Summerfolk

But the change of emphasis in the dacha culture of the post-Stalin intelligentsia was not simply a self-protective response to the revelations of the de-Stalinizing 20th Party Congress. It conformed to a broader cultural movement whereby the intelligentsia became larger, more independent, and more vocal. And one of the best ways to find a voice was, as ever, to look to the past for a script: in this case, to the models of conduct provided by the nineteenth-century radical intelligentsia or the early Soviet “true Leninists.” Thus, for example, Lidiia Libedinskaia and her husband, spending the summer at a rented dacha in Kuntsevo in 1948, read Aleksandr Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts in the evenings and relived the spirited debates of the 1840s. In the 1950s and 1960s numerous other members of the cultural elite rediscovered and reaccentuated the forms of informal sociability that had been so culturally productive in the second half of the nineteenth century. In a gesture characteristic of the times, the “dacha” opened by the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts in 1884 as a summer base for landscape artists was used for similar purposes in the second half of the Soviet period.81 Increasingly the dacha came to be seen as a year-round retreat, not a temporary and luxurious amenity; in some peoples understanding, it had experienced a complete transformation from vacation cabin to homestead. Nikolai Zabolotskii, perhaps Russia’s most ecologically minded poet, is reported to have said in 1958: “At one time I couldn’t stand life out of town. I laughed when people started looking for dachas in the spring____But now, you see, I feel drawn to the land.”82 Dachas were now to be used, not merely to be enjoyed. Veniamin Kaverin, for example, a doyen of Soviet literature and long-standing Peredelkino resident, wrote disapprovingly of Konstantin Fedin’s big, empty, unlived-in residence, while he recalled with obvious admiration Pasternak’s potato patches.83 Valentin Kataev went so far as to work Peredelkino into a myth of national origins: “I sometimes think that it was precisely here that what we are accustomed to call Rus’ began. Even if that isn’t true, because Rus’ came from Kiev. But ‘my Rus’’ undoubtedly began here, in the forest outside Moscow.”84 For the post-Stalin intelligentsia more generally, the village house (derevenskii dom) became an approved alternative to a dacha in an institutionally sponsored settlement; as rural areas were gradually abandoned by the younger generation of the indigenous population, many such houses fell vacant in the 1960s and 1970s and were sold to educated urbanites. For their new owners, the remoteness and unkemptness of many of these “dachas” came merely as welcome confirmation of their cultural authenticity.

But the village model had already left its mark on the dacha settlements proper of the cultural elite. A new pattern of exurban life was established for several prominent members of the Moscow intelligentsia after the war, when they returned from evacuation or propaganda work and took up residence in Peredelkino. Some of the dachas were rebuilt or refitted specifically for year-round use in the late 1940s (although Peredelkino had not been occupied by the Germans, it had been left in a poor state by the Soviet military personnel who had been stationed there).85 The increase in the permanent population gave rise to new forms of sociability. Long-standing friendships remained important, to be sure, but the close-knit familiarity of the oldest residents was increasingly supplemented by other kinds of personal interaction. Informal home visits and shared strolls through the settlement gave opportunities for meetings that might cut across institutional affiliations, political allegiances, and artistic affinities.86 Perhaps the most striking exponent of the impromptu visit was Aleksandr Fadeev, who, troubled by a deeply compromised past as high literary functionary under Stalin, sought fitfully to find common ground with writers less morally vulnerable than he.87