Summerfolk

The desired result of these measures was to create a row of imposing residences with elaborate and extensive gardens stretching all the way to the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. As early as 1736, Peder von Haven, arriving in St. Petersburg as secretary and preacher for a Norwegian sailor, commented on the row of “extremely fine out-of-town households” that he saw as he was driven into the city along the Peterhof Road.7 Eyewitness accounts of the Peterhof Road, like those of St. Petersburg itself, were not uniformly enthusiastic in its early days,8 but by the mid-eighteenth century they were consistently rapturous. Particular attention was lavished on the gardens of the princes Naryshkin, which were left open to the public.9 The positive assessments lasted well into the nineteenth century. A visitor of 1805 admired the view on heading out of Strel’na toward St. Petersburg: “As a parting gift my eyes were taken up by an unbroken chain of picturesque dachas—each one finer than the last—right up to the barrier at the entrance to St. Petersburg.”10 Fifteen years later, the author of an early guidebook found that the view from Strel’na had lost none of its charm: “From here a splendid mounded road leads to the magnificent dachas of the grandees and the wealthy.”11

The prime function of these dachas was public sociability: their owners were able to receive a stream of visitors from foreign delegations, prominent noble families, and of course the imperial court. In July 1772, for example, Prince L. A. Naryshkin laid on a lavish set of entertainments at his dacha eleven versts along the Peterhof Road. The guests started assembling at three o’clock and were able to amuse themselves by wandering through the gardens with their intriguing patterns of streams and paths. At seven o’clock the empress arrived and a “Temple of Victory” (in honor of the recent victory over the Turks and Tatars) was spectacularly unveiled. The entertainment was completed with fireworks and a masked ball.12 Five years later the Swiss scholar Jean Bernoulli called in at the Naryshkin dacha and commented especially on the tasteful English-style design of the gardens; he also noted with interest that the property was opened to the public twice a week.13 Count Stroganov, similarly, liked to entertain in the grand style: his generous hospitality cost him 500 rubles each Sunday as he threw open his dacha for music, dancing, and refreshments.14

The Naryshkin and Stroganov dachas in several ways conformed to the pattern of life often held to be characteristic of the elite country estate in the same period: display was valued over substance, short-term ostentatious hospitality over longer-term comfort. But this assessment needs to be qualified on two counts. First, the way of life on the Peterhof Road and at the country estate was not simply fixated on public spectacle. The Catherinian period was to a significant extent constructed by the new empress and her ideologues as a reaction against the artifice, luxury, and corruption of the reign of Elizabeth (1741–1762) and as a return to the austerity of Peter I’s time. The turn away from showy festivity and toward the “English” virtues of practicality and emotional depth found expression in the taste for Romantic garden designs; it also led to a change of culture at the country estate, where far niente went out of fashion, the simple country life (or its appearance) came to be more highly valued, and greater emphasis was laid on purposeful and reflective pursuits—notably reading.15 Life out of the city was, moreover, associated with a rejection of the status distinctions that underpinned social contacts in the city and at court. This relaxation of social rules prefigured an important and enduring cultural stereotype that would be articulated more forcefully in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: exurbia was seen as a uniquely “democratic” site for social interaction. As the poet and state servant Gavriil Derzhavin observed of parties de plaisir he attended in the 1770s:

Leaving behind in the city

All that our minds does trouble,

In simple cordial fresh air

Do we spend our time.

. . .

We resolved among friends

To preserve the laws of equality;

To abandon the conceits

Of wealth, power, and rank.

Оставя беспокойство в граде

И все, смущает что умы,

В простой приятельской прохладе

Свое проводим время мы.

[. . .]

Мы положили меж друзь��ми

Законы равенства хранить;

Богатством, властью и чинами