Summerfolk

What kind of a dacha was this! An izba with an internal partition that did not reach all the way to the ceiling, in which there was a kitchen on one side and on the other his room, a kind of lumber room, where he worked and slept. On hot days you could suffocate at this dacha, and when it was wet, you’d shiver to the marrow of your bones from the dampness and the wind that blew through the cracks in the floor and walls.82

This austere lifestyle (not, let it be said, adopted by choice) became one of the emblems of the radical tradition of which Belinskii was the founding father.

Suburbia Prefigured

Belinskii’s dacha experiences reflect a wider trend whereby dachas in St. Petersburg’s closer environs underwent a radical change in their function and character. Take the Koltovskaia district on the Petersburg Side, whose boundaries were the Karpovka to the north, the Zhdanovka to the southwest, and Bol’shoi Prospekt to the southeast. Briefly, in the 1820s the Koltovskaia was among the smartest dacha locations (note that it contained the dacha of Mariia Aleksandrovna Naryshkina, mistress of Alexander I). By the 1840s, however, it was mainly the preserve of middling and hard-up civil servants, whose poor living conditions and difficult rental arrangements formed commonplaces of popular journalistic accounts of the time.83 The Petersburg Side as a whole had plunged downmarket since its early days, when Peter I built himself a palace there. In a contribution to 53 Nikolai Nekrasov’s seminal almanac The Physiology of Petersburg (1845), E.P. Grebenka, commenting on the “dacha mania” of the time, wrote:

The richer people [get] farther away [from the city], but the poor folk head for the Petersburg Side; they say it’s just the same as the country, the air there is clean, the houses are made of wood on the whole, there are plenty of gardens, it’s close to the islands, and, above all, it’s not far from the city. . . .

Because of these considerations, all the houses and cottages, all the mezzanines and attics are occupied by dacha folk; shopkeepers lay in three times more supplies than usual; on Klavikordnaia Street, which leads to the Krestovskii ferry, carts thunder along and countless traders and manufacturers take up residence; every evening the streets and alleys come alive with people out for a stroll, with crowds of colorfully dressed ladies and their gentlemen.

And a little later in his article Grebenka has this to say about the houses on the Petersburg Side inhabited by dachniki and permanent residents alike: “Everywhere [you see] identical or almost identical little houses with or without mezzanines, front gardens with two lilac bushes, or a yellow acacia.”84

Several things catch the eye in this account: the opening up of the dacha to a less well heeled public, the existence of such a low-grade dacha location so close to the elite areas of Kamennyi Island and the Karpovka, and its amazing proximity to the city center. Another noteworthy development is the intermeshing of the dacha with suburbia, both physically (in the sense that the Petersburg Side was both a dacha settlement and a low-rent suburb, and a single street could belong to both) and culturally (in the sense that these dachas, with their front gardens, lilac bushes, and dark-green wallpaper with scenes from ancient mythology, conform so closely to Western stereotypes of lower-middle-class life). In the culminating passage of Grebenka’s article, the petit bourgeois domestic impulse is taken to an unsightly extreme: one resident of the Petersburg Side, determined to beautify his front garden, diverts the contents of his drainpipes into a large barrel in order to create a fountain—which spouts green water.85