Summerfolk

In the early nineteenth century, however, Moscow gained ground on Petersburg. Turgenev’s First Love (1860), for example, is set in 1833 in a dacha opposite Neskuchnoe at the Kaluga gates, at the same time Pushkin was occupying his fifteen rooms at Chernaia Rechka, yet it reveals a quite different model of dacha life. The colonnaded main house is occupied by the family of the narrator, Vladimir, who is sixteen at the time of the events described. It is flanked by two other buildings: one has been converted into a small wallpaper factory, while the other is rented out to summer guests. The tenant who arrives to spend the summer in this unprepossessing outbuilding is a pretentious “princess” whose first concern is to ask the narrators parents to pull strings on her behalf to resolve a legal difficulty in which she has found herself entangled. Vladimir’s mother is dismayed by the “vulgarity” of her neighbor, but she cannot avoid having something to do with her; Vladimir, by contrast, is much taken with the neighbors daughter, Zina. What he fails to see is that his father is himself conducting an affair with Zina. First Love is of interest as a unique experiment in the dacha genre by a writer associated primarily with the country estate. The suburban setting seems to bring with it a change in psychological dynamics: the characters are thrown together more randomly than they would be at the country estate, and the revelation of the father’s infidelity, though not surprising to the reader, is more shocking than anything in Turgenev’s measured and evenly paced longer works. In a pattern quite characteristic of Russian literary representations in the later nineteenth century, the dacha is shown as a place that undermines traditional forms of social intercourse: first, by bringing together a larger and more socially diverse set of characters; second, by allowing this expanded cast greater freedom of action (notably, the freedom to transgress marital boundaries).54