Nina Pavlovna eventually wins her husband over. They buy a house on a plot, having viewed it only in winter covered in snow. In the spring they are dismayed to find that it is in wretched condition. And the settlement itself is a disorderly sight:
And what about the houses?! Well, they were an open-air museum of folk architecture, no more, no less. . . .
Plots were handed out right after the war for growing potatoes: there was no documentation, no planning. Then, when an official inventory did take place, everything was frozen as it was.121
Despite all these apparent drawbacks, Igor’ Petrovich quickly finds himself forming a bond with the soil. Then, amazingly, he hits on the idea of building a new house from scratch himself. As he ponders his options on a walk around a neighboring settlement, he spots a dacha that embodies his ideaclass="underline"
The house contained an unimaginable variety of architectural styles of different eras and peoples. There were European blinds on the windows, the roof was crowned by a Gothic tower, there were north Russian carved window surrounds and cornices, a porch under an awning, once again carved. And all this had been painted as if the decorator, finding that one can of paint had unexpectedly run out, had grabbed another, the first one that came to hand, and when he’d finished that, took yet another, and carried on painting without thinking about how the colors sky blue, orange, green, and raspberry were coordinated. But the point was that the color coordination lay precisely in this apparent lack of coordination. The house was alive, it breathed, it made inspired play with the colors, entrancing passers-by even at a fleeting glance.122
This passage is extremely expressive not only of Soviet Russian standards of taste but also of an ostensibly un-Soviet concern with domestic space and pride in personal property. The owner of this dacha—who, it transpires, is a mouselike co-worker of Igor’ Petrovich’s—has, like another fictional dacha owner mentioned earlier, been saved from alcoholism by the acquisition of a plot of land. In a conversation with Igor’ Petrovich, he expounds on the destructive effects of beskhoziaistvennost’ (the neglect of property brought on by the absence of ownerly instincts), claiming that no word for this concept can be found in non-Soviet dictionaries.
Igor’ Petrovich himself joins the narrow but swelling ranks of capable and responsible Soviet dacha proprietors. He overcomes his scruples and has the friend of a friend deliver to him leftover building materials stolen from a construction site. With enormous determination, he sets about building a house. He even breeds rabbits. At the same time, he faces considerable obstacles: he is burglarized and he lives in fear of an inspection commission, which is rumored to be planning a visit to check on the provenance of building materials.
Soviet dachniki had good reason to consider these risks worth running. Dacha settlements may not have been the only places where Soviet citizens could indulge their proprietary urges, but there such urges took unusually visible, tangible, and individualized form. The attendant opportunities for self-fulfillment are abundantly evident in another piece of dacha fiction in which the hero, deeply offended by his wife’s less than enthusiastic response to the house he has gone to enormous trouble to build, explains to himself the attraction it has for him. In contrast to the rented accommodations where he has spent his whole life up to now,
here he had built a dwelling himself, with his own hands, he’d poured his own soul into this house. And even if it wasn’t much to look at, even if it wasn’t a grand residence or a villa, it was at least his, every last log in it had been nurtured by him, every detail had been polished and warmed in his hands a hundred times over. And this house wasn’t official [kazennyi], nothing here was slapdash. The desire to have your own house, either held openly or kept to yourself, can probably be found in every person, and it is indestructible.123
Yet the same character who here so passionately defends the dignity of personal ownership is tormented just a few lines later by the various deceptions he has had to perpetrate in order to complete his house. He has committed theft of state property many times over, which makes him no different from millions of other Soviet citizens, but which he nonetheless finds deeply shameful to admit. Dachniki, as we see clearly in this story, were caught between their aspiration (by the 1970s generally regarded as legitimate) to build a house of their own and the wholly illegitimate means that were required if this aspiration was ever to be met.124
This is by no means to say that all late Soviet summerfolk were similarly motivated. Interviews and memoirs suggest that the new opportunities for dacha construction and ownership met a mixed reception from the Soviet population in the 1950s and 1960s, and that the most significant variable was age. People who were adults setting up a home or returning to domestic life immediately after the war eagerly seized on the plots of land they were offered. Their children, however, were much less enthusiastic: members of the ’60s generation took more interest in tourism than in settling down to develop their own landholding. In their eyes, to receive a plot of land in a garden collective implied not relaxed enjoyment of one’s property but rather lengthy weekly round trips to inconveniently located and inadequately provisioned settlements followed by hours of backbreaking toil. For them ownership implied not status and security but responsibility and hard work.
It is tempting to see in these generational differences mere confirmation of a common life-cycle pattern: a young person values diversity and novelty, but by the time old age arrives he or she will positively welcome being restricted to a narrower and more stable set of experiences. In the Soviet case, however, other social factors were at work. Older people on the whole enjoyed far fewer educational opportunities than their children and performed much more than their fair share of household tasks. They were also much more likely to have personal experience of village life, and hence often retained a set of peasant attitudes even after several decades in the urban workforce: a belief in the importance and the dignity of physical activity, a commitment to working the land, and a desire to acquire a landholding where that commitment could be pursued.
Younger people were by no means certain to share these values, and they found a convenient bone of contention in the garden plot. The generation gap, accordingly, is one of the commonplaces of late Soviet dacha fiction. In one story, a thirty-year-old economist in Baku finds himself using up his spare time chasing up a mason to fix the roof of the dacha that his infirm mother is having built. Not until very recently, as she neared pensionable age, has his mother shown any inclination to work the soil, but now she is clinging stubbornly to the dacha idea—which in Azerbaijan takes the form of a cozy white house by the sea, surrounded by vines, with a veranda, a well, and a few chickens. Once the family has acquired a plot of land, however, they find that they do not really have time to build a house on it, especially given the difficulty of obtaining building materials and transporting them to the site. The son makes known his dissatisfaction with his mother’s “fanaticism,” but the story ends with a truce: she massages his overheated temples and he resolves to keep his misgivings to himself.125