Summerfolk

The conventions of the society tale are less gently probed in Zhukova’s Dacha on the Peterhof Road (1845). This story, in its bare outlines, is structured by a set of Romantic tropes. A prince (Evgenii) chases after an eligible young woman (Mary) but is undone at the last moment because his past catches up with him: he has raised and dashed the hopes of (that is, seduced) another girl, Zoia, whose consequently shredded nerves have not stopped her from becoming Mary’s close companion, and who raises a scandal when she recognizes Evgenii. But this straightforward story line is undercut in several ways. For one thing, Evgenii is lazy and vapid and has to be pushed in Mary’s direction by his forceful aunt, who sees that a match of this kind is essential to rescue the family finances. Romantic and realist worldviews clash openly in a discussion between Zoia and Mary on the meaning of true love. Moreover, the dacha setting serves to play off sentimentalist motifs against a realist authorial sensibility. On the one hand, the two girls are trying to create an arcadia in the manner of a pair of late eighteenth-century noble shepherdesses. The garden has a carefully landscaped section, but at the back it opens up toward the sea; here the girls can seek perfect solitude and commune with nature. The stylized interior of the house makes it a shrine to Russian-style reverie (mechtatel’nost’). Other things about this dacha, however, make it an unlikely backdrop for a pastoral idyll. Although it is one of the finest dachas on the Peterhof Road, it has changed hands since it was first owned by an “aristocratic gentleman” and now belongs to an owner “whose name seemed surprised to see itself on the plaque attached to a gate that once opened hospitably for counts and princes and their expensive carriages." The grounds of the dacha are no longer as splendid as they were in its aristocratic heyday: they contain a number of crumbling little houses, once used to accommodate the many guests who arrived at the dacha, but now rented out very cheaply. And the dacha certainly cannot be regarded as a secluded rural retreat: the Peterhof Road is a “real small town in its own right, a colony where people come together from all over Petersburg, where they get to know one another, even if not immediately, but where they still try to find out who everyone is, where they’ve come from, whom they receive, how they live.”65

The pattern of life fictionalized by Zhukova is confirmed (and sometimes bemoaned) by other sources. As a leading guidebook of the time observed, the dacha plots on the Peterhof Road had long since been sold by their original owners, and most of them now contained several subsidiary houses for rent to separate tenants. Peasant villages adjacent to the road also served as dacha locations.66 One former resident recalled at the end of the century that “by the 1850s the once fashionable Peterhof Road had become completely empty [empty, that is, of the beau monde], although by comparison with what it is now it might seem full of life.”67

Other observers were less wistful as they noted the weakening presence of high society in dacha areas. Much of Karolina Pavlova’s Double Life (1844–47), a late-Romantic society tale, takes place at a dacha in Moscow’s Petrovskii Park, a location that is depicted as being antipathetic to meaningful human relations:

Several days had passed since Vera Vladimirovna had moved into one of those nice pseudo-Gothic-Chinese buildings that Petrovsky Park is strewn with. Here too everything corresponded to the demands and conditions of society. Surrounding the luxurious cottage was a luxurious garden, its greenery always an excellent, a choice, one might say an aristocratic greenery. Nowhere a faded leaf, a dry twig, a superfluous blade of grass; banished was everything in God’s creation that is coarse, vulgar, plebeian. The very shrubbery around the house flaunted a kind of Parisian haughtiness, the very flowers planted in every available space took on a certain semblance of good form, nature made herself unnatural. In a word, everything was as it should be.68