Savva Mamontov’s Abramtsevo is perhaps the most famous case of intervention by new money in the cultural life of late imperial Russia. Mamontov bought the estate from the descendants of I. S. Aksakov in 1870; his subsequent development of the property neatly illustrates the transition from the old world of the country estate to something more culturally dynamic. Mamontov sought to invest the forms and some of the traditions of life on the estate with a radical new content: guests were invited not for their allegiance to a clan but rather for the contribution they could make to the life of the community. Once again, whether we should describe Abramtsevo as a dacha depends on whose perspective we adopt. Mamontov himself, as the owner of the property and manager of its affairs, certainly regarded it as an estate; but his visitors perhaps thought of it more casually as a dacha, where they had no household responsibilities and were in residence only temporarily. In the opinion of Il’ia Repin, Abramtsevo was “the best dacha in the world."19
At the dacha, better than anywhere else, we can find evidence of the coming together of merchant bourgeoisie and intelligentsia—of the creation of a cultivated “middle-class” lifestyle. The self-sufficiency and cultural hermeticism of even elite members of the merchant estate around 1840 contrasted strikingly with the Westernized self-confidence of the Tret’iakovs and Bakhrushins in the 1900s. Merchant families of this third generation were able to see themselves as a leisured class and were quite prepared to think of themselves outside their social and occupational contexts.20 An exuberant contribution to this new leisure culture was made by the Alekseev merchant dynasty, one branch of which bought the estate of Liubimovka (at Tarasovka, on the Iaroslavl’ railway line) in 1869: fifty desiatinas remaining from the formerly enormous landholdings of the Trubetskois and Belosel’skiis in this area. Liubimovka soon became the venue for numerous amateur performances, initially in a decrepit outbuilding but then (from 1877) in a purpose-built theater. Among the most enthusiastic participants was the young Konstantin Alekseev (better known by the name he later assumed, Stanislavsky). As a grown man, Stanislavsky, as much as anyone, sought to develop a socially and culturally mature intelligentsia by overcoming the boundaries separating commercial and cultural elites. And in his experience, no setting did more to erode those boundaries than exurbia.21
The dacha, then, gained some respectability from its partial cultural convergence with the country estate; but it was also lent legitimacy by perceptions of its unmediated relation to the natural world and to the rural “good life.” Ivan Shishkin may be seen as having initiated this change in sensibility when in 1856, as a promising student at the St. Petersburg Academy, he spent the summer working on landscapes at Lisii Nos, subsequently a dacha location highly valued precisely for its scenery and fine views over the Gulf of Finland.22 In his later career Shishkin painted dozens of forest scenes that became canonical as representations of an authentically Russian landscape.
The following generation of the intelligentsia may be said to have followed Shishkin’s lead by conceiving of the dacha as a secluded retreat entirely removed from the city. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov spent the summer of 1880 on the Stelevo estate, thirty versts the other side of Luga, on which he remarked: “For the first time in my life I’ve had the chance to spend the summer in the genuine Russian countryside . . . everything was in special harmony with my pantheistic mood at that time.” One of Rimsky’s fellow composers went even farther afield, to a dacha in Tula guberniia: “the dacha consisted of a spacious peasant izba. They [the Borodins] didn’t take many things with them. There was no kitchen range, they prepared food in a Russian stove. Life was clearly extremely uncomfortable, crowded and with all kinds of privations.”23
The values of simple lifestyle and natural beauty are often ascribed to the dacha in émigré writings, which are so often informed by the idées fixes of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia. Zinaida Zhemchuzhnaia, by her upbringing very much a creature of the country estate, came to recognize the appeal of the dacha lifestyle in emigration in north China, where she saw thick forest that reminded her of home and breathed air “like in Switzerland.”24 And the writer Boris Zaitsev, visiting Kelomiakki (now Komarovo, a dacha location famous in Soviet times as a center for the Leningrad intelligentsia) in 1935, found it a vivid reminder of the Russia he valued. “How much there is of Russia here!. . . The smells are quite Russian: a sharply sour one of marsh, pine, and birch. . . .And the whole cast of life here is Russian, like before the war.”25
Zaitsev here echoes numerous prerevolutionary voices: at the turn of the century the North came to be seen as the main geographical repository for Russianness. Proximity to the coast only heightened the effect of resorts such as Kelomiakki by drawing attention to a location’s detachment from civilization (to face the sea every morning was, for a Russian, truly to feel that one had reached the end of the world). Seaside retreats, preferably built in the fashionable pseudo-Russian style, gained great cultural prestige through the 1890s and 1900s. The family of Viktor Shklovskii had aspirations to build themselves a vacation home on the Baltic coast, but their money ran out and they had to sell the property.26 More successful was the writer Leonid Andreev, who in 1908 moved into a fifteen-room dacha modeled on an “ancient Norwegian castle” with a turret and splendid views over the Gulf of Finland. The family retained a flat in St. Petersburg, but Andreev increasingly gravitated toward his country residence, which he called a “house,” not a “dacha.”27As the most spectacularly successful Russian writer of this period, Andreev was able to live on the grand scale: several of the rooms were (given the severe winters) impractically enormous, guests arrived frequently, and a large staff of servants was in constant attendance. With its Gothic fittings and dark-oak interior, moreover, the house served as a fitting arena for the writer s increasingly fraught and self-dramatizing behavior.28
But Andreev’s house, which reflected so well that writer’s extravagant and obsessive personality, was far from typical. In the 1900s, other representatives of the artistic intelligentsia were busy reinventing the dacha as a place for intense and purposeful sociability, creative work, and self-sufficiency. This dacha ethos was exemplified by Kornei Chukovskii, the self-made critic, scholar, and writer, who by the time he moved to a house in the Finnish seaside village Kuokkala in 1906 was already one of the more prominent figures on the Petersburg intellectual scene. Kuokkala was the perfect place for him to indulge his puritanical habits and overdeveloped work ethic. From his daughter Lidiia’s memoirs we learn that he could not stand idleness—in his own family or in others. Nor could he understand the purpose of purely social visits (here, of course, he differed from most of the nineteenth-century dacha-frequenting intelligentsia). If he dropped in to see one of his near neighbors at Kuokkala (now Repino)—notably Il’ia Repin himself—it was to engage immediately in intense intellectual discussion. He did not shirk physical work, carrying out all home repairs himself. And there was plenty of physical work to be done, as life at Kuokkala was far from luxurious. Water, for example, had to be fetched from Repin’s Penaty; and Chukovskii particularly relished painting fences and other odd jobs. The Chukovskii family stayed at Kuokkala for portions of the autumn and winter, and for this reason saw themselves as authentic “locals,” unlike dachniki, who “scuttled back to Petersburg as soon as autumn, rain, and storms began.”29 The household shared by Repin with his companion, Nataliia Nordman, had a similar commitment to purposeful activity, physical exertion, and straightforwardness of conduct, though it bore the rather specific imprint of Nordman’s vegetarianism and democratism: servants were given a detailed and, by the standards of the time, generous work contract, and visitors were informed on arrival, by a notice placed on a gong stand, that a regime of “SELF HELP” existed at Penaty; guests should not expect a servants help in transferring their outdoor clothing to the hat stand.30