Summerfolk

The first references to dachas on Petrovskii Island came in the early 1790s. The island was given over to the Free Economic Society for agricultural purposes;31 but these activities were abandoned after the disastrous flood of 1824. Instead, houses were built for rent, bringing in 3,950 rubles in the first year. After that, plots were let out for tenants to build their own houses; these buildings then became the property of the society. In 1841 the island was transferred to the future Alexander II. Dacha owners suffered a period of uncertainty as to whether their contracts with the society would remain in force, but after some discussion they were given assurances that they would retain rights to their houses. Aptekarskii Island, home of the first botanical garden in Russia, was kept under close imperial supervision until 1799, when private construction was first allowed there. When more intensive settlement did occur, it took place quite haphazardly, with winding streets and dead ends, and Aptekarskii gained a reputation as the most unplanned of the islands.32

The most splendid of the islands in the Neva delta was no doubt Kamennyi. Its early owners were G.I. Golovkin (the first Russian chancellor), his son A.G. Golovkin, and, from 1746, A. I. Bestuzheva-Riumina, wife of the then chancellor. Her husband was arrested and disgraced in 1758; he was rehabilitated at the beginning of Catherine II’s reign and in 1765 sold the island to the empress, who presented it as a gift to her son Paul, the future emperor. Dacha construction began in the late 1780s, and on a rather more secure basis than earlier in the island’s history: Catherine’s charter of 1785 had given nobles reason to hope that in future their property would not be subject to sudden confiscation. Paul allotted the first plots on Kamennyi to favored courtiers, thus establishing the island as the main site for official residences outside the suburban palaces. Here is a description of one of the early buildings, advertised for rent in 1789: “A rebuilt wooden manorial house, unfurnished, with two outbuildings, one of which has a bathhouse and large servants’ quarters, the other has a kitchen, inside the yard there is a stable with six stalls, a cellar with an icebox and several storerooms, behind the yard [there is] forest and land tilled for a kitchen garden.”33 Residences and gardens on Kamennyi were, it seems, kept in impeccable condition, as befitted a place where members of the imperial family were liable to take strolls. In 1818 a visitor to the dacha of a senior civil servant observed that “everything about it was irreproachably clean and neat, every tree was nurtured like a rare tropical plant”; guests were forbidden to drive their carriages up to the entrance of the house for fear of disrupting this exemplary orderliness.34