Summerfolk

38. A. M. Gordin and M. A. Gordin, Pushkinskii vek: Panorama stolichnoi zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1995), 355–60. Nor was this exceptional by the standards of the time: a visitor from Riga left a description of a similarly spacious island residence, opposite Kamennyi on Aptekarskii, occupied by the director of the Postal Department, Konstantin Bulgakov. See V. V. Lents, “Prikliucheniia Lifliandtsa v Peterburge,” Russkii arkhiv, no. 4 (1878), 451.

39. On the conventions of the 1820S, see N. Cornwell, ed., The Society Tale in Russian Literature: From Odoevskii to Tolstoi (Amsterdam, 1998). This volume follows much previous scholarship in linking the society tale to a new emphasis in Russian literature on observation and analysis (as opposed to imagination and invention).

40. An influence attested by G. K. Lukomskii in his Pamiatniki starinnoi arkhitektury Rossii (Petrograd, 1916), 388.

41. “Posledniaia staraia dacha na Kamennom ostrove,” Starye gody, July–September 1910, 181–85.

42. See PSz, ser. 2, 8, no. 6660 (22 Dec. 1833). The first move in this direction had occurred in 1828, when police jurisdiction had been extended to the settlements (slobody) on the Okhta; an exception, however, had been made for dachas in this vicinity, as it was considered inequitable to subject dacha owners there to a property tax, given that, being rather thinly spread, they had relatively little need of the police, and also that dacha owners in other areas were not taxed (see PSz, ser. 2, 3, no. 2054 [25 May 1828]).

43. J. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), 34–35.

44. One such village is the setting for an episode in Faddei Bulgarin’s engaging picaresque Ivan Vyzhigin (1828): see Bulgarin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1990), 323–25.

45. See A. Fon-Gernet, Nemetskaia koloniia Strel’na pod S.-Peterburgom, 1810–1910 (St. Petersburg, 1910); Amburger, Ingermanland, 1:271–81; and T.A. Shrader, “Pravovaia i kul’turnaia adaptatsiia nemetskikh kolonistov v peterburgskoi gubernii v poreformennoe vremia,” in Peterburg i guberniia: Istoriko-etnograficheskie issledovaniia, ed. N. V. Iukhneva (Leningrad, 1989). For a clear summary of the early German immigrants’ privileges, see R. P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge, 1979), 47–48.

46. A short posthumous biography recounts how Krylov, renowned for prodigious feats of gluttony, uncharacteristically acted on the advice of his doctors and took to visiting dachas. Priiutino was farther from the city than most such places, but it was a “dacha” none the less. See M.E. Lobanov, “Zhizn’ i sochineniia Ivana Andreevicha Krylova” (1847), in I. A. Krylov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, eds. A.M. Gordin and M.A. Gordin (Moscow, 1982) 73.

47. Dnevnik Anny Alekseevny Oleninoi (1828–1829), ed. O. N. Oom (Paris, 1936), xv–xvi.

48. N. I. Gnedich, “Priiutino,” in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1956), 117–21. Gnedich was also the author of “Rybaki” (1821), a longer poem that on first publication was billed as “the first attempt at a Russian national [narodnoi] idyll” (ibid, 195–204). He takes a dachnik’s viewpoint, conveying the idyllic quality of the national landscape by focusing on a pastoral space that derives its meaning above all from its proximity to the city. The spire above the Peter and Paul Fortress, for example, is contrasted to the empty and unspoiled banks of the Neva.

49. K. Batiushkov, “Poslanie k A.I. Turgenevu” (1817–18), in his Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964), 235–36.

50. Moscow’s bucolic environs could also inspire early-Romantic rapture, as in A. Raevskii, “Okrestnosti Moskvy,” Syn otechestva, pt. 25, no. 40 (1815), 53–65.

51. On the exurban habits of the Moscow nobility in the early nineteenth century, see D. Blagovo, Rasskazy babushki; Iz vospominanii piati pokolenii (Leningrad, 1989), 158–63.

52. This conclusion is based on a general reading of Moskovskie vedomosti in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.