The 1960s intelligentsia inherited from their forebears not only a commitment to informal exurban association; they also shared their work ethic and their disdain for all the material trappings of life. The Soviet intelligentsia’s model of the writer living modestly and industriously at the dacha was created in the 1930s, as I suggested in Chapter 5. But it received further literary development in Konstantin Paustovskii’s “Empty Dacha” (1946), where a writer holes up to write a story and eventually reads it aloud to an audience of ordinary folk, who respond to it well; and in Andrei Bitov’s “Life in Windy Weather” (1963), where a self-obsessed writer, trying to overcome his creative apathy, retreats to his top-floor study in a picturesquely decaying dacha owned by his wife’s parents.88 In Trifonov’s Another Life (1975), moreover, an authentically rural dacha is the setting for a crucial row between the novella’s protagonist and an unscrupulous colleague who subsequently does much to ruin his academic career.89
Dacha asceticism could be said to be exemplified by the shared dacha Anna Akhmatova, by then the grande dame of the literary counterculture, occupied at Komarovo (though not by choice). In Lidiia Chukovskaia’s memoirs, Akhmatova’s difficult circumstances are implicitly contrasted to the smart terrace and multicolored crockery of Margarita Aliger’s Peredelkino dacha and even to the Pasternak residence (where Akhmatova paid a visit in 1955, only to be told that the Pasternaks were not at home).90 Although Ko-marovo performed a role similar to that of Peredelkino in providing an exurban center for the intelligentsia, it acquired a rather different cultural profile, being seen as more detached from literary intrigue and urbanity than the Moscow writers’ village. A poem by Joseph Brodsky, Akhmatova’s protégé, gives the settlement its old Finnish name, shows it in winter, and strikingly plays off the poet’s house against the harsh landscape: this is a remote northern hamlet, not a dacha settlement.91
When the intelligentsia turned their attention to the exurban habits of other sections of Soviet society, the dacha found itself the object of a distaste reminiscent of earlier periods of Russian cultural history and given racy expression in an “urban romance” by the guitar poet Aleksandr Galich in which a spurned lover lists the reasons for her rival’s success:
Don’t pretend it’s her wet lips have cast a spell on you—
It’s because her daddy’s got a lot of privilege;
He’s got coppers on his gate, a nice place out of town,
Dad has pretty secretaries and smooth young men around;
Daddy’s got a CC card to buy from closed foodstores,
Dad can go to private films, that don’t get shown around.92
Тебя ж не Тонька завлекла губами мокрыми,
А что у папы у ее дача в Павшине,
А что у папы холуи с секретаршами,
А что у папы у ее пайки цековские,
И по праздникам кино с Целиковскою!93
Iurii Trifonov, perhaps the most penetrating literary observer of the ways of Soviet urban society, tended to present the dacha in rather similar terms: as a symbol of self-serving materialistic values. In The House on the Embankment, the dacha at Bruskovo is the first of Professor Ganchuk’s possessions that captures the imagination of his acquisitive, upwardly mobile, and ultimately treacherous protégé, Glebov. In The Old Man (1978), Pavel Evgrafovich Letunov, the pensioner of the title, has been a member of the dacha cooperative Burevestnik (Stormy Petrel) for more than forty years.94 Burevestnik (in 1973) is the backdrop for a typically Trifonovian generational conflict between the well-stocked memory and moral sensibility of an old revolutionary (Letunov) and the shortsightedness and materialistic values of his children and their spouses. The immediate cause of tension within the family is a dacha that has just fallen vacant after the sole remaining resident died without leaving behind any close relatives. Letunov’s son Ruslan and daughter Vera urge him to go and talk to the chairman of the cooperative, Prikhod’ko: as the most prominent Old Bolshevik in the settlement, he commands considerable respect, and his extended family claims it badly needs extra living space. But Letunov is reluctant to oblige: in part, he is dismayed by his family’s acquisitive instincts, but most of all he does not want to ask favors of Prikhod’ko, whom he has known and disliked for several decades (ever since he sat on the commission that expelled Prikhod’ko from the Party in the early 1920s). Letunov never does speak to Prikhod’ko about this matter, but the other main candidates for occupancy of the vacant dacha drop out of the running quite by chance. At the end of the novel, however, it appears that all the various parties’ efforts to gain influence over Prikhod’ko may count for nothing: the site has been earmarked for construction of a new boardinghouse for vacationers.
As always, Trifonov is highly informative on the networks of personal contacts (and, correspondingly, the destructive envy and petty rivalries) that pervaded Soviet society. The importance of blat in obtaining building materials and in determining priority in the allocation of dachas is highly reminiscent of dacha cooperatives in the 1930s (with the crucial difference that no one, not even the most flagrant abuser of the Soviet system, is likely to be branded an “enemy of the people”). Take the following interior monologue by Oleg Vasil’evich Kandaurov, the most aggressive fixer in the noveclass="underline"
There is some character called Gorobtsov who’s first on the list, not for this house specifically but for the first share that becomes available, and who’s now in the running, but it won’t be hard to compete with him, as he hasn’t done anything for the cooperative. But Oleg Vasil’evich has. He sorted out the telephones. Brought along rubberoid for the office. A year ago he went through the Mossovet, via Maksimenkov, to make sure that Burevestnik got allocated its own stretch of land by the river with a cabana and a small area for mooring boats. This pathetic lot wouldn’t have got a damn thing done without him.95