A dacha in the style of “northern modernism,” located at Aleksandrovka (north of St. Petersburg). This dacha served as the summer residence of a professional family before the Revolution. In Soviet times it was split into four apartments.
A dacha at Siverskaia. According to its present owners (who bought the property in 1946), this is the oldest surviving house in the settlement. It was built in the 1890s.
A dacha at Aleksandrovka, another typical prerevolutionary design.
Exurban Recreations
The dachniki I have discussed so far were by and large members of the “free” professions. For them, time unencumbered by work commitments was nothing remarkable: they were well practiced in making what they considered to be gainful use of periods of recreation. But most of the dachniki who “scuttled back” to St. Petersburg or Moscow in the autumn did not have the option of staying longer: they might not own their own house in the country, and in any case their regular presence was required in the city. For summerfolk who were not writers or artists, exurbia brought with it an enticing novelty: a relative abundance of leisure time. The dacha represented a radical break with urban routine, and hence an opportunity to adopt a different, more open-ended pattern of life.
The projection of an exurban lifestyle and the legitimation of far niente can be traced through the proliferating magazines with illustrations (some of them even in color), many of which made tea on the garden terrace a regular tableau and accorded dignity to such activities as promenades, mushroom picking, and even postprandial snoozes. It was no longer shameful to do nothing or simply to want to enjoy oneself. As one columnist opined, after apologizing for what was already a commonplace, “we [Russians] don’t remotely know how to have fun and experience the ‘joys of life.’”31 Various forms of commercialized leisure in Russian cities at the turn of the nineteenth century—shopping, dining, cinema, light music, and so on—were in the business of instilling the requisite decorous joie de vivre and helping Russians to abandon the undesirable extremes of boorishness and undue earnestness that were conventionally ascribed to them. The dacha stood apart from these urban recreations yet in a sense surpassed them, as its whole environment predisposed city folk to relaxation, diversion, and domestic consumption. Such values were, for example, projected steadily in the local dacha periodicals that mushroomed in the 1890s and 1900s. Home decoration and home improvement were regular topics; advice was given on matters such as egg painting and the correct organization of a game of croquet; gossipy reports on local happenings were published in abundance; beauty tips were dispensed to women; and readers of both sexes were invited to savor the fictionalized exploits of dacha “Don Juans” and “Romeos.”32
The association of the dacha with leisure and consumption was strengthened by its detachment from the masculine workplace and its real and symbolic role in family life. Throughout its history the dacha has been above all a place for women and children, as men have generally continued to commute to work throughout the summer months (compare this situation with the parallel, but on the whole much more positively construed, “feminization” of American suburbia from the 1820s on).33 Comforting domesticity was, accordingly, a prime value for summerfolk. A proper family dacha might be of modest size, but it was to be kept clean and well appointed; everything in it should “breathe contentment.”34
Perceived to be a female dominion, dachas gave rise to stereotypes and humorous narratives concerning relations between the sexes. As early as the 1870s the put-upon dachnyi muzh was becoming a cliché of writings on the dacha. In 1899 the term was glossed in a dictionary of catchphrases as “a husband who leaves for work from the dacha and is given various errands by his wife, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, and neighbors.”35 In a Chekhov story, “Superfluous Men” (1886), a dacha husband arrives home tired from work only to find that his wife is out rehearsing for amateur theatricals; when she finally comes back, it is in the company of her fellow actors, and they proceed to conduct a further noisy rehearsal into the small hours.36 Other accounts went further still, suggesting that married women, in the prolonged absences of their commuting husbands, were able to establish suspiciously free-and-easy social relations with other men. The most famous novel of adultery in Russian literature contains a pivotal scene at Peterhof that enables Anna Karenina and Vronskii to have an uninterrupted and crucial tête-à-tête. Perhaps we should not accord too overriding a role in Anna’s affair to the dacha, as her infidelity is so thoroughly overdetermined (quite apart from being constrained by Tolstoy’s chain of symbolic connections, she is pregnant by this stage); but the fact remains that the dacha offered women more latitude than many writers professed to be good for the sanctity of marriage.37
As well as placing a premium on feminized domesticity, the dacha brought a release from the strict standards of urban decorum. Instead of going to the expense of taking with them all the furniture from their city apartments, summerfolk were urged to fill sacks with hay and use them as armchairs. Immobile intellectual pursuits were to be avoided; much better were tennis, croquet, boating, and bathing—and even “loud and lively conversation” could do much to aid the digestion.38 The three key elements in conduct at the dacha were “simplicity,” “hospitality,” and “modesty.” Casual visitors should be given a light snack (the servants should unobtrusively be asked to bring something in). Hosts should not treat longer-term house guests with urban formality. And guests should reciprocate by treating servants and animals in a friendly manner.39 To set store by urban hierarchies was to invite ridicule. In a sketch of the 1890s, a civil servant named Maksim Nikolaevich walks past a garden in his dacha settlement where the residents are playing cards. He himself is itching for a game, but is reluctant to invite his neighbors to visit because he considers them his social inferiors: one is a cook, the other a barber. To engage them in conversation, he contrives a pretext for stopping outside their fence: “I like your association. The fact that you’ve associated with one another and formed at least a small entertainment society. You know, this has a real European flavor.”40 The dacha, as presented in advice literature and illustrated magazines, was tied in with the search for new, more “civilized” forms of social intercourse, such as small talk, that allowed free, non-hierarchical, nonsexualized relations between men and women. As in so many other areas of late imperial middle-class culture, England was the preferred model for emulation.