Summerfolk

The 1960s intelligentsia inherited from their forebears not only a commitment to informal exurban association; they also shared their work ethic and their disdain for all the material trappings of life. The Soviet intelligentsia’s model of the writer living modestly and industriously at the dacha was created in the 1930s, as I suggested in Chapter 5. But it received further literary development in Konstantin Paustovskii’s “Empty Dacha” (1946), where a writer holes up to write a story and eventually reads it aloud to an audience of ordinary folk, who respond to it well; and in Andrei Bitov’s “Life in Windy Weather” (1963), where a self-obsessed writer, trying to overcome his creative apathy, retreats to his top-floor study in a picturesquely decaying dacha owned by his wife’s parents.88 In Trifonov’s Another Life (1975), moreover, an authentically rural dacha is the setting for a crucial row between the novella’s protagonist and an unscrupulous colleague who subsequently does much to ruin his academic career.89

Dacha asceticism could be said to be exemplified by the shared dacha Anna Akhmatova, by then the grande dame of the literary counterculture, occupied at Komarovo (though not by choice). In Lidiia Chukovskaia’s memoirs, Akhmatova’s difficult circumstances are implicitly contrasted to the smart terrace and multicolored crockery of Margarita Aliger’s Peredelkino dacha and even to the Pasternak residence (where Akhmatova paid a visit in 1955, only to be told that the Pasternaks were not at home).90 Although Ko-marovo performed a role similar to that of Peredelkino in providing an exurban center for the intelligentsia, it acquired a rather different cultural profile, being seen as more detached from literary intrigue and urbanity than the Moscow writers’ village. A poem by Joseph Brodsky, Akhmatova’s protégé, gives the settlement its old Finnish name, shows it in winter, and strikingly plays off the poet’s house against the harsh landscape: this is a remote northern hamlet, not a dacha settlement.91

When the intelligentsia turned their attention to the exurban habits of other sections of Soviet society, the dacha found itself the object of a distaste reminiscent of earlier periods of Russian cultural history and given racy expression in an “urban romance” by the guitar poet Aleksandr Galich in which a spurned lover lists the reasons for her rival’s success:

Don’t pretend it’s her wet lips have cast a spell on you—

It’s because her daddy’s got a lot of privilege;

He’s got coppers on his gate, a nice place out of town,

Dad has pretty secretaries and smooth young men around;

Daddy’s got a CC card to buy from closed foodstores,

Dad can go to private films, that don’t get shown around.92

Тебя ж не Тонька завлекла губами мокрыми,

А что у папы у ее дача в Павшине,

А что у папы холуи с секретаршами,

А что у папы у ее пайки цековские,

И по праздникам кино с Целиковскою!93