Summerfolk

Pavlova’s critique of the undue formality, false friendliness, and servile cordiality of Russian high society may be seen as continuing a venerable tradition started by foreign observers such as the Wilmot sisters. A similar view was taken by A. F. Tiutcheva, lady in waiting for two empresses, in her diary: in Tiutcheva’s view, the empty daily rituals of life in Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo served to entrench a strict hierarchical order that precluded warm and genuine relations between individual members of the palace entourage.69 Even the reforming Alexander II (ruled 1855–81) brought no perceptible change to court mores. When Alexander went out to stroll in the Tsarskoe Selo grounds in the late 1850s, aristocratic hangers-on would make a point of being there too. As one witness commented, “everyone tried to come before the eyes of the emperor. [They all wanted to see] whom he would speak to, and who would only receive a bow.”70

Such unflattering impressions of official society had as their corollary an alternative tradition that, by presenting the dacha as a way of avoiding the contamination of public life, sought a more authentically rustic experience. V.Bykova, born in 1820 and a graduate of the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, issued an exalté farewell to her dacha (rented on the Peterhof Road) in a diary entry of August 1841: “Farewell, pleasant strolls, farewell bright days and moonlit nights!” Although Bykova was susceptible to the entertainments available at Isler’s Mineral Waters, she continued (as an older woman, by now a teacher at the institute, in the 1850s) to steer clear of the more densely populated dacha locations. In 1854, for example, she went to Kolpino with her sister and another family, the two groups renting adjacent cottages. The view from her window was “simple, quite rural. No constraints at all, life was free, quiet, and peaceful.” Two years later she found the social scene at the Pavlovsk station concerts much less to her taste: the program was monotonous, consisting exclusively of waltzes and polkas; the conductor, Strauss, was too high and mighty, even getting a servant to turn the pages for him; and there was too much audience chatter in foreign languages.71

Similarly, N. E. Komarovskii, having spent time at dachas on the Peterhof Road and on Kamennyi Island, reflected that he had been happiest in his childhood at an altogether more modest location on the river Okhta, to the southeast of St. Petersburg, in the 1850s.72 And the same nostalgia for the simple exurban lifestyle can be found in the memoirs of the Moscow-based M. A. Dmitriev, who in the 1840s celebrated his promotion to chief prosecutor and concomitant pay raise by fulfilling his long-standing ambition to rent a dacha for the summer. The house he chose was modest—“almost a peasant izba, but with large windows and Dutch tiled stoves; it was new, clean, and neat”—and it was located in the village of Zykovo, just beyond the Tver’ gates to the north of the city. Although the Dmitrievs’ dacha was only a short walk from Petrovskii Park, it gave them a much-valued feeling of rural seclusion.73

This commitment to the simple dacha lifestyle and hostility to the social vanities was shared by prominent members of the first generation of the Russian intelligentsia. It is ironic, given Karolina Pavlova’s disapproval of the Petrovskii Park haute bourgeoisie in her Double Life, that Ivan Panaev, when he visited Pavlova and her husband at Sokolovo (a little more than fifteen miles outside Moscow, in the Petersburg direction) in the early 1850s, criticized their dacha on rather similar grounds: for its “artificiality” and “dandified primness.”74 For several years in the 1850s Panaev wrote regular articles in the socially engaged journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), where he offered a survey of Petersburg society and its recreations, and this venue afforded him ample opportunity to pass further scornful comment on the bourgeois dacha public.75

But Panaev and his fellow representatives of the intelligentsia had their own “authentic” dacha model, one that was created in the 1840s as Russian intellectual life became increasingly metropolitan.76 In 1845, for example, the historian T.N. Granovskii, the translator N. Kh. Ketcher, and Aleksandr Herzen moved with their families to the village of Sokolovo, where Pavlova spent her summers a little later: