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Between Arcadia and Suburbia: Dachas in Late Imperial Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Stephen Lovell
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Abstract

In the last few prerevolutionary decades, dachas (summer houses) became an amenity accessible to wide sections of the population of Russia’s two main cities. Dachas offered middle-income urbanites unprecedented scope to free themselves from the workplace, cultivate new lifestyles, and create new communities and subcultures. Dachas thus constitute an important element in the history of late imperial leisure, entertainment, consumption, everyday life, and urban development. They also illustrate the complexity and hybridity of urban culture in this period. The dacha public was diverse in its tastes and sociocultural allegiances; it blended the intelligentsia’s commitment to the simple country life with a more “petit bourgeois” interest in diversion and domestic comfort. As an isolated bridgehead of urban civilization in an undercivilized rural hinterland, the dacha provides an important focus for discussing the middle strata of Moscow and St. Petersburg. If the tag “middle-class” could be applied to anyone in late imperial Russia, it was to the dachniki.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 66 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2002

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References

I gratefully acknowledge the engaged criticism that drafts of this article received from Diane Koenker and the anonymous referees for Slavic Review. Thanks also to Barbara Heldt, Catriona Kelly, and Gerry Smith for helpful comments on other pieces of work.

1 Lotman, Iu., “Kamen' i trava,” in Lotmanovskii sbornik (Moscow, 1995), 1:82–84.Google Scholar

2 Faddei Bulgarin, “Dachi,” Severnaia pchela, 9 August 1837, 703.

3 “Gorodskaia khronika,” Razvlechenie, 1860, no. 25:304.

4 K. la. Poluianskii, Dachi: Temnye storony naemnykh dach i vygoda stroit’ sobstvennye dachi (St. Petersburg, 1894), 1. Although its rhetoric is commercially driven (Poluianskii was writing in order to attract more customers), this account does not seem too untrustworthy. A brief memoir by the Soviet writer N. S. Tikhonov, for example, confirms diat renting a small house or a couple of rooms in one of the villages just outside St. Petersburg was an established pattern of life in artisan communities at the turn of the century: see Brainina, B. la. and Nikitina, E. F., comps., Sovetskie pisateli: Avtobiografii (Moscow, 1959), 2:427–28.Google Scholar The presence of artisans and tradesmen in dacha settlements outside Moscow, and their part in a “middle-class” urban public, are likewise emphasized in Sobolev, A. K., Podmoskovnye dachi (Ocherki, nabliudeniia i zametki) (Moscow, 1901).Google Scholar

5 A sensible typology of nineteenth-century dacha settlements around St. Petersburg can be found in O. I. Chernykh, “Dachnoe stroitel'stvo Peterburgskoi gubernii XVIII-nachala XXvv,“2 vols, (unpublished dissertation, St. Petersburg, 1993), 1:38–43.

6 Putevoditel'po Tsaritsynu (Moscow, 1912).

7 See, for example, Sudeikin, G. M., “Al'bomproektov”dach, osobniakov, dokhodnykh domov, sluzhbit.p . (Moscow, 1912), 7–9.Google Scholar

8 Stori, V., Dachnaia arkhitektura: 12 proektov i smet deshevykh postroek (St. Petersburg, 1907), 1:3.Google Scholar Similar in the conclusions they invite are Tilinskii, A. I., Deshevye postroiki: 100 proektov, v razlichnykh stiliakh, dachnykh i usadebnykh domov, sadovykh besedok, ograd, palisadnikov, kupalen, sadovoi mebeli (St. Petersburg, 1913)Google Scholar, and Dal'berg, A., Prakticheskie sovety pri postroike dach (St. Petersburg, 1902).Google Scholar

9 Details of one case, the territory of the appanage farm (udel'naia ferma) outside St. Petersburg, can be found at Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, f. 1205, op. 12, dd. 369 and 370 (lists of dacha plot holders and descriptions of dacha buildings, 1888–91).

10 Materialy po statistike narodnogo khoziaistva, 16, Chastnovladel'cheskoe khoziaistvo v S.-Peterburgskom uezde (St. Petersburg, 1891), esp. 97-99.

11 Maksim Gor'kii’s Dachniki (1904) is the most famous, but by no means the only, piece of literary invective directed at the summerfolk.

12 Quoted in A. Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, vol. 1, The Distant Thunder, 1880–1908 (Oxford, 1979), 38.

13 See Chekhova, M. P., Iz dalekogo proshlogo (Moscow, 1960), 36–37, 67–88 passim, 100–101.Google Scholar

14 Pasternak, A. L., Vospominaniia (Munich, 1983), 95–97.Google Scholar

15 An account of Chekhov’s experiences can be found in Kazhdan, T. P., Khudozhestvennyi mir russkoi usad'by (Moscow, 1997), 291–303.Google Scholar Kazhdan identifies Melikhovo as an “intermediate” form located between estate and dacha and hence sees it as a “Chekhovian“ model of the estate quite distinct from the “Turgenev” model (301–2).

16 Chekhova, h dalekogo proshlogo, 116.

17 Persiianinova, N. L., Bol'shie i malen'kie (Moscow, 1912).Google Scholar Eventually, of course, the wife sustains huge losses on her dealings and offers to teach evening classes to make up the money.

18 A. A. Bakhrushin, for example, head of a family that had made its money in the leather trade and founder of the Theater Museum in Moscow, began in the late 1890s to rent a summer house on a thinly populated estate in the Moscow region. In the 1900s he continued to gravitate toward a “landownerly” pattern of life, leaving for the country as early as mid-March and returning to the city only in mid-September. See Bakhrushin, Iu. A., Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1994), 101–7, 290–95.Google Scholar The Tret'iakovs, similarly, moved from a dacha at Kuntsevo (effectively an exurban enclave for Moscow’s merchant elite) to a middling estate at Kurakino (on the laroslavl’ railway line): see V P. Ziloti, V dome Tret'iakova (New York, 1954), esp. 189. At Kurakino they were close to the Mamontov estate of Abramtsevo (bought from the descendants of I. S. Aksakov in 1870), which was perhaps the most famous case of intervention by “new money” in the cultural life of late imperial Russia.

19 See, for example, Ruane, Christine, “Caftan to Business Suit: The Semiotics of Russian Merchant Dress,” in West, J. and Petrov, Iu., eds., Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie (Princeton, 1998).Google Scholar

20 On Stanislavskii and Liubimovka, see Shestakova, N., Pervyi teatr Stanislavskogo (Moscow, 1998).Google Scholar Stanislavskii’s views on the social and cultural potential of his generation of the merchantry come across strongly in chapter 2 of his memoir My Life in Art, trans. J.J. Robbins (London, 1924). In chapter 29, he recalls how a barn on a friend’s estate a few versts from Liubimovka provided the venue for early rehearsals of the troupe that would soon become the Moscow Arts Theater.

21 Shuvalova, I. N., ed., Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin. Perepiska. Dnevnik. Sovremenniki o khudozhnike, 2d ed. (Leningrad, 1984), 38–39.Google Scholar The migration of landscape artists to the north is recognized as an established phenomenon in “Peterburgskoe obozrenie,” Severnaia pchela, 7 May 1860, 416. It received increased institutional backing in 1884 with the establishment of a retreat (later named the “academy dacha“) in Tver’ guberniia where students of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts could refine their skills each summer: see I. Romanycheva, Akademicheskaia dacha (Leningrad, 1975).

22 Rimskii-Korsakov, N., Letopis’ moei muzykal'noizhizni (1844–1906), 3d ed. (Moscow, 1926), 237.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 224.

24 Andreeva, V., Dom na chernoi rechke (Moscow, 1980).Google Scholar The artistic intelligentsia often used the word dom instead of dacha as a way of emphasizing the permanence of dieir ownership and the lived-in quality of the dwelling: examples include the house of Maksimilian Voloshin in Koktebel’ (which visitors occasionally called a “dacha,” but was most commonly considered a “dom”), the residence Chekhov had built in Ialta (in this case usage was divided more evenly between “dom” and “dacha”), and the house Mikhail Prishvin bought in a village near Moscow in 1946 (which was most definitely a “dom”).

25 This comes across very strongly in Davies, R., ed., Leonid Andreyev: Photographs by a Russian Writer (London, 1989), esp. 50–56.Google Scholar

26 L. Chukovskaia, Pamiati detstva (New York, 1983), 27.

27 Kelly, C., Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, 2001), 184–86.Google Scholar Voloshin’s “house” in the Crimea was similar in its democratic byt, though here the nonreliance on servants was less a social statement than a reflection of material constraints. Nordman would not, presumably, have required her guests to fetch water themselves, as did Voloshin. On the conditions Voloshin set for his visitors, see the letter quoted in Ostroumova-Lebedeva, A., “Leto v Koktebele,” in Kupchenko, V. P. and Davydov, Z. D., comps., Vospominaniia o Maksimiliane Voloshine (Moscow, 1990), 528–29.Google Scholar

28 See, for example, Barantsevich, K., “Poslednii dachnik,” in Kartinki zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1902).Google Scholar Furniture storage was anodier service frequendy advertised in the newspapers and targeted specifically at dachniki.

29 A prime example is the magazine Zhivopisnoe obozrenie in the 1880s and 1890s. Children’s books are another good source on the norms of easy-going dacha domesticity: see Leto v Tsarskom Sele: Rasskazy dlia detei (St. Petersburg, 1880), and Dachnyi poezd (Moscow, 1917).

30 Note the following examples: Dachnaia zhizri (a supplement to the middlebrow magazine Raduga published in 1885 and 1886 in Moscow); Dachnyi kur'er (a St. Petersburg newspaper published in 1908); Dachnaia gazeta (published in St. Petersburg in 1908); Dachnaia biblioteka (published in St. Petersburg in 1911); Dachnitsa (a weekly newspaper published in St. Petersburg in 1912); Dachnik (published in Moscow in 1912).

31 Examples in this paragraph are taken from advertisements in Moskovskii listok and Peterburgskii listok from the 1870s to the 1890s. The market for goods “specially for the dacha” draws comment in “Peterburgskaia zhiznɴ,” Khudozhnik, 15 May 1891, 617–18.

32 On America, see Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), esp. chap. 3.Google Scholar

33 Mikhel'son, M. I., Russkaia mysl’ i rech': Opyt russkoi frazeologii (St. Petersburg, 1899), 227.Google Scholar

34 M. V, Kakprovodit’ leto na dache (Dachnaia dietetika) (St. Petersburg, 1909). Similar in its insistence on simple furnishings and the rational use of domestic space is Khoziaiha doma (domoustroistvo) (St. Petersburg, 1895). The virtues of physical activity and exposure to the natural environment are also extolled in “Dachnik”: Dachnye mestnosti vblizi g. Kieva (Kiev, 1909). A parody of good intentions for the summer is Sasha Chernyi’s fourdi “episde” (of 1908) from the Baltics, in his Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1996), 1:135-36.

35 Zhizn’ v svete, doma ipri dvore (St. Petersburg, 1890).

36 Ibid., 108–10.

37 Dachnik, 1912, no. 5:12. Similar is Chekhov’s story “Dachniki” (1885), where a newlywed couple enjoying their privacy at the dacha unwisely take a stroll to the railway station and run into the husband’s uncle and his large family who have come to visit. Unwelcome dacha guests are also the subject of Sasha Chernyi’s “Mukhi” (1910), in Sobmnie sochinenii, 1:65–66.

38 On which see Rayfield, D., “Orchards and Gardens in Chekhov,” Slavonic and East European Review 67, no. 4 (1989): 530–45.Google Scholar

39 Chekhov, A. P., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1974–83), 3:21.Google Scholar There is a strong parallel here with bourgeois beach culture in western Europe, which presented the seaside as an ideal location for acquaintances to be made and matches to be expedited.

40 Zhizri v svete, 109.

41 One memoir account is Tsvetaev, V. D., Dubrovitsy: Iz dachnykh vpechatlenii (Moscow, 1907).Google Scholar Descriptions of such entertainments are abundant in late imperial dacha periodicals.

42 Cycling caught on, first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow, in the early 1880s; by the early 1890s there were twenty cycling societies in Russia and numerous smaller “circles.” See Blok, Iu. Velosiped: Ego znachenie dlia zdorov'ia, prakticheskoeprimenenie, ukhod za mashinoiu ipr. (Moscow, 1892), 25–26.Google Scholar

43 The first Russian gramophone recordings date from the late 1890s, but it was not until around 1910 that the gramophone became a commonly owned piece of equipment rather than a marvellous technical innovation. For an interesting history of early Russian sound reproduction, see Tikhvinskaia, L. I., “Fragmenty odnoi sud'by na fone fragmentov odnoi kul'tury,” in Dukov, E. V., ed., Razvlekatel'naia kul'tura Rossii XVIII-XIX vv.: Ocherki istorii i teorii (St. Petersburg, 2000).Google Scholar An ironic comment on the dacha gramophone craze isS. Marshak, “Dacha” (1911), in Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1968–72), 5:475–76.

44 Reports (sometimes as many as twenty at a time) can be found in the journal Rampa i zhizn' and in Artist i stsena.

45 The Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the St. Petersburg State Theater Library (the repository for manuscripts of all plays approved for performance in prerevolutionary Russia) contains over thirty plays with some direct reference to the dacha in the tide; the number set at the dacha must be significantly greater. On the generally acknowledged need for a lighter repertoire in the summer theaters, see S. Krechetov, “Letnii teatral'nyi stil’ i Malakhovskii teatr,” Rampa i zhiznɴ, 1912, no. 32:10–11.

46 See M. V. Iunisov, “‘Lishnii’ teatr: O liubiteliakh i ikh ‘gubiteliakh,ɴ” in Dukov, ed., Razvlekatel'naia kul'tura Rossii.

47 See “Dachnoe blagoustroistvo,” Dachnyi vestnik, 1899, no. 2:1.

48 Examples can be found in Tsentral'nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy, f. 64 (Moskovskoe gubernskoe po delam ob obshchestvakh prisutstvie), op. 1.

49 A further indication of winterization is the appearance of advice issued to “dachniki“ on kitchen gardening (ogorodnichestvo): see M. R., “Dachnye ogorody,” Dachnyi vestnik, 1899, no. 1:7–8.

50 Znakomyi, G., Dachi i okrestnosti Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1891), 49.Google Scholar

51 See Raevskii, F., Peterburg s okrestnostiami (St. Petersburg, 1902).Google Scholar

52 Dachnyi vestnik, 1909, no. 1:4.

53 “Ot redaktsii “ Dachnik, 1912, no. 1:2.

54 One response to the prevailing stereotypes of life in dacha settlements is “Chto ob nas govoriat i pechataiut?” Pargobvskii letnii listok (hereafter PLL), 13 June 1882, 2.

55 See, for example, “Novye Sokol'niki.” Dachnye uchastki: Imenie Anny Nikolaevny Kovalevoi (Moscow, 1911), and Opisanie Edinstvennogo v Rossii Blagoustroennogo Podmoskovnogo Poselka “Novogireevo” pri sobstvennoi platforme (Moscow, 1906).

56 E. Iu. Kupffer, Zhiloi dom: Rukovodstvo dlia proektirovaniia i vozvedeniia sovremennykh zhilishch (St. Petersburg, 1914), 197.

57 Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow was translated into Russian in 1904, and in 1913 a Russian garden city society was formed (it re-formed after the civil war period in 1922).

58 D. Protopopov, “Goroda budushchego,” Gorodskoe delo, 1909, no. 17:855-56.

59 Semenov, V., Blagoustroistvo gorodov (Moscow, 1912).Google Scholar

60 On which see V L. Ruzhzhe, “Goroda-sady,” Stroitel'stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada, 1961, no. 2:34–36. One of the first such projects was drawn up for the Stroganov lands just north of the Neva: see “Pervyi gorod-sad v Rossii,” Gorodskoe delo, 1911, no. 15–16: 1183–4.

61 Saladin, A., Putevoditel' po prigorodnym i dachnym mestnostiam do stantsii Ramenskoe Moskovsko-Kazanskoi zheleznoi dorogi (Moscow, 1914), 21.Google Scholar

62 Shteinberg, R N., Dekorativnyi dachnyi i usadebnyi sad, 3d ed. (Petrograd, 1916)Google Scholar, and Kamenogradskii, P. I., Dachnyi sad: Razbivka i obsadka nebol'shikh sadov i parkov derev'iami, kustami i tsvetami, 3d ed. (Petrograd, 1918).Google Scholar

63 Semenov, Blagoustroistvo gorodov, 1.

64 Note, for example, the strictures of the columnist “Staryi posel'chanin” (Old Settlement Resident) in Poselkovyi golos (St. Petersburg, 1909–10). Losinoostrovskii vestnik (1909–17) and Vestnik poselka Lianozovo (1908, 1913) reflect a similar range of concerns.

65 For a contemporary diagnosis of the problems, see K. Raush, “Prigorody bol'shikh gorodov i ikh puti soobshcheniia,” Gorodskoe delo, 1909, no. 16:802–10.

66 Colton, Timothy, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 60–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67 Durilin, P. N., “Moskovskie prigorody i dachnye poselki v sviazi s razvitiem gorodskoi zhizni,” Arkhiv gorodskoi gigieny i tekhniki, 1918, no. 1–2:63–101.Google Scholar

68 Peterburgskii listok (hereafter PL), 26 June, 2 July, 8 July, 23 July 1880.

69 PLL, 1 August 1882, 3.

70 “Romanicheskoe ubiistvo,” Dachnyi listok, 21 June 1909, 3.

71 Oranienbaumskii dachnyi listok, 30 May 1907, 3.

72 As Susan Morrissey observes in a useful discussion, “suicide was transformed into a phenomenon in which the individual was almost absent.” Morrissey, “Suicide and Civilization in Late Imperial Russia,“Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 43, no. 2 (1995): 211. For more on the origins of, and meanings ascribed to, the suicide epidemic, see Paperno, Irina, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, 1997), esp. chaps. 2 and 3.Google Scholar

73 On the reception and immediate context of “Neznakomka,” see Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 1:240–44.

74 “Gorodskaia khronika,” Razvlechenie, 1860, no. 23:288.

75 See Cherikover, S., Peterburg (Moscow, 1909), 203–4.Google Scholar

76 Frierson, Cathy A., Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth- Century Russia (New York, 1993), chap. 6.Google Scholar

77 PL, 3 July 1880, 2.

78 “Na skol'ko my nravstvenny?” PLL, 25 July 1882.

79 Here I paraphrase Vladislav Khodasevich’s fine poem on the subject, “Bel'skoe ust'e” (1921), Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1989), 142.