Summerfolk

This broadly positive account did not, however, come without certain reservations. Although dachas were intended to improve the health of their residents, they were often damp and cramped. They might have strengthened the economy by improving employment prospects, but they had also stoked inflation, as tradesmen were driven to raise prices in order to fund their own forays out of town. Dachas could, moreover, be seen to undermine the economy by taking people away from their work for two months at the very least. Worse still, the lifestyle adopted by most people at the dacha—consisting mainly of sleeping and talking—was bound to engender lassitude.

Bulgarin was here setting a trend for subsequent decades: a survey of dacha life served as a springboard for far-reaching social commentary, and especially for speculation on the size and the nature of Russia’s “middle class.” Nor was his ambivalence anything remarkable: it was shared by many people writing both in his time and later. A like-minded view was expressed by Nestor Kukol’nik, a literary figure similarly tainted in the eyes of posterity by his easy acquiescence in political conservatism. In another article of 1837, Kukol’nik chose to see the dacha as evidence of the emergence of a middle class with the surplus wealth and leisure necessary to cultivate its own taste. Like Bulgarin, he cited classical models in support of the dacha, using “dacha” and “villa” as synonyms. Even so, the arrival of a middle class occasioned some regret for the decline of the grand suburban residences and spectacular entertainments of the great aristocratic families. “Simplicity is a pleasant thing, but there are places where it brings persistent tedium or melancholy upon the reflective spirit,” Kukol’nik concluded.8

By the middle of the 1840s, however, such doubts were beginning to appear futile. To comment on the convoys of dachniki quitting the city each year at the beginning of June was fast becoming a commonplace, and the appeal of a summer in the country was held to be universally acknowledged.9 The trend was sufficiently marked for an authoritative St. Petersburg guidebook to reflect in 1851 on an important shift in the meaning of the word “dacha”: “Petersburg dachas have lost their original meaning of ‘a place out of town given into ownership by the government or bought by a particular person,’ and the name dacha is now frequently given to a peasant house rented by a city dweller for the summer months.”10 Rental opportunities of various kinds were widely publicized. Although newspapers continued, as in the 1820s, to contain advertisements for substantial dacha residences, typically with ten or twenty rooms (sometimes nearer thirty), several outbuildings, and ample stable space, they also offered more modest accommodations: a four-room peasant home, for example, or the top floor of a baker’s house in a village a few versts north of St. Petersburg.11

Dachas were of interest to urban people not only as an amenity but also as a new type of dwelling that offered its owner space, freedom, and much richer possibilities for selfexpression than a city residence could afford. Architectural pattern books offered advice on how to make full use of this potential. The out-of-town houses described in P. Furmann’s Encyclopedia of the Russian Owner-Architect in Town and Country (1842) were solidly built and fully equipped for comfortable family life. They tended to have a study, a nursery, separate rooms for dining and entertaining, bedrooms, and further refinements such as boudoirs and “relaxation rooms.” Servants might be accommodated in small rooms inside the main house or in outbuildings. Attention was expected to be paid to the house’s external aspect; it was particularly important that there should be a clean and uncluttered approach for visiting carriages. This was sometimes called the “clean yard”; a grubbier one might be found to the rear of the house with perhaps an outhoused kitchen, a chicken coop, and a vegetable garden. The values of comfort and refinement were promoted in designs for wallpaper, furniture, gates, and railings. For the garden, neoclassical statues and faux-rustic garden furniture were recommended.12