Summerfolk

Such sentiments and the stock narratives of dacha life to which they gave rise can be traced not only in interviews and memoirs but also in mainstream Soviet fiction, which in the post-Stalin era became increasingly concerned with and informative on questions of everyday life. The same gendered proprietary impulse is reflected in a short story of the 1980s in which the hero, a welder at the local factory, finds his vocation (and thereby abandons the bottle) by building his own house:

Three years Kondrat spent building his allotment house, building it thoroughly and without haste, and the house came out a real marvel: it was spacious, light, and cozy. It reminded you of a traditional Siberian izba, where there’s nothing superfluous, where everything has been thought through and made to last. . . .

He’d done the house, the gates, the little veranda, and the greenhouse according to his own taste: solidly, in the peasant manner, without any excessive dacha-style showiness. Next to overelaborate two-story mansions and houses with strange roofs cut away to make room for attic windows, his homestead was most likely the finest of all, in the way a person with inner spiritual grace is fine.115

Here an attempt is made to reclaim the country house as an attribute of an authentic, patriarchal rural world; the dacha, persistently feminized in Russian culture since the nineteenth century, is associated with spartan male virtues. It now regains some of its much earlier connotations—as a plot of land to be looked after, not as a place of idle repose. But the author, understandably enough, tends to avoid the word “dacha” in his text, preferring the more agriculturally resonant usad’ba.

Kondrat steadfastly resists any incursion of cluttering “feminine” artifacts into his austere new home. His wife tries to prettify their dwelling by spreading a flowered oilcloth on the table, but is told off severely for doing so: “Don’t even think of it! You hold sway at home in the apartment, but don’t go setting up a stupid perfumery [sic] here.”116But she is happy to be submissive: the dacha has cured Kondrat of his alcoholism and given him a sense of purpose and pride. As another fictional character reflects in a moment of villagerly revelation, as her family is about to revoke its decision to place its dacha on the market, “City apartments don’t seem to be for living in but for passing time”; the dacha, by contrast, brings a sense of purpose and participation in community life. Neighbors in urban apartment buildings are largely indifferent to one another, but dacha owners form a mutual-aid brotherhood that cuts across social boundaries to embrace manual and intellectual workers.117

We see here how the dacha could be accommodated within perhaps the most powerfill cultural trend of the post-Stalin decades: a growing awareness of the economic predicament and cultural potential of the Russian village. In its literary manifestations this was known as “village prose” (derevenskaia proza). Narratives infused with this rusti-cizing spirit treated dachas approvingly if they could be construed as a return to village roots or as an adoption of patriarchal values.118 But dacha folk qua vacationers were consistently contrasted unfavorably with year-round residents in the same settlements. On occasion authors were led to conclude that dachas were doomed not only morally but physically: one conventional way of bringing closure to narratives of exurban life was to reveal on the last page that the settlement in question was shortly to be removed to make way for a rest home or a suburb.119

This dacha at Abramtsevo illustrates the appeal of the vernacular style for the late-Soviet dachnik