Summerfolk

Other venues were known to attract more specific sections of the urban population. Krestovskii Island, in the words of one memoirist, “was frequented above all by merchants, low-ranking civil servants, and all kinds of middling Petersburg people.”51 The son of a prosperous merchant family recalled his family taking regular after-dinner strolls there and drinking tea sold by an enterprising meshchanin who had set up a stall with a samovar. Marquees with music and dancing were set up at the end of the island, facing Elagin. A less well-off visitor to the islands was Nikolai Gogol, who during his brief career in the St. Petersburg civil service (1830–31)took frequent walks there in the late evening.52Moscow, too, was developing a suburban entertainment culture whose appeal extended far beyond the traditional social elite. For the son of a well-to-do merchant family in the 1840s, summer could be an endless round of visits, promenades, and balls:

I’m dazed, I’m in the devil knows what kind of state of mind, my head is full of hot, burning kisses! The older folk want me to get down to serious matters!!. . . They don’t understand what’s happening to me!. . . Pokrovskoe keeps getting visited by musicians from Petrovskii Park, and not one band, but two.53

The impact of public entertainments on dacha life are most strikingly illustrated by the case of Pavlovsk, a location that epitomized upmarket hauteur in the early nineteenth century and to a large extent retained this aura until the early twentieth.54 Built for the son of Catherine the Great who later became Paul I, the palace with its surrounding territory became the domain of Paul’s widow, Mariia Fedorovna, after his assassination in 1801. The select clans who were permitted to live at Pavlovsk had the opportunity to walk freely in the palace gardens and to observe the imperial family’s everyday habits at close quarters. Somewhat later, in the 1820s, many residents still had personal connections with the palace, and their households commonly adopted a style of open-house hospitality that implied membership in a close-knit community of social equals.55 Even in the 1840s, little seemed to have changed:

The Grand Prince, who owned Pavlovsk in those days, personally crossed off the names of dubious dacha ladies who wanted to move to Pavlovsk for the summer; every day he was handed a list of persons who wanted to rent a dacha in the spring. . . .

Not much of an audience came from the city on weekdays, so that all the regular attendees at concerts knew each other by face and by name.56

Old-style aristocratic sociability was, however, by now under threat in Pavlovsk. In 1837 the character of the settlement had begun to change with the opening of the Tsarskoe Selo railway. This new rapid transport link brought much closer together the“modern” city and the “Romantic” landscape of the palace ensembles; now these two contrasting worlds could no longer be conceived as being separate and sealed off from one another. In 1836 a competition was announced for designs for the station building, and the winning entry, that of A.I. Shtakenshneider, seemed to accentuate this meeting of two cultures: the station, a symbol of technological modernity, was in a thoroughly Gothic style.57 Pace modernist cultural appreciations of the railway, this was not at all an anonymous point of arrival and departure but a major social center in its own right. The station complex included a large hall for dinners, balls, and concerts, two smaller halls, two winter gardens, and forty guest rooms. The railway authorities also laid on station concerts that were free of charge for the audience and soon began to draw a regular public.