Summerfolk

Dacha texts tended nonetheless to treat the exurban impulse with sympathy: the willingness of city dwellers to confront serious obstacles in order to satisfy their thirst for land was viewed as praiseworthy, and their urge to own property was assessed in various ways but rarely subjected to outright censure. One exemplary case is Dacha for Immediate Sale, a lengthy story set in a provincial city in the 1970s or 1980s. Nina Pavlovna Kalugina, recently retired, leaps at the chance to snap up a dacha put up for sale cheap when the owners suddenly leave. Her husband, Igor’ Petrovich, stuck in a middle-aged rut of television and detective novels, is unenthusiastic. Nina Pavlovna gets to work on him by stressing the benefits of the dacha for their health and domestic economy, but also by pointing out that a dacha is quite accessible even to ordinary people like them: “Here [i.e., in this town] what people call dachas aren’t just suburban villas or izbas bought up in village but also the most ordinary little houses in collective garden associations.”120

Nina Pavlovna eventually wins her husband over. They buy a house on a plot, having viewed it only in winter covered in snow. In the spring they are dismayed to find that it is in wretched condition. And the settlement itself is a disorderly sight:

And what about the houses?! Well, they were an open-air museum of folk architecture, no more, no less. . . .

Plots were handed out right after the war for growing potatoes: there was no documentation, no planning. Then, when an official inventory did take place, everything was frozen as it was.121

Despite all these apparent drawbacks, Igor’ Petrovich quickly finds himself forming a bond with the soil. Then, amazingly, he hits on the idea of building a new house from scratch himself. As he ponders his options on a walk around a neighboring settlement, he spots a dacha that embodies his ideal:

The house contained an unimaginable variety of architectural styles of different eras and peoples. There were European blinds on the windows, the roof was crowned by a Gothic tower, there were north Russian carved window surrounds and cornices, a porch under an awning, once again carved. And all this had been painted as if the decorator, finding that one can of paint had unexpectedly run out, had grabbed another, the first one that came to hand, and when he’d finished that, took yet another, and carried on painting without thinking about how the colors sky blue, orange, green, and raspberry were coordinated. But the point was that the color coordination lay precisely in this apparent lack of coordination. The house was alive, it breathed, it made inspired play with the colors, entrancing passers-by even at a fleeting glance.122

This passage is extremely expressive not only of Soviet Russian standards of taste but also of an ostensibly un-Soviet concern with domestic space and pride in personal property. The owner of this dacha—who, it transpires, is a mouselike co-worker of Igor’ Petrovich’s—has, like another fictional dacha owner mentioned earlier, been saved from alcoholism by the acquisition of a plot of land. In a conversation with Igor’ Petrovich, he expounds on the destructive effects of beskhoziaistvennost’ (the neglect of property brought on by the absence of ownerly instincts), claiming that no word for this concept can be found in non-Soviet dictionaries.

Igor’ Petrovich himself joins the narrow but swelling ranks of capable and responsible Soviet dacha proprietors. He overcomes his scruples and has the friend of a friend deliver to him leftover building materials stolen from a construction site. With enormous determination, he sets about building a house. He even breeds rabbits. At the same time, he faces considerable obstacles: he is burglarized and he lives in fear of an inspection commission, which is rumored to be planning a visit to check on the provenance of building materials.