly delivered invitation to take part in amateur theatricals.11