Many of them, it might well have been thought, were drunk, though some of them were wearing smart and elegant clothes; but among them were also men who looked very peculiar, in peculiar clothes and with peculiarly flushed faces; some of them were army officers and some were far from young; there were also among them men who were comfortably dressed in wide and well-cut suits, wearing diamond rings and cufflinks, and magnificent pitch-black wigs and side whiskers, with an imposing though somewhat fastidious expression on their faces, who in society are, as a rule, avoided like the plague. In our holiday resorts [zagorodnye sobraniia] there are, of course, people who are remarkable for their quite extraordinary respectability and who enjoy a particularly good reputation, but even the most circumspect person cannot always be expected to protect himself against a brick dropping from the house next door. Such a brick was about to drop now on the highly respectable public who had gathered to listen to the music of the band.69
Dostoevsky was not the only observer to notice a distinct change in the composition of concert audiences at Pavlovsk. Newspapers of the 1870s readily passed comment on the “mixed public,” which included “workmen with unpleasant faces,” “salesmen and minor civil servants and their families”; Pavlovsk, it was alleged, had become “the haunt of all ranks and all social estates.”70 In 1891 a feuilletonist commented that the moneyed bourgeoisie had largely elbowed aside the titled aristocracy; even worse, “physiognomies of the Jewish type” and “ladies of’that’ kind” had made their appearance. All in all, a public holiday in Pavlovsk had become indistinguishable from those in open spaces in the center of the city.71 Rents were considered to have been kept too high in view of competition from places such as Shuvalovo and Ozerki.72 By the early twentieth century, Pavlovsk was even starting to look neglected.73
The report on vacation places with built-in social commentary became an established minor genre of journalistic prose in the second half of the nineteenth century. Take the following description, contemporaneous with Myshkin’s Pavlovsk misadventures, of a public holiday in the sleepy spa town of Lipetsk:
The public walk around the paths in twos and threes, with dignity, maintaining a deep silence, with long faces and placid expressions, as if forming some kind of procession. . . . There’s no liveliness or gaiety, no originality in dress, no variety in peoples behavior; everyone looks at everyone else, worried that they might stand out from the others in some way. This is obviously a provincial public who expend all their energy on not compromising themselves in the eyes of visitors from the capital by undue familiarity or anything unusual.74
Here the emphasis was on provincial backwardness, but reports on dacha places near the two major cities were most often presented specifically as evidence of the nobility’s weakening social position, which might be construed as social degeneration or as a more healthy social development, according to the author’s preference. The latter view was taken by one Moscow journalist in 1860:
These days Sokol’niki is more the home of merchants, foreign traders, in fact all foreigners, who spend more on their lifestyle and are more expert in doing so than the enlightened Russian nobility. But whining patricians to this day don’t like rubbing shoulders with the middle estate, they don’t even like observing them at close quarters. I don’t know what has caused this: whether it’s simply an inherited Asiatic caste prejudice or vanity gnawing away inside or, finally, an unexpressed awareness that real advantages these days do not at all correspond to estate privileges.75
By the 1870s and 1880s, the Petersburg and Moscow sensationalist press, while it had no particular love for “whining patricians,” tended to view overcrowded and heterogeneous dacha settlements as following a trajectory of inexorable social decline.76 Commentators noted a decline in linguistic propriety: “Instead of the tender murmurs and warblings of young resonant voices you hear flat, cynical quips, coarse jokes, and obscene conversations,” noted one Petersburg journalist of Novaia Derevnia.77 Leonid Andreev wrote that the population of Moscow’s night shelters each summer relocated to dacha settlements, where they slept outdoors and engaged in petty thievery.78 Andreev’s piece, alarmist though it is, does demonstrate that dacha settlements were particularly vulnerable to perceptions of social malaise, because they were filled with people of no instantly definable occupation; scroungers and spongers became stock dacha characters in the feuilletons of the time.79
Newspapers reported with particular relish violent and otherwise socially disruptive incidents in formerly prestigious settlements such as the Peterhof Road, Tsarskoe Selo, Krasnoe Selo, Peterhof, and Lesnoi Korpus. Thus in the summer of 1880 it came to public attention that a dacha governess had been trying to seduce a boy in her charge, that ladies had been harassed on the station platform at Krasnoe Selo, and that Peterhof had been afflicted by swindlers and falling prices.80 After a watchman told a cab driver in the Pargolovo area to slow down, the passenger leaped out, shouted insults, and then physically assaulted him.81 Thirty years later, the tenor of newspaper reporting had changed little. In a dacha settlement outside Warsaw the bloodied body of a “respectably dressed girl” was found at the edge of a wood. A youth, “an educated man [intelligent] by appearance,” was seen running away from the scene of the crime. The girl, it transpired, was the daughter of a merchant, and the young man had been pressing for her hand in marriage.82 In the village of Martyshkino, a bathing dacha lady came across a drowned worker.83 On reporting a suicide in the second-class carriage of a train heading for Peterhof, one local newspaper alleged that the victim was about to “commit some sort of terrorist act.”84
“Dacha delights,” a satirist’s view of the strains of dacha life (from Razvlechenie, no. 25 [1885])
Reports of suicides tied in neatly with the dubious reputation of many dacha settlements, especially those on the way to becoming suburbanized. Modern civilization, with its soulless cult of luxury and of the individual self, was held responsible for the suicide “epidemic,” as was the migration of hundreds of thousands of peasants to the city, which confronted them with moral dangers that they were ill equipped to resist. Almost invariably, the principle that suicide directly reflected social pathology was taken as axiomatic.85 And so reports of suicides in dacha areas, themselves characterized in the journalistic imagination by social and cultural marginality, were doubly resonant. Here journalists had the discursive support of some of Russia’s leading literary lights. Aleksandr Blok’s “Neznakomka,” for example, a genuine sensation on its first appearance in 1906, evoked the suburban seediness of Ozerki as the setting for the “unknown woman” of the title, who is a louche version of the Lady Beautiful so prominent elsewhere in Blok’s poetry.86