Summerfolk

Besides making a valuable contribution to the emerging poetics of the dacha, First Love indicates that the subdivision of estates into dachas for rent was under way in the Moscow region in the 1830s.55 In this period the most significant new factor in dacha development, and one common to Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the sale of substantial 25 areas of land just outside the city limits as dacha plots. In the St. Petersburg area, for instance, land belonging to the Forestry Institute (Lesnoi Institut) was initially sold off as eighteen plots in 1832; the demand was so great that more were made available two years later.56 In Moscow the main example in this period was Petrovskii Park, an area totaling seventeen desiatinas located between the city gates and the Petrovskii Palace, in the direction of Tver’. The first aristocratic dachas there dated back to the late eighteenth century, but they were all destroyed during the Napoleonic invasion. Later, in the 1830s, the park was revived as an up-market summer residential area: peasants were bought out from the surrounding land and building plots were handed out to elite nobles. There were to be no inns or similar watering holes, as the “purpose of building these dachas [was] respectability of aspect and conduct [blagovidnost’ i prilichie].” Mikhail Zagoskin, director of the Moscow theaters in the 1830s, had a dacha of the requisite decorous appearance. “The balconies and squares were bedecked in flowers; wire gates, topped by a fragrant flowerpot or convolvulus, were surrounded by small gardens.”57 Purchasers of plots in Petrovskii Park were to have their house designs approved by the Building Commission, and if they failed to build within three years, their plot would be resold at public auction. Against those restrictions, they received ten years’ relief from taxes and loans of up to 5,000 rubles from the commission.58 Observers were quick to sense that these developments had brought about a change in the leisure habits of Moscow’s social elite: in the opinion of the memoirist M. A. Dmitriev (1796–1866), for example, the picnics and parties de plaisir favored by some aristocratic families became much less common in the 1830s, as Petrovskii Park offered them a more permanent base for exurban recreation and invited new forms of sociability.59 In the 1840s the park remained a place for the summer residences of the Moscow aristocracy and a venue for refined entertainments such as costume balls.60

BY THE mid-1830s we can see much of the dacha’s subsequent nineteenth-century history in embryo. The period from 1780 to 1820 weakened the hold of the aristocracy and the court elite over the semirural retreats around St. Petersburg and brought Petersburg society closer to what might be called a “modern” leisure culture. That is, the arena for unofficial social interaction became polarized between, on the one hand, a small circle of family and intimates and, on the other, the anonymity of public spectacle. Attempts to combine the two spheres of public and private entertainment—as had occurred, for example, in the grand festivities at the Naryshkin dacha on the Peterhof Road—were made less frequently.