Summerfolk

This annual exodus was motivated in part by very real health concerns. Petersburgers in the middle of the nineteenth century lived in fear of periodic devastating outbreaks of disease. The worst came in 1848, when the city lost over 12,000 people to cholera, and memoirists recalled anxiously sitting out the summer and waiting for the epidemic to abate. One man took refuge in a well-to-do location north of the city, but even here, he remembered, “terror reigned everywhere during the entire summer. There were almost no deaths in the dachas near Lesnoy Korpus, but nevertheless, everyone was distraught and tense.”33 Even when the city in summer was not life-threatening, it was likely to be repellent. The combination of inadequate sanitation and hot weather brought a pervasive stench to the streets of St. Petersburg, and urbanites ran the further risk of being doused in paint and sand or struck down by falling wooden beams as they walked along: the summer months were the main time for construction and renovation work in residential buildings.34

Practical considerations of this kind soon received cultural elaboration and amplification. For those people with the time and money to spend prolonged periods out of the city, the dacha began to reinvent itself as a place not for idle and ostentatious entertainment but for healthful recreation, purposeful leisure, and virtuous family life. These were the main priorities emphasized in advice, liberally dispensed from the 1840s onward, on the conduct of life out of town. Dacha dwellers were urged not to try to haul all their belongings to the dacha, but rather to create a more straightforward lifestyle over the summer months, rising early and taking frequent invigorating walks, avoiding excessive mental activity, greasy and rich food, and mid-afternoon snoozes.35 The most important considerations were “trees, a bit of water, and, above all, that you shouldn’t have to put on airs, that you can leave the house in your smoking jacket, with a pipe in your mouth, without making yourself, or anyone else, blush.”36 The virtues of simplicity and practicality were similarly projected by architects’ designs of the period, several of which take the English or the Swiss country cottage as their model.37 Practice did not necessarily follow prescription, of course. It seems that advice to choose a not excessively damp site and an appropriate set of building materials was not always heeded. In any case, the design recommendations of the time left much room for misapprehensions. One man’s tasteful Gothic was another’s vulgarity; Peterhof-style eclecticism, if it fell into the wrong hands, was apt to seem impractical and pretentious. As one thoroughly typical retrospective account had it, many of the new Petersburg dachas were

just houses of cards, not at all adapted to the climate, with Mauritanian and other adornments on the outer facade, but without the least conveniences inside, with verandas and belvederes but without stoves, with various means of defense against the sun, which so rarely shows its face in Petersburg, but without the slightest defense against the cold, strong wind that blew right through all our dachas for the whole of our so-called summer.38

Even so, the morally fibrous qualities of the dacha did enter the public consciousness in mid-century. They find an unlikely literary beneficiary in Il’ia Il’ich Oblomov, the eponymous hero of Ivan Goncharov’s novel (first published in 1858). Oblomov has gone down in Russian culture as the epitome of apathy. In part 1 of the novel he never quite manages to get out of bed; and then, at the beginning of Part 2, despite the vigorous pressure applied by his indefatigable German acquaintance Stolz, he shows no real signs of taking leave of his dream world and putting his affairs in order. A trip abroad, for which he makes the practical arrangements, is postponed indefinitely after he wakes up one morning with a swollen lip. But then, in one of the more astonishing spatial shifts in Russian literature, Oblomov does change both his location and his lifestyle:

He gets up at seven, reads, takes books to a certain place. He does not look sleepy, tired, or bored. There is even a touch of color in his face and a sparkle in his eyes—something like courage, or at any rate self-confidence. He never wears his dressing-gown. . . .