Summerfolk

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of Russian Romanticism is not the range of its eclecticism or the ambition of its stylistic experimentation but rather the speed with which the styles it borrowed became dehistoricized and entered the mainstream. In large measure, as with Romanticism in other cultures, this process of cultural adoption and adaptation was bound up with the search for a national art; a search that was pursued with all the more urgency in Russia for that country’s comparatively late arrival on the European cultural scene. Thus, for example, the Gothic style in architecture was quickly reappropriated as an emblem of Russian antiquity and its nouveauté accordingly forgotten. No less important, the new aesthetics of Romanticism had an impact in more everyday areas of life too. House designs, both interior and exterior, bespoke a closer and more 35 individual engagement with the home environment. In the 1830s and 1840s, for the first time, symmetry might be sacrificed in the interests of functionality, and the enfilade principle hitherto dominant weakened slightly in designs of country residences. In town houses it remained largely unchallenged, but the number of people who could afford to own and maintain such houses in the center of the city was shrinking. Here we find an important determinant of the dacha’s social prominence in nineteenth-century Russia: as apartment living became the norm for more and more urban people of all social groups (and this change was felt especially acutely by the nobility), an out-of-town residence took on added significance as a center for the extended household and as a focus of domestic and proprietary instincts.16

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

The tone had been set by the imperial Kottedzh (Cottage), designed by Adam Menelaws for Nicholas I and built at Peterhof from 1826 to 1829. In its basic composition and in the early stages of its construction this residence was classically symmetrical, but in its finished form no two sides of the house were identical in facade, its aspect was lent visual interest by contrasts in tone and perspective, and its interior was rather reminiscent of a rich bourgeois Western European household. In its execution the Kottedzh had become acutely Gothicized. And the architectural ensemble of which it formed part contributed to a new domesticized mythology of power whereby the tsar was brought down to human dimensions and emphasis was placed on his family life.17

The values embodied by the Peterhof Kottedzh—domesticity, family life, home comfort, individuality—duly filtered down to less exalted dacha dwellers. As Furmann asserted, the Gothic style, with its invigorating “imprint of poetry,” had come down to the modern age in a “pure” and “regular” form; the designs of well-known architects such as Aleksandr Briullov and Andrei Shtakenshneider had shown that it was fully compatible with the values of a civilized and no longer feudal culture.18 Other residents of Peterhof shared these convictions and followed their tsar’s lead—especially after 1832, when they gained full rights to the land on which houses stood (until then the land had been owned by the court, which retained the right to reclaim plots and remove buildings without compensation).19 As early as 1837, Kukol’nik observed that the taste for grandiloquent architectural gestures was passing, to be replaced by a tasteful eclecticism; in his opinion, Peterhof now equaled Versailles in beauty while avoiding its cultural pretensions.20 Peterhof’s domesticated Gothic was later recalled by one tenant of the 1860s, who remembered his father renting “a small cottage in the Gothic style with a high pointed roof and lancet windows; in front of the dacha there was a small patch of garden, in the middle of which stood an ancient maple tree whose branches stretched in through the windows of a rather high mezzanine.”21