Summerfolk

Until the 1860s the Petersburg Side remained remarkably underdeveloped; its ad hoc arrangement of streets was in striking contrast to the ordered planning of the city center, on the other side of the river.86 In 1864 the Koltovskaia district was finally paved, and the roads became more or less passable. But the area had already acquired a quasi-bucolic image that it could not properly shake off. In his epic of the 1860s, Petersburg Slums, Vsevolod Krestovskii takes a break from his main themes (illegitimate children, fallen women, night life in Petersburg dives) in order to show us the charming old Povetin couple, who have lived in Koltovskaia forever, have their own kitchen garden and chickens, and lead a life of untroubled domesticity (quite an achievement in the nineteenth-century novel, especially in the Russian tradition). Koltovskaia has become gently rundown since the days when it was a luxury dacha location: it is now teeming with “numerous breeds of civil servant, from collegiate registrator to court counselor inclusive,” who are divided into those rushing about their official business and those “resting in the bosom of their families after the end of their official career.” The houses reflect the conservative values of the population:

little cottages, with three or five windows, with a mezzanine, with green shutters, the obligatory patch of garden and the dog chained up in the yard. In the windows with their prim curtains you’ll see pots with a geranium, a cactus, and a Chinese rose, some kind of canary or siskin in a cage, in a word, wherever you turn, whatever you look at, everything makes you think of a kingdom of peaceful, quiet, modest, family-based, patriarchal life.87

The image of dacha folk projected in the press overlapped to a significant extent with Krestovskii’s depiction of the Petersburg Side. In newspapers of the 1850s the dachnik emerged as a cultural personage in his own right, characterized, in the more approving accounts, by modest, restrained tastes, by a sense of responsibility for his property, and by a concern for his family’s well-being. Dacha dwellers did not require “salon-style comfort”; all they needed was a small patch of land with a rowan tree. As usual, the Teutonic population was held up as the ideal of modest, well-ordered domesticity, a stroll through the German section of Krestovskii Island presented the visitor with “images of family tranquility, of peaceful home life, just like the cover illustration of Gartenlaube, which is the favorite publication of these dachniki.”88 In 1850, similarly, in the “Miscellany” section of Sovremennik, a journalist described wandering into Novaia Derevnia and finding a "huge row of miniature cottages with microscopic patches of garden.”89 His impression was corroborated by other writers of the time, for whom this location was the embodiment of a not altogether admirable neatness and orderliness.