Summerfolk

The village belonged to the landowner Divov, who retained the large mansion there for himself for any trips he might take to his family estate but leased to tenants the two wings of the mansion and a cottage behind it plus a magnificent linden and birch grove that ran from the house down a hill to the river. On the other side of the river and hill, in keeping with the common character of Russian landscapes, a solid line of peasant huts was strung out. The Herzen and Granovsky families occupied the wings and Ketcher the rear cottage.77

Herzen also mentioned this summer at Sokolovo in his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts. With his characteristic ironic detachment, he observed the peculiarities of the landscape on the two sides of the park: “On one side our Great Russian sea of wheat unfurled itself, on the other opened out a spacious view into the distance, and for this reason the owner did not pass up the opportunity to call the pavilion placed there ‘Belle-vue.’ ”78 Herzen commented further that the aristocrats of the eighteenth century, “for all their failings,” had at least had a certain “breadth of taste,” their own sense of style.

This last comment reveals that in the eyes of a sophisticated member of the literary intelligentsia in the 1840s, the culture of the country estate had lost its cultural vitality: at best, it was a living monument to an enlightened earlier generation of the aristocracy, at worst a reminder of enduring social ills. Even if they rented their summer houses on “traditional” country estates, members of Moscow intellectual circles were at pains to distinguish their values and pattern of life from those of their landlords.

The tensions that might exist between aristocrats and their tenants are well illustrated in Ivan Panaev’s memoirs. In the summer of 1851 Granovskii and his friend N. G. Frolov, a publisher and translator, rented a small house on the Iusupov estate of Arkhangel’skoe. Panaev and V.P. Botkin arrived to visit, and were soon invited by the young prince Iusupov to visit him in the main family residence on the estate. (Panaev, a nobleman, was already well acquainted with the Iusupov family.) In due course, Iusupov extended the invitation to Zagoskin too, but at this point Frolov took huge offense on Zagoskin’s behalf, supposing that Panaev and Botkin had instigated the invitation and arguing that an eminent and independent man such as Zagoskin was not to be patronized by such marks of aristocratic favor.79

The intelligentsia’s countermodel of country life was exemplified by the Sokolovo group in the mid-1840s. Herzen and his friends entertained guests on a grand scale, went for regular walks together, and above all engaged in prolonged and passionate discussions (it was here, for example, that an important fissure within the intelligentsia—between the Westernizers and the proto-populists—opened up).

only one thing was not allowed at Sokolovo—to be a limited person. Not that one was peremptorily required to be an effective speaker and display flashes of brilliant capabilities in general; quite the contrary, people wholly engrossed by their own specialties exclusively were held in very high esteem there. What was required were a certain intellectual level and a certain dignity of character. All the discourse of the circle was devoted to refining people’s intellect and character, no matter what the talk was about.80

But the Moscow circle’s model of dacha life, centered on the country estate and valuing comfort and open-ended sociability, was not shared by the Petersburg-based radicals, with whom it parted intellectual company in the 1840s. In an extremely influential essay first published in 1844, Vissarion Belinskii contrasted the warm, open, contented, familyoriented Moscow with the cold, official, but high-achieving St. Petersburg. To Moscow Belinskii went so far as to ascribe the value of komfort, which in this period was widely held to be uniquely an attribute of the English.81 Belinskii, however, was condemned to spend his summers in a succession of drafty huts on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. In 1845 he rented a dacha near Lesnoi Institut; but, according to Avdot’ia Panaeva, a well-connected member of progressive circles and subsequently the common-law wife of Nikolai Nekrasov, it can have done his fragile health little good: