Iurii Trifonov, perhaps the most penetrating literary observer of the ways of Soviet
urban society, tended to present the dacha in rather similar terms: as a symbol of
self-serving materialistic values. In
The House on the Embankment, the dacha at Bruskovo is the first of Professor Ganchuk’s possessions that captures
the imagination of his acquisitive, upwardly mobile, and ultimately treacherous protégé,
Glebov. In The Old Man (1978), Pavel Evgrafovich Letunov, the pensioner of the title, has been a member
of the dacha cooperative Burevestnik (Stormy Petrel) for more than forty years.94 Burevestnik (in 1973) is the backdrop for a typically Trifonovian generational conflict
between the well-stocked memory and moral sensibility of an old revolutionary (Letunov)
and the shortsightedness and materialistic values of his children and their spouses.
The immediate cause of tension within the family is a dacha that has just fallen vacant
after the sole remaining resident died without leaving behind any close relatives.
Letunov’s son Ruslan and daughter Vera urge him to go and talk to the chairman of
the cooperative, Prikhod’ko: as the most prominent Old Bolshevik in the settlement,
he commands considerable respect, and his extended family claims it badly needs extra
living space. But Letunov is reluctant to oblige: in part, he is dismayed by his family’s
acquisitive instincts, but most of all he does not want to ask favors of Prikhod’ko,
whom he has known and disliked for several decades (ever since he sat on the commission
that expelled Prikhod’ko from the Party in the early 1920s). Letunov never does speak
to Prikhod’ko about this matter, but the other main candidates for occupancy of the
vacant dacha drop out of the running quite by chance. At the end of the novel, however,
it appears that all the various parties’ efforts to gain influence over Prikhod’ko
may count for nothing: the site has been earmarked for construction of a new boardinghouse
for vacationers.As always, Trifonov is highly informative on the networks of personal contacts (and,
correspondingly, the destructive envy and petty rivalries) that pervaded Soviet society.
The importance of
blat in obtaining building materials and in determining priority in the allocation of
dachas is highly reminiscent of dacha cooperatives in the 1930s (with the crucial
difference that no one, not even the most flagrant abuser of the Soviet system, is
likely to be branded an “enemy of the people”). Take the following interior monologue
by Oleg Vasil’evich Kandaurov, the most aggressive fixer in the novel:There is some character called Gorobtsov who’s first on the list, not for this house
specifically but for the first share that becomes available, and who’s now in the
running, but it won’t be hard to compete with him, as he hasn’t done anything for
the cooperative. But Oleg Vasil’evich has. He sorted out the telephones. Brought along
rubberoid for the office. A year ago he went through the Mossovet, via Maksimenkov,
to make sure that Burevestnik got allocated its own stretch of land by the river with
a cabana and a small area for mooring boats. This pathetic lot wouldn’t have got a
damn thing done without him.95
Kandaurov only states brazenly values that all too many of the cooperative members
share. In fact, dacha life is presented as providing a focus for the spiritual corruption
of “mature” Soviet society. Not only have the residents of Burevestnik long since forgotten
their cooperative roots, they are also unfailingly indolent. In
The Old Man a good deal of tea is drunk and jam eaten, but we never hear of anyone digging a
vegetable patch; significantly, the positive character Letunov spent very little time
at the dacha in his youth and middle age. Trifonov, of course, is far from being an
unprejudiced observer. He is creating his own myth of dacha existence as sinfully
empty, idle, and mean-spirited. As in Gorky’s Dachniki, minor disputes thinly conceal more profound human failures.96The Garden-Plot Dacha