But tensions of this kind had emerged only recently. Formerly, roughly up to the 1860s, the distinction between the dacha and the country estate had been relatively clearcut and nonemotive. The dacha was oriented toward the city and represented temporary occupancy and brief periods of leisure unencumbered by the management of extensive lands and agricultural concerns; the estate, by contrast, was embedded in a rural environment, involved some sort of agricultural commitment, and had a markedly “traditional” way of life and set of values based on seasonal and domestic routines and on lasting relationships with neighbors and the local community. What happened in mid-century, in the words of one art historian, was that the country estate moved from being the “subject” of culture to being its “object.”12 Or, more bluntly: it acquired a cultural prominence out of proportion to its social significance. By this time life at the estate had diversified to such an extent that its social profile was complex and not conducive to easy generalizations. Economic factors, moreover, were reducing the scale and the number of country estates. But here a compensating cultural mechanism played its role: the usad’ba became an emblem of a golden age of social harmony, high (especially literary) culture, and rural authenticity. The dacha, by contrast, began to connote “the vulgarity and prosaic aspects of reality and its unattractive, distorted features. This kind of dacha world, in which people lost touch with themselves, could not become the subject of culture.”13 The strength of this stereotype is shown by its power to shape scholarly perceptions even in the 1990s, as the passage quoted above on “the banal everyday life characteristic of the dacha” amply illustrates.
There were, of course, ways of avoiding the charge of banality. As we have already seen from the example of Chekhov, dacha folk from the cultural elite were able to construct their own model of cultured exurban existence, drawing where necessary on the traditions of the usad’ba. Some of the most creative efforts in this vein came from the merchantry, a section of society that had always struggled to find an authoritative public voice but now was growing in cultural activity and assertiveness. This occupational group was large and heterogeneous, like any of imperial Russia’s social “estates” (sosloviia). Membership in a guild had been the main route of social advancement for generations of peasants; most of them remained modest tradespeople rather than prosperous entrepreneurs. As time wore on and their socioeconomic position stabilized, many ordinary merchant families were abandoning their former cultural isolationism, becoming assimilated to urban civilization, and taking up the dacha habit that had emerged as an essential part of this civilization. The journalist N.A. Leikin, a self-made authority on Russia’s Grub Street, was in no doubt of the softening of merchant ways that took place on acquisition of a dacha by the Karpovka: tattered shoes were exchanged for elegant pumps, a printed cotton smock gave way to a linen shirt, and the newly exurban tradesman even stopped eating Lenten dishes on Wednesdays and Fridays.14
The top end of the merchantry made an even more striking contribution to dacha culture. A small number of wealthy entrepreneurial families had intermarried with the nobility and the intelligentsia, and came to play a prominent part in the cultural life of the fin de siècle. For these select clans, the dacha was not an entrée into urban “respectable” society but rather a social center in its own right, a minor country estate connected not so much to the local community as to independent, often literary and artistic social networks. For this reason, they looked farther afield for their summer residences than Pavlovsk, Peterhof, or the Karpovka. A. A. Bakhrushin, head of a family that had made its money in the leather trade and founder of the Theater Museum in Moscow, first rented a dacha when he already had a family, in the late 1890s. After a first summer in Izmailovo, he took a house on the estate of Gireevo for the next few years. His son recalled that these were “not even dachas, but little wooden houses built on someone’s whim and subsequently abandoned.” The dwellings were widely spaced out on the estate lands; a couple were occupied by the owners, the Terletskii family. The oldest Terletskii, who owed his fortune to the vodka trade, was a man of an “antediluvian” stamp. His son, however, by now over fifty, although he had the main estate residence at his disposal, preferred to build himself an “anglified little dacha” with all conceivable comforts (full plumbing, electricity, even a phonograph). The main house was used only for lavish entertaining on the younger master’s name day.15
If the Terletskiis combined the country estate traditions of generous hospitality with a more up-to-date commitment to home comforts, the Bakhrushins valued Gireevo for the opportunity it gave them to rest from the rigors of city and commercial life. A.A. Bakhrushin enjoyed fishing and reading in the open air, while his wife took a more practical interest in planting flowers and tending the garden. Very unusually for people of their social position, in the early 1900s they departed for Gireevo as early as mid-March and returned to Moscow only in mid-September. By 1907, however, they were driven to look for another vacation spot, as the Terletskiis had begun to develop the estate for construction of smaller dachas and the place was quickly losing its secluded and unspoiled feel. They soon accepted an offer from the writer N. D. Teleshov of a spacious dacha on the Malakhovka estate with ten desiatinas of bordered land. This move marked a distinct shift toward a landowner way of life.16
The Bakhrushins were not alone among major merchant families in moving from a relatively modest rented dacha to something grander. P. M. Tret’iakov and his wife spent their first three summers together in a rented dacha off the Smolensk highway. They then spent ten years in Kuntsevo, about ten versts to the west of Moscow, in a two-story log house rented from the landowner Solodovnikova. The settlement was not wholly secluded, but the total number of dachas was smalclass="underline" eight owned by Solodovnikova, fifteen by the merchant Soldatenkov, and a few by another local landowning family, the Shelaputins. Kuntsevo was effectively an enclave for Moscow’s merchant elite, as is evinced by its rich cultural life and its level of amenities (most families, for example, had their own bathing tents moored to the bank of the Moscow River). The tempo and style of life were modeled more on the country estate than the dacha settlement. In the 1870s, for example, there were no permanent trading points: the baker staggered over regularly from a neighboring village, the butcher and the greengrocer came by cart from Moscow twice a week, and all other foodstuffs were bought from the local peasants. Yet Kuntsevo was close enough to Moscow for a merchant paterfamilias to commute to work daily throughout the summer.17 When the time came for a move, Tret’iakov was extremely resistant to his wife’s idea of buying a property “of the Turgenev type.” In his daughter’s words, he “did not recognize the right to own land of people who did not work the land with their own toil.” The compromise eventually reached was the long-term rental of a middling estate, Kurakino, on the Iaroslavl’ railway line. This move transformed the social life of the Tret’iakov family—not least because it brought them closer to the Mamontov clan, who owned an estate nearby.18