Summerfolk

The connection of these early suburban residences to the values of urban high society was emphasized by their design. Most owners took the Italian villa as their model.40 The simple, heavy, “laconic” architectural style typical of the Alexandrine period was particularly prevalent on Kamennyi Island, as in the dacha of Prince Ol’denburg: “The round hall under the cupola is wonderfully fine: modest and solemn at the same time. This is precisely that ‘wealthy simplicity’ which was so well understood by artists of the first half of the nineteenth century; this is the ideal of a suburban house combining country-style coziness with refined luxury.”41

And suburban was what these residences were becoming in the 1820s. Their closer relationship with the city was signposted by a law of 1833 that extended the jurisdiction of the St. Petersburg police to dacha areas from the Okhta to the Vyborg Side. But, although residents of such areas now had the assistance of the city authorities in maintaining “safety” and “decency,” they retained a freedom in their use of space and architectural design that was denied to inhabitants of more densely settled parts of the city.42

As the mention of locations such as the Vyborg Side suggests, in the early nineteenth century there were other sites for dacha life besides court residences and island villas. To judge by advertisements of the time, several other areas had houses for sale and summer rental. Many of them were located in the northern part of the city, on the Petersburg Side or even farther afield. There was plenty of room for people to have spacious residences only a short carriage ride from the center; St. Petersburg still appeared bucolic to travelers who approached it in the 1800s.43 Most dachas for rent came with outbuildings, kitchen garden, and furniture, and they commonly offered accommodation of ten rooms or so. Houses were made available for rental not only by grandees, prosperous merchants, or prominent civil servants but also by humbler folk. Peasants on Krestovskii Island, as we have seen, were letting out houses for the summer from the late eighteenth century, and villages on or near the Peterhof Road were similarly full of cheap rental opportunities for summering Petersburgers in the early nineteenth century.44

Among the earliest dacha landlords from a humble milieu were the German “colonists.” German immigration to the St. Petersburg region dates back to the early years of the reign of Catherine II. Foreigners were attracted by a set of extremely favorable conditions, including freedom of confession, free lodging for six months on arrival, land grants, exemption from taxes, and start-up loans. The first German settlers duly arrived in St. Petersburg via Lübeck in 1762 and 1763; their first colony was named Novaia Saratovka and had an initial population of sixty families, each with thirty-five desiatinas of land. The next wave of settlement came in the 1800s, when a colony was established at Strel’na, on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland. In 1808 Alexander I made up to 20,000 desiatinas available for further German settlement in the region. In 1809, one hundred more German families moved from Poland to a new colony near Oranienbaum. This settlement was soon disbanded and the German peasants were resettled because the land proved unsuitable for agriculture, but the other colonies remained. The colonists at Strel’na, for example, paid quitrent (obrok) to the landowner; they did not have the right of private ownership, but neither were they constrained by the commune traditional in Russian peasant villages. They were able to make a living from the land under conditions much more favorable than those enjoyed by the majority of the population of the Russian Empire. And thanks to the surplus income they generated, the relative economic independence they enjoyed, and the favorable and expanding property market that obtained in the Petersburg region, many of them were able to build and rent out summer houses and to buy more land. The number of such settlements continued to increase in the second half of the century, and locations such as Strel’na and Novaia Derevnia had the reputation of being overwhelmingly German in their population.45