Dachas also gave summerfolk scope to explore the new technologies of leisure. Cycling had caught on, first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow, in the early 1880s; by the early 1890s there were twenty cycling societies in Russia and numerous smaller associations.49 This new means of locomotion was extremely well suited to life out of town. Whereas cycling was permitted only in specific places in the city, it did not fall foul of any regulations out of town. More positively, it brought settlements closer together and was valued especially by young people for providing them with an exciting new form of exercise and for greatly expanding their freedom of movement. Dacha periodicals regularly passed comment on the cycling phenomenon: some articles assessed its health benefits, while others referred to the nuisance value of two-wheel speed demons on narrow rural roads. Cyclists, according to one observer, were “afraid of nothing and no one,” and at critical moments thought nothing of maiming themselves or others; in some settlements ditches had been dug to hinder the progress of these “pioneers of bicyclical civilization.”50
The impact of the phonograph came slightly later but was even more marked. The first Russian recordings date from the late 1890s, but it was not until around 1910 that the phonograph became a commonly owned piece of equipment rather than a technical innovation to be marveled at. In dacha settlements it provided a novel aural backdrop to all manner of domestic activities and gave new life to social gatherings: now people could have music to bring a festive spirit to social occasions at all times of day and night.51 The main cultural effect of sound reproduction, as of other innovations such as bicycles, improved rail links, telephones, and street lighting, was to give people a new sense of control over their own time.
Postcard view of Kliaz’ma station. Courtesy of Helsinki Slavonic Library.
Theater was another important form of collective entertainment for dachniki. Many of the larger settlements had theaters where performances were held regularly throughout the summer season. Besides forming the audience for visiting professional companies, dacha folk might also be involved in their own amateur productions. In the latter case, participation went far beyond merely bestriding the stage: a theatrical production was an enterprise that required coordinating the forces and resources of an entire dacha community. The standard practice, often remarked on in memoirs and fiction, was for a few enthusiasts to take the initiative and ask members of the community to contribute their time or money.52 For both amateurs and professionals, the staple repertoire consisted of comedies, vaudevilles, and one-act plays, many of them insubstantial farces set at the dacha, with stock situations and characters.53 Plays were often put on by close-knit groups of acquaintances (such was the case with the gatherings at Abramtsevo and Liubimovka), but performances might also be arranged for a broader section of the local population. Unsurprisingly, amateur theater met a hostile response from many of the theater journals, which took it upon themselves to defend the high art of the professionals. But the amateur performances, as far as we can judge, were generally well attended and well received. They were, it seems, a rather different kind of cultural institution from the “serious” theaters, deriving much of their appeal from easy audience identification with the events acted out onstage.54 Dacha theaters, allied to the many other summerfolk recreations, testified to a cultural independence and assertiveness that was unwelcome to some observers.
Discourses on the Dachnik
As will perhaps be apparent by now, social observation in late imperial accounts of the dacha was often overlaid with stereotype and prejudice. The dacha, despite—or rather because of—its ever increasing accessibility to urban Russians, had an increasingly serious image problem from the 1870s on. More precisely, the dacha had become too broad a phenomenon to condemn out of hand, and so distaste for the petit bourgeois philistinism (meshchanstvo) that it seemed to harbor was displaced onto the dachnik. Run-of-the-mill comfortable middle-class pleasure seekers were anathema both to wealthy conservatives and to the Russian intelligentsia, being seen by the former as vulgar upstarts and by the latter as unbearably complacent and materialistic. A lot of the objections raised were familiar from earlier generations of exurban commentary. The dacha boom was seen to be driven by fashion, by a “herd instinct of imitation.”55 A soulless love of luxury was replacing the stylistic restraint of earlier decades; ostentatious dachas were subject to disapproval as being parasitical.56 Where owners had to choose between superficial flourishes and basic building standards, they opted for the former. Just as earlier in its history, Krestovskii Island was cited as an overcrowded enclave for “cardboard houses imitating Gothic castles and Greek villas.”57 Fears of declining taste, commonly expressed from the 1840s on, only intensified in the early twentieth century. “The main decorative element in our dachas is provided by innumerable carved decorations, which give the buildings a vulgar and unsettled look that absolutely does not harmonize with the natural environment.”58
Although the Russian intelligentsia’s much-fabled oppositional unity was coming under severe strain as early as the 1880s, some of their cultural hierarchies have remained intact to the present day. And the dachnik has often been located near the bottom of such hierarchies, on a par with the meshchanin. It is worth pondering why. The reason appears to be that, in the eyes of the opinion-forming intelligentsia, dachniki, unlike meshchane, ought to know better. They have education and—by definition—leisure, and have an obligation to do more with these advantages. Take the following soapbox pronouncement made by a character in Gorky’s sub-Chekhovian Dachniki (part of a trilogy of plays that Gorky, with his customary light touch, envisaged as a critique of the “bourgeois-materialistic intelligentsia”): “The intelligentsia—that’s not us! We’re something else . . . we are dachniki in our own country . . . some kind of foreign visitors. We rush about, try to find ourselves comfortable niches in life . . . we do nothing and talk a disgusting amount.”59The opposition between talking and doing is a standard contribution to a cultural tradition: several generations of literary heroes (Chatskii, Onegin, Rudin) had shown talk to be cheap and ineffectual. But dacha folk were doubly vulnerable to criticism because they both liked talking and—unlike Rudin and Gorky’s character—were unconcerned by their failure to “do” things. Dachniki were strangers in their own land: not tortured “superfluous” people but something akin to the self-satisfied German tourist, the butt of much unkind comment in our own time. This notion is picked up in a sketch by Nadezhda Teffi, one of the leading contributors to the humor magazine Satirikon: “The first dachnik arrived from the West. He stopped near the village of Ukko-Kukka, had a look around, uttered the words ‘Bier trinken,’ and sat down. And around him a croquet lawn, a card table, and a red-hemmed canvas parasol instantly materialized.”60