Summerfolk

Over the following few decades music at the station brought more and more people together as a stream of musical celebrities passed through Pavlovsk. In the early 1840s Franz Liszt and Robert and Clara Schumann visited, but the mainstays of concert life were German conductors brought over with their orchestras to provide the requisite mix of classics and crowd-pleasers (usually weighted in favor of the latter). In 1856 Johann Strauss the younger arrived for the first of many concert seasons. It was Strauss who turned Pavlovsk into a proper concert venue, insisting that music be played in a separate concert hall instead of in the dining room, where the musicians had to compete with loquacious diners and waiters. He also insisted on more Wagner and Beethoven in the repertoire, and in this programming policy we can see evidence of a standard “middle-class” stage in cultural history taking place in Russia: the invention of classical music.58 Now people visited the Pavlovsk station not only for the sake of dinner and conversation in a social circle where everyone was at least a nodding acquaintance. The music was no longer merely a pleasing diversion but rather an exciting cultural experience in its own right: a performance that took center stage, not a melodious background hum. Strauss became a huge celebrity—to the extent that he was held personally responsible for pushing up Pavlovsk rents.59 Journalists and memoirists alike remarked on Strauss’s celebrity, his extravagant style of performance, and his appeal to the opposite sex. In 1857, apparently, he “literally did not know where to hide from his female admirers,” even if “on many people his affectations (his way of dancing along as he conducted) made an unpleasant impression.”60 The station concerts remained a commonplace topic for feuilletonists for several decades: in one story by the prolific sketch writer V. O. Mikhnevich, titled “Under the Bows of the Pavlovsk Violins,” the hero falls in love with a married woman, who tests the strength of his affections by insisting he sit through Pavlovsk concerts all week. He fails the test, complaining bitterly of the monotonous repertoire.61

Despite the mild notoriety that attached itself to Strauss, Pavlovsk remained a respectable and decorous place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had none of the unseemly behavior that was held to be characteristic of the immediate outskirts of the city, where urban popular culture regularly encroached on the sedate life of dacha settlements. The Pavlovsk concerts were certainly not mass entertainment. They were, however, a decidedly nonaristocratic phenomenon in a location that had from its earliest days been associated with the more enclosed and exclusive social rituals of the elite nobility. As such, they strengthened the dacha’s real and symbolic association with new, more “middle-class” habits.

Sociability: From Aristocratic Salon to Intelligentsia Enclave

Out-of-town recreations, formerly the prerogative of a high society that blended the mandarinic and the patrician, were now open to all those who could afford a ticket to the Pavlovsk station or the admission fee for the Petrovskii Park concerts. To be sure, court life followed its traditional course within and immediately around the imperial palaces, but these palaces no longer dominated the social scene or set the tone for urban people who sought convivial and culturally stimulating ways of spending their summers outside the city.62 Dachas were no longer polite exurban drawing rooms where entry was by invitation only and the rules of behavior were understood by all. Now nonaristocratic urbanites were taking up temporary residence in exurbia and seeking to cultivate acquaintances and pursue activities that would bring them pleasure and excitement while remaining harmonious and decorous.