Summerfolk

According to another contemporary, visitors were divided into three main categories: those taking the waters (both marine and mineral), those coming to Helsingfors out of curiosity, and younger people who were attracted by the social scene (especially the wellattended balls). At any one time more than 300 people would be taking cures, but the main building of the mineral waters complex was equipped for a rather broader public: it had a large hall (in which there was often dancing in the evenings), a billiards room, and a restaurant. For the summering Petersburger Helsingfors had the advantage of being clean, law-abiding, and cheap. New accommodation was created as the leisure industry grew, so that visitors no longer had to settle for a guesthouse: “The space separating the building of the [mineral] waters from the bathing booths is now beginning to fill up with dachas, and we can expect to see soon a continuous chain of pretty cottages that will replace the present view of the cliffs.”26 Certain resorts were by now so well established that their medical functions were taking second place to their social amenities. One Petersburg civil servant hoped to spend the summer of 1834 in Revel’ (now Tallinn) recuperating with his wife, who had just given birth. What he found on arrival was a microcosm of well-to-do Petersburg society; as a result, he felt unable to shed urban formalities and to take full advantage of the setting, which he admitted was splendid.27

In general, however, medical and social attractions seem to have been considered not contradictory but complementary. The vacation habits of the Russian leisure class in this period fitted a pattern identified by Dominic Lieven in his study of the nineteenth-century European aristocracy: small-town spas came to be regarded as an agreeable hybrid of the high society of the capitals and the quieter lifestyle of the country estate.28 The rise of the spa town brought with it an emphasis on a different range of pastimes: a vacation by the sea was expected not merely to replicate the entertainments afforded by the salon and the ball but also to provide opportunities for mental repose, healthy physical exertion, and untroubled and “democratic” socializing. Bulgarin made a point of praising, besides the health-giving properties of the local water, the hospitality of the Finns and the openness of Finnish high society. Another observer concurred, noting that “in Helsingfors all ages and classes of people can find themselves the appropriate entertainments and spend the summer as they please, without constraint, enjoying complete freedom in all places and at all times.”29 Similar benefits—hygiene, public order, relaxed entertainment, and healthy lifestyle—were promised in Revel’.30 In July 1829 the young Nikolai Gogol, at the end of his tether after a few months in St.Petersburg, took a trip to Lübeck, where he was favorably impressed by the neat and well-appointed dacha hamlets outside the town: “The cottages spread out beyond the town are planted and entwined with trees, bushes, and flowers; they are delightful and very similar to Petersburg dachas.”31

Gogol was doubtless extreme in the violence of his rejection of St.Petersburg, but he was by no means exceptional in taking a dislike to the place. In the 1830s and 1840s attitudes toward the city became more self-conscious and, in general, more hostile; attention was increasingly drawn to its “contradictions.”32 Petersburg became an unwholesome and treacherous place, and trips to the dacha were regarded as an essential outlet. In other words, the dacha gained definition as a space with a set of values not only different from but also opposed to those of the city. In the summer Petersburg was left for unstable dreamers such as the narrator of Fedor Dostoevsky’s White Nights (1848), who spends much of the opening pages of that work conveying his obsessive sense of abandonment as his not even nodding acquaintances from Nevskii Prospekt all depart for their dachas; with similar dismay he observes the long procession of carts piled high with furniture and household items and the fleets of boats similarly loaded up crossing the river to Chernaia Rechka or one or other of the Neva islands.