Summerfolk

A correspondent of the prominent newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti was in 1850 already able to say that the dacha was a tired theme for the feuilleton.90 Another journalist commented eleven years later that the humbler dachas should not be denigrated, as they brought much joy to the “laboring class of the Petersburg population.”91 Neither of these opinions was much heeded by the bulk of their colleagues in the city’s newspapers and journals. By the early 1860s, dachas had received an extraordinary amount of verbal punishment in the press; derogatory names attached to them included “houses of cards,” “toothache resorts,” “reservoirs of rheumatism,” “undertakers’ delight,” and “sideshows of vanity.”92 These jocular designations were complemented by more serious apprehensions concerning the changing character of dacha settlements close to the city. As the censor Aleksandr Nikitenko noted in his diary for 1854: “I’ve grown awfully sick of Lesnoy Korpus. Everything has changed—the woods have been destroyed, the fields taken up with kitchen gardens, the population has grown, taverns have multiplied—in a word, it has turned into a wretched little town.”93 The outskirts of St. Petersburg were in the 1850s and 1860s becoming much more intensively developed for leisure purposes, and Isler’s pleasure garden was fast being overtaken by a wide range of other entertainments, which included, for the lowbrow audience, Italian organ grinders, drunken bears, monkeys, and mouth organs.94 If dacha locations were not derided for their conservative and bourgeois profile, they might be disdained as hotbeds of proletarian rowdiness.95

As the dacha became regularly the object of disparagement in the Petersburg press of the 1850s, so the dachnik tended to be treated as a figure of fun. Some of the stock characters created by the out-of-town feuilletonists were fanatical believers in the health-giving properties of water, air, and dew. Others were pretentious dacha owners who ruined the appearance of their homes by topping them with hideous cupolas and bedecking them with exotic fruits and flowers. Still others were ludicrous snobs whose aspirations to rusticity were allied to an obsessive concern with marks of social status.96 In a vaudeville of 1850, a not overly wealthy civil servant is begged by his wife and three daughters to rent a place for the summer. A dacha, they argue, is essential to uphold the family’s social prestige. But an inserted ditty puts their ambitions in an unflattering light:

For a rich man or aristocrat

It’s no sin to live at the dacha,

But for the likes of us

It’s quite strange and ridiculous.

Look at the next man renting a shack

Or some kind of barn

And shouting self-importantly to his friend:

Come and visit us at the dacha!

Богачу, аристократу,

Жить на даче не грешно,

А уж нашему-то брату,

Как-то дико и смешно.

Вон, иной наймет лачугу,

Иль какой-нибудь сарай,

И кричит преважно другу,

К нам на лану приезжай!97

Far from providing the necessary restorative for overwrought urbanites, dachas were often little better than shanties for the Petersburg office proletariat. Instead of providing a genuine alternative to urban existence, they were inhabited largely by people who could never hope to escape the physical and moral pollution of the city. For the first time, but by no means the last, the dacha was finding itself compromised by the discrepancy between its apparent aspirations to healthful exurban gentility and the less than genteel realities of life on the fringes of the city.

THE INCREASED importance of the out-of-town house in the middle of the nineteenth century received its most telling recognition in the appearance of a new cultural stereotype: the dachnik. At best vaguely delineated in the urban imagination of the previous generation, dachas and their inhabitants now gained sharper definition. The first satirical depictions of dacha folk appeared in the 1840s and 1850s, but they were good-natured and lighthearted in comparison with the more serious disapprobation that would be dispensed by the intelligentsia in the later nineteenth century. If dachniki found themselves in drafty, unhygienic houses at no significant remove from the city, that did not make them morally culpable—just unfortunate, foolish, or misguided.