Summerfolk

B. Paterssen, The Kamennyi Island Palace As Seen from Aptekarskii Island (1804). Courtesy of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (171 c.229).

The point of this excursus into the visual arts is not only to show how the outskirts of St. Petersburg were acquiring independent aesthetic and cultural value but also to suggest the increasing diversity and vitality of dacha life in this period. The dacha seems to have become a fixture on the social scene in the early part of the nineteenth century, when renting a summer house became a universal aspiration for well-to-do sections of Petersburg society. In 1802 F. F. Vigel’ was struck by a transformation that had taken place since his first visit: arriving in September, he was surprised to find the city “empty,” as people had not yet returned from their summer houses. During the two years he had been away from Petersburg, he surmised, the dacha habit had “already spread to all classes.” Even if some allowances need to be made for Vigel’’s youthful impressionability, his observation is strengthened by further details of the time. The early years of the reign of Alexander I brought a construction boom in Petersburg and its environs; land was drained, trees were felled, and dachas went up steadily.27 In the early nineteenth century, moreover, dachas were advertised more widely and with greater attention paid to their commercial possibilities. Take the following notice from 1820, which is revealing of the contemporary craze for horticulture:

An orangery 60 sazhens long with fruit trees, for example peaches, apricots, and plums . . . , next to it four sections with their own hothouse, which has vines, a barn for cherries of 20 sazhens, in it up to 150 trees in tubs, a kitchen garden 65 sazhens long, 12 sazhens wide, in it up to 20 rows of Spanish strawberries, red currant, black currant, white and pink currants, various kinds of gooseberry, and in addition, in various sections and the greenhouse, up to 200 pots of roses and up to 2,000 pots of other flowers, and also ten of the best kinds of hothouses for watermelons and melons.28

By the turn of the eighteenth century, the dacha market was not at all restricted to the routes linking the city and the palaces at Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, and the more recently built Pavlovsk. It now notably included the various islands in the Neva. In the first years of St. Petersburg’s existence, these islands were handed out to Peter’s relatives and favorites. Thereafter, during the eighteenth century, they changed hands quite frequently as their owners were disgraced and dispossessed or decided to cash in the gift they had received. Prince Aleksandr Menshikov was the first owner of Krestovskii Island; after his disgrace, the island was given to Count Minikh by Empress Anna Ioannovna in 1731. Then, after Minikh’s involvement in a palace plot of 1742, the island passed to the Razumovskii family. The Razumovskiis then became property entrepreneurs, renting out houses on the island to civil servants. In 1804 P.K. Razumovskii sold the island to Prince A.M. Belosel’skii-Belozerskii, who quickly took an even more entrepreneurial approach by increasing the number of plots.29 An unflattering description of dacha life on the island was given by Iu. Arnol’d, who spent a summer there as an adolescent in 1827. To the east, he recalled, there were thirty-three peasant households, to the west no more than six or seven; amenities were limited to a tavern, an inn, and a small trader’s stall; the island was cross-cut by only two roads. The peasant houses were rented out to “gentlemen”:

It was left to the tenants to concern themselves with making these dwellings more or less habitable and if possible comfortable. For this reason the “dachas” were usually rented for about five years. Our “dacha” . . . consisted of a house with six rooms, a mezzanine of three little rooms, and various outbuildings in a closed yard. At the front, facing the street, was a little patch of garden, and behind the yard an enormous expanse of communal meadow.30