Summerfolk

Besides offering practical advice on design and issuing the common instruction not to build on low-lying, marshy ground, Furmann had interesting comments to make on style. On a trip around the provinces, he recalled, he had been shocked by the ugliness and tastelessness of many large houses that he encountered. He now sought to resist this trend by placing emphasis on simple, mainly classical architectural solutions. He also had kind words for the style rustic: a cottage-like dwelling was especially pleasing to the eye tucked away in parkland, and was highly suitable for putting up guests. The straightforwardness of its outward appearance did not, moreover, imply a spartan interior; the comforts concealed by the rustic exterior might “satisfy all a pampered sybarite’s demands for refined luxury.”13

Furmann’s work was one of several publications of the time that gave coverage to a new kind of summer residence quite distinct from the manor house and the town house. This kind of dwelling, generally known as “dacha,” “house out of town,” or “country cottage” (sel’skii domik, to be distinguished from the less diminutive and more manorial sel’skii dom), came in two main types: the neoclassicism of solid, symmetrical, and often colonnaded residences and the countrified aspect of more modest and less symmetrical houses that often evoked the English cottage. Where it differed most strikingly from its architectural forebears was in the scope it offered for the whimsical and the exotic.

In this last respect, the dacha was in the aesthetic vanguard of its time. The 1830s were a decade when eclecticism, far from being a dirty word, was taken up enthusiastically by numerous commentators on architecture and the other arts. Civilization, it was widely believed, had entered a third, Romantic phase, following its “Eastern” and “Greek” eras. The normative boundaries of art were pushed back in several spheres, and the history of culture was raided for inspiration in creating novelty. Hence, for example, the “discovery” of the Middle Ages, the Gothic revival, and the commitment to stylistic experimentation. Romanticism was a disposition rather than a fixed style; or alternatively, it was, in the words of Wladimir Weidlé, “the loss of style.”14 Nowhere did architectural innovations achieve more striking results than in prime dacha territories such as Kamennyi Island, where a whole range of new constructions went up in the late 1830s: Gothic mansions, white Dutch cottages with green shutters, Neapolitan glass galleries, Greek columns, Russian izbas, and Chinese pagodas.15

A neoclassical dacha design from the 1840s (from P. Furmann, Entsiklopediia russkogo gorodskogo i sel’skogo khoziaina-arkhitektora [St.Petersburg, 1842])

A dacha “in the Gothic style” (from P. Furmann, Entsiklopediia russkogo gorodskogo i sel’skogo khoziaina-arkhitektora [St.Petersburg, 1842])