The St. Peter’s Day holiday was celebrated by Pargolovo aboriginals for three whole days. On the first day everything was fine and proper: peasant girls, women, and lads went around the village in groups singing and playing the harmonica; but by the evening there was a complete change of ambience: decorum was replaced by impertinence and unruliness, and all of a sudden the dachniki were under siege.101
The report went on to describe how an elderly gentleman had had his hat knocked off by a peasant lad, how two ladies had been harassed by drunken and foul-mouthed locals, and how three men had been prevented from entering a local restaurant by a group of drunken peasants who were urinating by the entrance. All the while the local police were nowhere in evidence. Reports on peasant violence in dacha settlements were as old as the Petersburg boulevard press itself, and they continued to the end of the imperial period.102In Pargolovo in 1880 a peasant boy hanged himself after he had taken the family’s plow out without asking permission and his horse fell at the first furrow, breaking the shaft.103 In 1909 a journalist reported that in Pargolovo III there were “four pubs, two wine stores, a wineshop, and other similar institutions” within a stretch of only 100 sazhens. “This once peaceful dacha resort now resounds every evening with drunken singing and the swearing of local hooligans.”104
The local newspaper for Pargolovo volost, although it often disputed the sensationalized reports found in the boulevard press, shared its perception of social tensions. In 1882 it contended that the “upper layers of the dacha population”—with the exceptions of “minor cases of bullying that have brought dachniki to the local police cell and of suggestions of dramas and romances that are supposed to have taken place during the present season”—should not bear responsibility for the general decline in standards of public behavior. Rather, blame should be attached to servants and to various kinds of migrants (in winter, spring, and autumn, these were laborers; in summer, peddlers, organ grinders, and beggars). In summer the population swelled from around 2,000 to 10,000 registered residents (the real number was significantly greater). The six village constables currently employed could not cope with the resulting waves of drunkenness and burglaries, and dachniki were unwilling to hire yardmen to keep an eye on their property.105
Mutual suspicion and incomprehension between dachnik and peasant had also become a common theme of fiction set in dacha settlements. Literary representations of the peasantry had by the 1880s a sizable history. In the sentimentalist age, representatives of the common people were human props in dramas of sensibility; in the mid-nineteenth century they emerged as full-fledged human beings with the potential to be dramatic heroes; but in the 1870s disappointment with the peasantry set in, and it only deepened thereafter. Poverty, hunger, adultery, and crime (without repentance) became dominant themes.106
In Gleb Uspenskii’s Quick Sketches (1881), the narrator, an educated commoner named Lissabonskii, has come back in despair from an expedition to spread enlightenment to the Russian village. His burning desire to communicate with the common people has given way to a powerful urge to lie face down in the damp grass and blank out all thoughts. The location he chooses for this summer of recuperation is a village some 150 versts from St. Petersburg. Here, however, he runs into the same problems he had encountered in his more socially engaged recent past. Take the following exchange with a “village proletarian”:
“Excuse my asking, but what kind of title might you have?”
“Why do you need to know that?”
“Just so’s I know, sir. You know, where are you from, how did you get here? These days, as you know yourself, you get all sorts of charlatans turning up.”
“I’ve come to spend the summer at the dacha,” I replied categorically. “I need to spend time in the country for my health.”
“So that’s what it is. You mean, you’ve come to us from Petersburg for your health in actual fact?”
“In actual fact for my health. Don’t you feel what the air is like here! Well, I want to fill my lungs with it.”
“With the air, sir?”
“Yes, with the air.”
“But isn’t there any air in Petersburg?”
“There is, but it’s awful.”
“Well, I never! So you mean it’s just for the air?”
“Yes!”
“Aha. You came here by machine [i.e., by train] actually because of the air?”
Silence.
“Nice to have you here.”
He fell silent and looked at me goggle-eyed, as they say.107
Peasants’ unreceptive attitude toward the dacha impulse is the subject, albeit from a different perspective, of a sketch by N. A. Leikin: a servant of peasant origin leaves her masters’ employment when she discovers they have rented a dacha near Oranienbaum, which she considers a “backwater”: “We purposely left the village to come to Piter [Petersburg] , and here you are dragging us back to the village. What kind of dacha is that—in a village!”108
Perhaps the most famous account of failed communication between dachnik and peasant is Chekhovs “New Dacha” (1898). In this story an engineer and his family take up residence in a dacha and make every effort to build bridges with the peasants of the neighboring village. (In fact, the engineer has quite literally built a bridge in their village.) But here again the peasants have difficulty understanding the dacha concept as it is explained to them: “In the new estate . . . they won’t be sloughing or sowing, they’ll just be living for their own pleasure, just so as to breathe the fresh air.”109 The peasants soon reach the conclusion that these dachniki are no more than landowners in disguise (“They’re landowners just the same”) and treat them accordingly: they shamelessly steal from them and encroach on their property, and at the same time expect their appointed feudal lord to keep an eye on them and resolve their problems.
THE PEASANTS in the stories by Uspenskii and Chekhov are bewildered by the designation “dachnik” until they impose their own very partial interpretation of it. Yet for all their ignorance, they were not so very unusual for their time in finding difficulties in understanding and using the language of social description. Discussion of imperial Russian society was based largely on the ostensibly fixed categories of “estates,” which, especially by the 1890s and 1900s, concealed a huge amount of social fluidity. The word “peasant,” for example, covered a multitude of occupations and social identities, many of them—especially in the Moscow and St. Petersburg areas—distinctly and increasingly urban in orientation.
Dachas, of course, did not provide a marker for a distinct social estate, but they became a useful shortcut for identifying people living in the major cities who were not peasants. The dacha came to be seen as one of the defining attributes of a late imperial “middle class.” All urban people, from members of the high political establishment down to shopkeepers, might own or rent a country house for the summer months. For all the changes in the dacha and its social constituency in the nineteenth century, one thing remained more or less constant: dachas were almost always used intermittently by people whose main place of work and residence was the city. They were a form of settlement spatially separate from the city but in every other way—socially, culturally, economically—contiguous with it. Summerfolk, unlike the noble families of Russian cultural iconography who repaired to their country estates, did not take up residence out of town so as to relinquish their ties to the urban environment. Take the following rapturous musings by a recent bride strolling up and down a dacha platform with her husband in Chekhov’s “Dachniki” (1885): “How wonderful it is, Sasha, how wonderful!. . . You really might think that all this is a dream. Just see how cozy and affectionate the trees look. How lovely these solid, silent telegraph poles are! They . . . liven up the landscape and tell us that over there, somewhere, there are people and—civilization.”110 The dachnik was by definition a marginal figure in the rural landscape: a heavy-footed intruder breathing tuberculosis and the Neva onto the ruddy-faced village population, an Adam munching his own urban apple in an (admittedly far from paradisiacal) Russian Eden.111