The quotations from Teffi and Gorky also convey the shameless self-interest assumed to be characteristic of dacha folk. In typical accounts, dachniki are neglectful of other people’s property and of the environment; they are, moreover, unreceptive to anything that does not contribute to their material gain or short-term amusement. Thus in Ivan Bunin’s “Na dache” (1895) an architect’s son is sent for carpentry lessons to a Tolstoyan, Kamenskii, who lives at a nearby mill. In due course Kamenskii is invited to dinner by the dachniki, who want only the opportunity to poke idle fun at him.61 The dacha was commonly associated with a suspect detachment from the burning social and political issues of the day. In A. I. Gomolitskii’s “Na dache” (1911), descriptions of the view out of a dacha window are humorously and incongruously interposed with reflections on contemporary politics.62 The fourth of Sasha Chernyi’s “epistles” from a Baltic resort in 1908 observes the peaceful and harmless pursuits of other dachniki who in their working lives—as admiral, chief of police, teacher, and bureaucrat—are rather less inoffensive.63
Despite the prevalence of these unsympathetic portraits, however, it would be a serious oversimplification to divide dacha commentators into two opposing camps: a killjoy intelligentsia and a fun-loving proto-bourgeoisie. For one thing, representatives of the self-appointed cultural elite could not stand apart from the dacha phenomenon in the same neat way they could distance themselves from many manifestations of urban entertainment culture (taverns, cafés chantants, dance halls, and so on). Quite simply, they needed the dacha for their own purposes, a fact that was never wholly obscured by their attempts to draw a distinction between authentic and inauthentic models of exurban life. The same Gorky who railed against the dachniki in his play of the same name was a regular summer vacationer; he was even observed to shed tears at a melodrama playing at the local cinema in Kuokkala.64
Even more important, dachniki outside the elite cultural intelligentsia were not all fancy-free pleasure seekers. Unalloyed hedonism was not a viable option in an urban culture that, though it accorded increasing prominence to entertainment and consumerism, also clearly projected values such as self-sufficiency, prudence, restraint, hospitality, gentility, refinement, respectability, and cleanliness.65 Mainstream summerfolk were, in other words, not at all impervious to intelligentsia values. They too were likely to want hygiene, public order, and a civilized but not ostentatious lifestyle; they might even aspire to emulate aspects of the usad’ba. Many of the negative stereotypes and stories of dacha life circulated in periodicals that were read largely by dachniki. These stock narratives should therefore be regarded not as attempted suppression of the vacationing impulse but rather as implying a code of out-of-town values and behavior. They seem in significant ways analogous to Western urban legends. As Americans tell stories about cement-filled Cadillacs, ax-wielding maniacs, microwaved dogs, and deep-fried rats, so late imperial dacha narratives regularly returned to henpecked husbands, unruly youngsters, and cunning or drunken peasants. Although these stories seemed on the surface to show the dacha in an unfavorable light, their deeper function was to provide a safe outlet for common anxieties, to trigger shared emotional responses (laughter, diversion, schadenfreude), and to give expression to consensual notions of what dacha life should properly entail.
Besides the obvious topoi of conflict with peasant landlords, public indecency, and accidents (especially fires), dacha stories regularly returned to various kinds of antisocial behavior within the summerfolk population. Disagreements between neighbors, conducted over the garden fence, were a particular favorite. In one episode of 1875, a squabble between dacha wives rapidly escalated when the young son of one of the women threw a brick over the fence as the other’s husband returned home.66 One dacha owner of the early 1900s showed awareness of the long-standing stereotype when he wrote to his neighbor to clear up a dispute arising from the repair of a fence dividing their two properties: “I think that such a trifling quarrel is like the Gogol story ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich.’. . . So let’s not argue and let’s be good neighbors, especially as we’ve known each other since January 1876—in other words, we’re old acquaintances.”67
Although at its best the dacha could be emblematic of harmonious family life, it was also regularly presented as unbalancing relations between the sexes. Throughout the summer months, the “dacha husband” of the feuilletons was subjected to constant indignities as he trudged back and forth between home and office. In the more extreme depictions, married women came across either as green-belt strumpets or as harridans. Newspapers published with relish scenes of domestic conflict such as the following: “A crowd of curious onlookers gathered outside the dacha to watch the wife of the decorator G. M. beating her husband and then drawing blood by scratching the face of the lad who worked in her husband’s business. Blood flowed freely and the shouts could be heard all over Pargolovo.”68 The reporting of such incidents upheld the moral code of the implied dachnik audience while at the same time conveying a certain discomfort. For, although the dacha gave a wide range of urban folk unparalleled opportunities to develop a cultured, leisured, and enjoyable lifestyle, it also took them out of their natural habitat, leaving them as an isolated bridgehead of urban civilization in a rural world that did not share their commitment to fine living.
The Dacha and Late Imperial Social Diagnostics
There are few more eloquent commentators on post-Emancipation social anxieties than the unpredictable narrator of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Take the following description of Nastas’ia Fillipovna and her entourage as they prepare to descend the three steps to the Pavlovsk bandstand, thus provoking one of the novel’s several climactic skandaly: