Summerfolk

The year 1837 provides a convenient starting point for the next phase in the history of the dacha. The chronological marker is, for once, provided not by the death of Pushkin but rather by the completion of Russia’s first railway— line from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk. This technological advance had immense practical and symbolic value. The formerly exclusive enclaves of the out-of-town imperial palaces and their adjoining settlements were now made accessible—at least in principle—to a much more broadly construed urban society. Not that the train was the only way to escape the metropolis. The development of the city outskirts as a recreational zone had already been encouraged by the creation of a public transport system. In 1832 came the first coach routes from the city to outlying areas (Krestovskii Island and Novaia Derevnia).1 An eyewitness account of St. Petersburg in 1838 noted no fewer than twenty forms of horse-drawn transport.2 In the late 1850s coaches with room for sixteen passengers were running to the factories on the outskirts of the city and to northerly outskirts such as Lesnoi Institut (the Forestry Institute), Kolomiagi, and Pargolovo; during the day they departed every thirty minutes or so on the more popular routes.3 Moscow’s first suburban railway line came in 1862 (the Northern line, to Sergiev Posad, built largely to profit from the traffic in pilgrims to the monastery located in that town). In the mid-nineteenth century the development of railways was still much slower in the Russian Empire than in Western Europe; as of 1866, there were only a handful of lines under one hundred kilometers in length. Yet these routes (from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Oranienbaum, and Krasnoe Selo, and from Moscow to Sergiev Posad) brought a range of out-of-town locations unprecedentedly close to city dwellers.4

In the middle third of the nineteenth century, then, the conditions were right for the dacha to expand its social constituency and to raise its public profile. The synchronized expeditions that occurred on public holidays or at the start of the “summer season” gave life in the city a different rhythm and held out to city dwellers the promise of relaxation, enjoyment, and increased physical and mental well-being. Out-of-town living captured the imagination of urban people, who found in the dacha an enticing middle ground between the unhygienic and increasingly disenchanting city and the high society of the suburban palaces and estates.

The “House out of Town” Reconceived

In that same year of 1837, Faddei Bulgarin, a journalist sensitively attuned to changing Petersburg habits, noted the arrival of the dacha as a broad social phenomenon.5 In his own youth, Bulgarin recalled, to have a dacha was to be rich: “There were people who acquired rank, who gained wealth, yet did not want to live at dachas so as not to arouse talk, slander, or envy.” Now, however, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and tradesmen could all afford summer holidays out of the city. Bulgarin even felt justified in speaking of a “second city” that had come into being: “summertime Petersburg.”6

Although Bulgarin may well have exaggerated slightly the extent of this new social trend (in order, as was his wont, to emphasize the advanced nature of Russian society under autocracy), his assessment of the situation is corroborated by other witnesses of the same period (as we shall see). But perhaps more interesting are the ways Bulgarin found to analyze and evaluate the dacha phenomenon. He noted particularly the emergence of the house out of town (zagorodnyi dom) as a positive cultural development inconceivable in a country ruled by brute force, where people had to shut themselves up in castles and fortresses for protection. Villas, he proclaimed, were a sign of cultural stability and prosperity; here he invoked the example of ancient Rome, a parallel that had enormous resonance for people of a generation that derived much of its inspiration from classical models.7 Dachas, moreover, had more immediate benefits: they improved the health of the population, they created extra space in the cities in the summer, and, by expanding the service industry, they helped to create jobs.