This is not to suggest that the summerfolk were a monolithic bunch. Of course, the dacha differentiated as much as it united. Members of the State Council took their summer vacations in surroundings rather unlike those experienced by a tradesman. Quite apart from such obvious differences in scale and splendor, dacha users varied strikingly in the ways they thought of their summer houses; and such variation was socially and culturally marked. The conflicts and convergences between engagé intelligentsia and commercial elite, between noble and nonnoble, between visual and verbal culture were modeled by attitudes toward the dacha and—especially—the dachnik.
In an account of the dacha it is thus easy to rehearse familiar truths about the failure of the late imperial middle to cohere into a self-conscious, civically active bourgeoisie. What seems more noteworthy, however, is the extent to which the dacha engaged the attention and the cultural energies of Russian urban society. On a personal level, most members of this society had a stake in the out-of-town experience. Dachas were valued subjectively as a relaxing and pleasurable amenity, as a way of testing a lifestyle prophesy made in the first issue of Russia’s equivalent of Country Life: “Fine living is not accessible to everyone, but it does nonetheless exist, it creates special values that someday will be possessed by all.”112 Yet, if we examine the cultural meanings circulating more widely in urban society, the lot of summerfolk sometimes appears to have been an unhappy one. As in England one can consider oneself a member of the middle class and yet use the term “middle-class” as a pejorative, so in late imperial Russia it was quite possible to love one’s dacha yet poke fun at the dachniki. Dachas were able to elicit multiple and ambivalent responses because they stood apart from the city while remaining entirely the prerogative of urbanites; because they brought together people who, although they inhabited the same city, might otherwise belong to different worlds; and because, as isolated pockets of middle-class culture in a polarized society, they provided an opportunity for that middle class to contemplate itself. Paradoxically enough, if we wish to study the urban civilizations of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late nineteenth century, there is no better place to start than outside the city.
1. Pattern books that illustrate this trend are “Arkhitekturnyi sbornik” sel’skikh postroek i modnoi mebeli (Moscow, 1873); and N. Zheltukhin, Prakticheskaia arkhitektura gorodskikh, zagorodnykh i sel’skikh zdanii (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1875). Whereas the pattern books of the 1830S and 1840S (discussed in Chapter 2) commonly speak of the “country cottage” (sel’skii domik) for dacha-type constructions, in the 1870S the diminutive is removed and the sel’skii dom becomes the focus of attention. From this change we might infer that in the earlier period rusticity had been a form of stylization, whereas later on it was treated with less cultural detachment.
2. J. Randolph, “The Old Mansion: Revisiting the History of the Russian Country Estate,” Kritika 1 (2000): 744
3. I. Lazarevskii, “Kollektsionerstvo i poddelka,” Stolitsa i Usad’ba, no. 7 (1914), 24.
4. T.P. Kazhdan, Khudozhestvennyi mir russkoi usad’by (Moscow, 1997), 181. Some of the ungainliness of the original has been preserved in the translation.
5. Quoted in A. Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, vol. 1, The Distant Thunder, 1880–1908 (Oxford, 1979), 38. Even where a family’s summer residence was unhesitatingly called a “dacha,” in intelligentsia circles emphasis tended to be placed on its remoteness from urban civilization and its rustic simplicity. One example was the house in Tarusa (Kaluga guberniia) where Marina Tsvetaeva and her sister Anastasiia spent much of their childhood. Anastasiia (no doubt self-deludedly) recalled the summers they spent there as a time of untroubled simplicity: see her Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1971), 52–60. Marina’s memories were also extremely upbeat, but she presented Tarusa more assertively as emblematic of her family’s heroic spirit and as radically opposed to the cluttered and pretentious interior she found at the “dachlet” of an acquaintance who lived nearby: see “Zhenikh” (1933), in her Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1988), 2:16.
6. A.L. Pasternak, Vospominaniia (Munich, 1983), 95–97.
7. See, e.g., A. Ianishevskii, Dacha na Volge (Kazan’, 1900).
8. An account of Chekhov’s experiences can be found in Kazhdan, Khudozhestvennyi mir, 291–303. Kazhdan identifies Melikhovo as an “intermediate” form between estate and dacha; she sees it as a “Chekhovian” model of the estate, quite distinct from the “Turgenev” model (301–2).
9. Chekhova, Iz dalekogo proshlogo, 116.
10. N.L. Persiianinova, Bol’shie i malen’kie (Moscow, 1912). Eventually, of course, the wife sustains huge losses on her dealings and offers to teach evening classes to make up the money.
11. V. Nabokov, Pnin (London, 1997), 148–50. Note also Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, where the author’s first love, Tamara, comes from the culturally remote dacha (thereby, perhaps, gaining added fascination in his eyes).
12. G. Iu. Sternin, “Abramtsevo: Ot ‘usad’by’ k ‘dache,’” in his Russkaia khudozhestvennaia kul’tura vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX veka (Moscow, 1984), 186.
13. Ibid., 199.
14. N.A. Leikin, Neunyvaiushchie Rossiiane (St. Petersburg, 1912), 227.