Summerfolk

This quest left its mark in literary accounts of the time, which, by rejecting the ambience and the poetics of the salon, may be said to have brought the dacha into the realist age. Ever since Mariia Zhukova received a favorable mention from the celebrated critic Vissarion Belinskii in the late 1830s (which, in typical style, he drastically revised a few years later), she has intermittently been regarded as a herald of the shift from Romanticism to realism; and her two best-known works are set at the dacha. In Evenings by the Karpovka (1837) she paints a picture of considerable social diversity on the Petersburg islands:

Barouches, carriages, cabriolets swept along the roads, colorful crowds strolled in the gardens, balconies turned into living rooms, whole families with their samovars and their numerous children and nannies hurried over to Krestovskii or to the hospitable garden of Countess L., they spread out with their cold supper, ice cream, and tea on the slope of the hill or under the dense lime trees on the very shore. You saw there a German craftsman and his good family, and high-spirited groups of young civil servants, and a Russian merchant with his wife and children of all ages, and two young artists discussing a forthcoming exhibition, and the chic mantilla of a high society beauty, and a servant girl’s pretty kanzu.63

The main focus of the story, however, is not the day trippers on Krestovskii but the dacha of an elderly lady, Natal’ia Dmitrievna Shemilova, in the Karpovka district—a mere stone’s throw from the dachas inhabited and fictionalized by Pushkin. Shemilova’s dacha serves as a framing device for the stories that make up the body of Evenings: she receives a handful of regular visitors from various walks of life, who over the course of several evenings spin yarns to entertain the others. The dacha is a domestic world of everyday concerns and routine informal socializing. It is in pronounced contrast to the exurban salon of Pushkin’s experience, which is a more public and convention-ridden arena for conversation. It also differs from the salon in its cultural detachment from the city. Shemilova’s house and the stories told by her guests have no place for the conflict between urban artifice and natural virtue that tends to provide the emotional dynamic of the society tale.64