Summerfolk

53. Moskovskie vedomosti, 15 Mar. 1833, 1000.

54. First Love was apparently Turgenev’s favorite of his own works because it was not “made up.” On the autobiographical resonance of the story, see the notes in the standard Russian edition: I. S. Turgenev, Pervaia liubov’, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1978–86), 6:479–80. The dacha location featured in Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin, the village of Emel’ianovka on the Peterhof Road, is the venue for another scene of acute tension brought on by social misrecognition (an orphan girl from a noble family fallen on hard times is insultingly propositioned by a lecherous older man who, it turns out, was instrumental in ruining her mother): see Bulgarin, Sochineniia, 328–29.

55. The first signs of this practice can be dated even earlier. It seems that the Sheremetevs rented out buildings on their Ostankino estate as early as the 1810S, though the occupants at that time resembled more closely “paying guests” than impersonal “tenants”; the beginnings of a “dacha industry”—the construction of houses specifically as dachas on plots belonging to house serfs—would have to wait until the 1830s. See E. Springis, “Moskovskie zhiteli v sele Ostankine: K istorii dachnoi zhizni stolitsy serediny—vtoroi poloviny XIX veka,” Russkaia usad’ba 5/21(1999).

56. PSz, ser. 2, 9, no. 7464 (16 Oct. 1834). An 1843 account of life in Lesnoi Institut is quoted extensively in Amburger, Ingermanland, 1:563.

57. [S. Engel’gardt], “Iz vospominanii,” Russkii vestnik 191 (1887): 703.

58. PSZ, ser. 2, 9, no. 6882 (5 Mar. 1834). A general history of the park can be found in S. Malafeeva, “Poltora veka Petrovskogo parka,” Moskovskii arkhiv 1 (Moscow, 1996): 107–17.

59. M.A. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni (Moscow, 1998), 278. The emergence of Petrovskii Park as a dacha location was mentioned by one contemporary observer as an important step in the direction of the Petersburg model of exurban development, although dachas were still considered to be a much less commonplace phenomenon in Moscow than in the imperial capital (see V. M-ch, “Peterburgskie i moskovskie dachi,” Severnaia pchela, 17 Aug. 1842, 723–24). The significance of the creation of Petrovskii Park and the role played in it by the entrepreneurial A. A. Bashilov are noted in Blagovo, Rasskazy babushki, 1:160–2, and in S. M. Zagoskin, “Vospominaniia,” Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 1 (1900), 60–61.

60. P. Vistengof, Ocherki moskovskoi zhizni (Moscow, 1842), 90. Of the thirty-four dachas listed in one guidebook of the late 1840s, twenty-six were in Petrovskii Park or “beyond the Tver’ gates”: see M. Rudol’f, Moskva s topograficheskim ukazaniem vsei ee mestnosti i okrestnostei (Moscow, 1848), 31–34·

61. M. Wilmot and C. Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, ed. The Marchioness of Londonderry and H.M. Hyde (London, 1934), 48, 195, 223.

62. V.A. Sollogub, Vospominaniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931), 213. Sollogub goes on to emphasize the point by recalling a trip to an estate his mother had just bought in Simbirsk province, where he learned that “besides the world of the court . . . there was another world too, a world with deep Russian roots, the world of the common people” (219).

2

Between City and Court

The Middle Third of the Nineteenth Century