Summerfolk

Yet this approach poses problems for inquiry into the historical long term; it is unclear, for example, how it accounts for and analyzes change over time. One consequence of the mixing of social and cultural history is the difficulty of establishing chronological cut-off points. Any history that is at least as much cultural as it is social will tend to undermine clear-cut periodizations, to subvert simplistic notions of historical causality, to stress continuity over rupture, and to divert attention from a historiography fixated on certain key dates and schematic arguments associated with them. In Russian history, of course, the biggest landmark is 1917, and the most schematic arguments concern the nature of the Soviet system.

All this is not to belittle the enormity of the Bolshevik coup as a factor in Russia’s subsequent history or even to assert that it is not a watershed of some kind in the history of the dacha. In one sense, the October Revolution divides the present study neatly into two: it brought into being a society in which large and increasing numbers of urban office workers grew food on allotments or dacha plots; before 1917, by contrast, they did so only rarely. The extent of food gardening varied greatly through the Soviet period, and until the 1960s the plots of land where vegetables were grown were not generally called dachas; yet the Soviet takeover fundamentally rerouted Russian exurbia/suburbia toward the function of subsistence. In the 1980s and 1990s the dacha fused in many people’s minds with the allotment shack.

Nor is 1917 the only date that can be used to punctuate a history of the dacha. My chapter titles imply and my argument in many places makes explicit that this history can meaningfully be divided into successive phases, even if they invariably overlap and remain blurred around the edges.

But it is equally possible to identify aspects of the dacha’s history that are common to several epochs; to show that cultural meanings and social practices could straddle historical divides, even if people and buildings very often did not. Most obviously, for the last two hundred years the dacha has been easy prey for stereotypes that have been largely negative and have many common features. Reasons are not hard to find: Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be called a consumer society only with qualifications immeasurably greater than are necessary in the case of Western Europe, and so the discursive space available for leisure and its appurtenances was much smaller than in England or France.5 And the dacha’s public image was always colored by Russian social cir-cumstances. The tendency to see dachas as emblematic of shallowness and vanity, of rootlessness and mercantilism, has been remarkably enduring ever since summer houses were identified as an essentially Petersburg phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. The dacha was easily accommodated in an emerging bipolar typology that contrasted the cold bureaucratic granite of the new capital with the warm familial earthiness of the old. In time this contrast weakened, as Moscow acquired a prominent dacha tradition of its own, but it set the tone for much subsequent commentary on exurbia. The drafty hut made out of “barge timber,” first exposed by Petersburg journalists in the 1840s, was a regular fallback for their later colleagues.

There have, however, been distinguished exceptions to the general rule of public disapproval of the dacha. The first is that country houses inhabited by members of the intelligentsia have received more sympathetic treatment than average. Many of the writers who gave short shrift to dachniki in their articles and newspaper columns were themselves contentedly ensconced in summer houses. The double standard of a typical purveyor of doggerel was pithily laid bare by the prolific Soviet poet and translator Samuil Marshak:

There once was a man quite perverse

Whose practice was always to curse

From his dacha’s veranda

With unabashed candor

His neighboring dachniks in verse.6

Он жил на даче,

Но, одначе,

Разил он дачников стихом.7