Summerfolk

The film was deservedly admired for its fine acting and high production values. But, like so much of Mikhalkov’s work, it aims for rather more than that, implying nothing less than an interpretation of modern Russian history and society. The broad-shouldered, potent, heroic, nationally rooted, ultimately martyred man of the people (Kotov) stands in opposition to the opportunist, cowardly, villainous, slightly built, childless cosmopoli-tan intelligent (Mitia). Kotov’s manly qualities are in further contrast to the almost painfully Chekhovian family into which he has entered by marriage. His in-laws are as cultured, sociable, high-strung, and charmingly set in their ways as any Gaev or Astrov viewed with the softening hindsight of revolution and state terrorism. As one critic noted, “It’s as if the old dacha folk of Burnt by the Sun are the heroes of Mechanical Piano1 who’ve grown older and survived to the 30s.”2

The case of Burnt by the Sun provides a fitting epilogue for this book, and not just in the sense that it offers a post-Soviet perspective on the dacha phenomenon. Rather more significantly, it illustrates the ease with which the dacha, over the past two centuries of its history, has been overlaid with social and cultural mythmaking. Mikhalkov could be accused of employing a kind of artistic sleight of hand in his portrayal of 1930s exurbia. For, as he himself has admitted, the dacha lifestyle depicted in his film is drawn from his recollections of a childhood spent in the milieu of the Soviet cultural elite. It does not necessarily have much to do with the ways of the prerevolutionary artistic intelligentsia.3 Here, as in many other texts mentioned in this book, the single image of the dacha is made to bear a considerable cultural burden—in this case, to elide disjoined social and cultural worlds and to evoke a transhistorical Russianness that was in Mikhalkov’s view severely damaged but not destroyed by the evil furies of the early Soviet period. The evil is conveniently externalized and objectified in the demonic Mitia, while Russianness resides in the unchanging rhythms of exurban life.

But the fact that Mikhalkov was tempted to make two such radically different eras coalesce, besides leading us to question the director’s personal motives and wider ideological purposes, illustrates a complementary point that is also central to this book: much as we may want to drag the dacha out of the cultural responses it elicits, in practice it always remains mired in them. And this in turn suggests a large potential difficulty: how are we to disentangle social and cultural history? Or, to put it still more simply, how can we know things reliably about the history of a phenomenon such as the dacha?

To these questions I can offer two broad answers. The first is practical: the only way to begin to bridge the gap between social and cultural approaches is to consult as wide a range of sources as possible. One of the advantages of studying an everyday phenomenon is that it leaves traces—small, perhaps, but discernible—in many places. The second answer is theoretical: there is in fact often no need to disentangle social and cultural history. Cultural meanings do not float in some asocial stratosphere but are themselves tied to and articulated in social relations and practices. In no field of social history would this insight seem to have more obvious relevance than in the study of people’s dwellings and habitats.Housing is so closely tied to people’s identities and to their place in the community that it would be deeply unsatisfactory to make a study of bricks and mortar without inquiring as to people’s subjective understanding of their dwellings. Many anthropologists have recognized the significance of the dwelling unit by making the household, rather than the family, the starting point for their work.4 In this light, the pronounced subjectivity of many of the sources cited in this book should be seen not as a problem but as a small contribution toward a solution.