Summerfolk

The style of dacha life cultivated in mid-century at Peterhof emerges in greater detail from the papers of one particularly well placed landlord, Aleksandr Pavlovich Kozhevnikov (1807–1875). In 1843, Kozhevnikov became the councilor of the Peterhof palace administration; his duties included supervision of Peterhof hereditary lands (votchiny) and of the towns affairs more generally. While in the job, he set about acquiring dachas of his own for rental, later complaining that his official salary was too low to cover his expenses. One of these houses, a stone residence facing the sea, with twenty-four rooms, brought in 1,200 rubles a year fully furnished. Kozhevnikov also owned two other stone houses of thirteen rooms and two wooden houses of nine and seven rooms. He catered to tenants with high expectations. In 1848, for example, one of his houses was rented by A. F. L’vov, director of the court choir. In a letter to his landlord, L’vov mentioned several pieces of furniture and other household items that he was having sent to supplement the furnishings provided (these included carpets and a bronze clock); he also requested that the gardener make fresh flowers available and hinted that Kozhevnikov should help to get the interior in order.22 For L’vov, as for other residents of upmarket settlements such as Peterhof, the dacha, despite its distance from the metropolis, was synonymous with cultivated domesticity.

The Dacha and the Natural World

The mid-century model of the dacha implied not only a new, more attentive and imaginative attitude to domestic space but also a different quality of engagement with the wider environment. The architectural recommendations were joined and amplified by public discussion of leisure and its relation to the natural world. Furmann’s encyclopedia was in step with the times when it defined “dacha” as “a house out of town where city dwellers repair for the summer period in order to have a rest well away from the dust, noise, and bustle of the city and to enjoy the fresh delights of the fields and woods.”23 This was a rationale for the dacha that would be heard with ever greater frequency over the next few decades: human beings, born as part of the natural world, must not allow themselves to overexercise their rational, intellectual faculties, and must take time to enjoy—even if only intermittently—the rural “good life.” A dacha, then, not only made people cultivated and contentedly domestic, it also made them physically and morally robust.

The desirability of summer recreation out of the city was further emphasized by the prominence given to Russian sea resorts. Once again a precedent was set by Nicholas I, who was the first tsar to acquire a permanent residence in the Crimea, and whose public association with the Peterhof ensemble and consequent proximity to the sea fed the image of him as a Romantic individual as well as a good family man.24 The tsar’s efforts at selffashioning were complemented and amplified by the first serious reports on Russian sea resorts. Spa towns—the aristocratic resorts of the Caucasus and the provincial mineral source in Lipetsk—first emerged in the early nineteenth century, at a time when “taking the waters” was becoming one of the most fashionable pastimes of the European aristocracy. The 1830s were associated with the rise of a more northern set of locations that catered more to an urban elite than to a landed gentry. Here again Faddei Bulgarin was a herald of social change. The sea baths at Helsingfors (Helsinki), he proudly declared, were “without any exaggeration one of the best institutions of their kind not only in Russia but in the whole of Europe.”25