Summerfolk

The case of Krasnyi Kabachok is symptomatic of a liberalization of the property market on the Peterhof Road. As one observer noted in 1829, a change of ownership took place at the turn of the eighteenth century: “enormous seigneurial castles were replaced by the pleasant-looking cottages of the merchantry, or had entered the hands of this estate."20The diversification of the property market is reflected in the St. Petersburg court newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, which from the late 1760s ran advertisements for dachas along the Peterhof Road. In February 1769, for example, P. B. Sheremetev put up for sale several plots of land, including “a seafront property twelve versts from Petersburg, comprising a seigneurial residence [gospodskie khoromy] on a stone foundation, fully equipped and furnished, with two outbuildings, servants’ quarters, kitchen and cellar, stable and farmyard, a planned garden, orangeries with trees and greenhouses, three ponds with fish of various kinds, among them a fair amount of carp; on the territory of the dacha [v dachakh] there is a good supply of wood and hay.”21

The “Out-of-Town” House and the Environs of St. Petersburg

In the first half of Catherine’s reign, the meaning of “dacha” as “plot of land” was clearly still primary. The word could, moreover, be used interchangeably with myza or (less frequently) dvor, both of which suggest more a farmstead than a primarily residential property. While these miniature estates would generally have a main house solidly built on a stone foundation, they also had space for extensive domestic agriculture (livestock, orchards, kitchen garden, even, in some cases, greenhouses). In the 1780s, although dachas were still thought of as plots of land rather than as homes, we begin to find evidence of a more rapid turnover of owners and a wider range of locations (including the Vyborg Side, the Neva islands, and the Tsarskoe Selo Road). In addition, there were signs of increased commercial exploitation of dacha plots as owners began to rent out smaller houses: “At the dacha of the privy councilor, senator, and knight Mikhailo Fedorovich Soimonov, near Ekaterinhof, two houses are available for rent complete with stables, outbuildings for carriages, and icehouses.”22 At the beginning of the nineteenth century a new concept begins to emerge: that of the out-of-town house (zagorodnyi dom) or house for summer entertainment (dom dlia letnego uveseleniia), both of which typically came with less land and fewer amenities. lust occasionally, individual rooms were made available for rent. For the first time, the house and associated lifestyle were becoming more important than the land on which the house stood.23 It is in the last two decades of the eighteenth century that we can trace the origins of a new kind of entertainment culture: the focus was slightly less on lavish parties thrown for court society or on elaborate fêtes champêtres than on fluid and decentered forms of social interaction. This was, in other words, the beginning of a shift from the aristocratic gulian’e (fête) to the progulka (promenade) in a small group of family or friends, from the individually owned landscaped garden as a site for collective entertainment to the more public venues of park, embankment, and pleasure garden (uveselitel’nyi sad).24