Summerfolk

By 1800, seventeen plots had been handed out on the eastern part of the island. Alexander I tried to keep strict control over new building: inns, shops, and coffeehouses were strictly forbidden, and the building of private dachas was kept to a minimum. But there was still considerable turnover of ownership, as in the Dolivo-Dobrovol’skii dacha, subsequently famous for the two summers that Aleksandr Pushkin spent there (in 1834 and 1836). The plot was originally given by Alexander I to a Naryshkin; it was then sold first to another old noble family, the Pleshcheevs, then (in 1816) to a petit bourgeois (meshchanin) named Kamenshchikov, from whom the plot was confiscated for debts in 1820. Then, in 1821, it passed briefly into the hands of a merchant before being sold to a woman named Dolivo-Dobrovol’skaia, wife of a high-ranking civil servant. The house where Pushkin lived was built between 1822 and 1830.35 Contemporaries all agreed that it was not cheap; the writer’s wife leased it after the money had arrived for the first issue of Sovremennik (The Contemporary), the journal that Pushkin hoped would rescue him from his straitened financial circumstances. The handful of memoirs that have come down to us paint a picture of domestic contentment and informality in his household. A summer on the island presented ample opportunities for socializing. Quite apart from the neighbors on the island, the opposite bank of the Neva (Novaia Derevnia) was well populated; among its residents were the members of the Guards Regiment to which Pushkin’s later antagonist, Georges d’Anthès, belonged.36

Pushkin, the best-known dacha resident of the period, was already a habitué of the islands. In the summer of 1830 he spent a lot of time with his friend Anton Del’vig, who had rented a dacha near Krestovskii Island. Del’vig’s younger cousin (subsequently state inspector of private railways) recalled how the two of them went around Krestovskii noisily engaging the attention of passers-by in a way they had clearly done since their schooldays; for Pushkin, this was the last opportunity to enjoy the bachelor lifestyle.37 Then and subsequently, Krestovskii had a reputation for strolling crowds, mildly unruly behavior, and a low level of actual residency. As a married man Pushkin spent a couple of summers at Chernaia Rechka (near the Stroganov gardens, on the north side of the island), later infamous as the location for his fatal duel. His landlord on both occasions was F. I. Miller, head butler under two tsars and one of the first dacha entrepreneurs. These were no mere vacation cottages: in a letter to her daughter in Warsaw, Pushkin’s mother reported that her son’s dacha had “over fifteen rooms.”38

Pushkin left an insight into this socially exclusive dacha world in his fragment “The Guests Were Assembling at the Dacha” (1828). Here we discover that the dachas on the islands were so close to the city center that people could go there not just for a day or two but for part of a day, or even for part of an evening. In this unfinished story the guests have come straight from the theater and plunge immediately into drawing room conversation. The tone is free and easy, even facetious, but high society norms still obtain: the prolonged tête-è-tête of a married woman with an admirer on the balcony is noted by everyone and marked down against her. The dacha offers the opportunity for private communication in a very public setting—with all the risks it entails. In a word, this dacha is an exurban salon and the story is a society tale. If the setting may be said to give this highly conventional genre its own particular coloring, it is perhaps in a certain ease of narrative style. The fact that all the guests have come from a distance and crossed the urban/suburban divide divests them of their social biography; the dacha is a location where characters can be brought together and left to interact without too much scene-setting. It is significant that Pushkin’s unfinished story is supposed precisely for this reason to have caught Lev Tolstoy’s eye as he was mulling over his own tale of adultery, Anna Karenina, four decades later.39