He reads a book or writes dressed in an ordinary coat, a light kerchief around his neck, his shirt collar shows over his tie and is white as snow. He goes out in an excellently made frock coat and an elegant hat. He looks cheerful. He hums to himself. What is the matter?
Now he is sitting at the window of his dacha (he is staying at a dacha a few miles from the town), a bunch of flowers lying by him. He is quickly finishing writing something, glancing continually over the top of the bushes at the path, and again writing hurriedly.39
Goncharov here reverts to the style of present-tense reverie that he used earlier for Oblomov’s dream of his ancestral estate, Oblomovka. And that points to an essential similarity between the two locations: the hero’s move to the dacha is an attempt to abandon the bad habits of the city and create a rural idyll such as he remembers from his childhood (but without exposing himself to the unpleasant realities of grown-up life in the country). The difference is that the dacha is an open and uncluttered space, and one that receives remarkably little comment in its own right. The other three main locations in the novel (Oblomov’s city-center flat on Gorokhovaia Street, Oblomovka, and the remote suburb of the Vyborg Side) are described in much greater detail and with much stronger value judgments.
This very lack of specificity in the account of Oblomov’s summer outside Petersburg suggests that the dacha had acquired its own way of life, its own ideology; that it had become a space more than a place. And this is undeniably an important stage in the development of any cultural space: the moment when it floats away from a set of physical coordinates and comes to be associated with its own set of practices and values. But these were by no means the only possible practices and values. Many people required more excitement and social stimulation than did Goncharov’s placid hero, and in the middle of the nineteenth century institutions were appearing that could provide them.
A New Entertainment Culture
The inhabitants of St.Petersburg and Moscow in the first half of the nineteenth century included a significant and increasing number of modestly prosperous people who lacked a substantial independent income, an illustrious family name, and the extensive social networks invariably associated with these benefits, but who had the time and education to feel deprived of them. They had no ready-made entrée into polite society, and their means and housing conditions did not allow them to entertain on any great scale and thereby project their own social profile. They could hardly be satisfied with an entertainment culture that until the 1830s remained polarized between two extremes: on the one hand, the privately organized and funded recreations of the elite nobility; on the other hand, the maximally inclusive urban popular festivities (
In the space between these two extremes emerged a new urban entertainment culture, many of whose prime venues were to be found on the outskirts of the city and within easy reach of several dacha settlements.