Summerfolk

It is in the early nineteenth century also that we find the origins of another extremely enduring model of dacha life. In the 1810s, A. N. Olenin, president of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts and director of the public library, brought together many of the leading literary and artistic figures of his day at his residence, Priiutino, located seventeen versts from St. Petersburg, beyond the Okhta, in the direction of Lake Ladoga. Although in certain respects this property was a landed estate by virtue of its rural location and its relative detachment from the city and from other centers of social activity, visitors commonly referred to it as a dacha. Its function was not agricultural production but rather the encouragement of convivial and predominantly intellectual relations within a particular circle. Priiutino was the setting for a succession of prolonged house parties, and certain habitués—such as the poet and translator N. I. Gnedich and the celebrated poet and fable writer I. A. Krylov—were practically in permanent residence in the summer.46 Olenin had built several smaller houses on the grounds of his own residence specifically in order to accommodate such long-term guests. And the guests kept on coming: one visitor recalled that even the seventeen cows at the dacha struggled to produce enough cream for all the writers and artists summering at Priiutino. The social responsibilities of guests were strikingly limited: a bell summoned them several times a day to meals, but otherwise they were free to amuse themselves.47

Olenin’s literary acquaintances were not slow to express their gratitude for this relaxed hospitality, especially given that Priiutino was easily accommodated within their early-Romantic worldview. In 1820, Gnedich dedicated to Olenin’s wife a poem in which, playing lightly on the dacha’s name (priiut means “shelter"), he spoke of the dacha as a blessed refuge from the noise and vanity of the city, as a place to flee life’s “turbulence” and seek spiritual repose.48 Konstantin Batiushkov, similarly, referred to Priiutino as a “refuge for kind souls” and a setting for “rustic festivities.”49 Olenin’s country retreat may therefore be seen as setting up a powerful legitimizing model for dacha life: far from being a site for empty-headed entertainments, the dacha was a place for spiritual recuperation from the rigors of city life, informal and friendly social interaction, and intense intellectual and artistic creativity.50

Moscow

So far the discussion has been focused on one city and its environs. It is true that Petersburg was in the vanguard of the early history of the dacha, because the urban/suburban divide opened up more suddenly and decisively there than elsewhere in Russia, and because of the concentration of imperial institutions and resulting opportunities for careers. The entertainment culture of the Moscow nobility was, moreover, structured rather differently from that of St. Petersburg. The city was ringed by aristocratic palaces, which were major social centers in their own right and for the time being obviated any need to create new entertainment-oriented suburban settlements.51 A survey of advertisements for property in and around Moscow in the 1800s reveals that dachas, in the sense that is relevant here, are simply not mentioned. The nearest equivalent is the comfortable town house with spacious gardens but minimal landholdings (khoziaistvo).52 Even in the 1830s the word “dacha” was used less often in Moscow than in Petersburg, and the distinction between a dacha or zagorodnyi dom and a “town estate” or gorodskaia usad’ba was much less clear-cut. Take the following advertisement: “On the Serpukhov Road, at the fifth verst from Moscow, in the village of Verkhnie Koshly for summer rent: two houses together or separately with all amenities, with furniture or without, completely dry, built in a pleasant location from which the whole of Moscow can be seen; on the dacha itself [i.e., the plot of land] there is a small stream.”53