Summerfolk

The negative stereotypes of out-of-town life that were projected in the Petersburg feuilletons should not, moreover, be allowed to obscure the many things the dacha had in its favor. It offered health benefits to the inhabitants of crowded and unsanitary cities and provided a much appreciated amenity for an urban population that was moving decisively in the direction of apartment living. It also stood in gratifying opposition to the values of order, formality, and hierarchy that were embodied in the Russian imagination by St. Petersburg. The dacha, by contrast with the capital city, presented a site for untroubled family life, for open-ended interaction within small social groups, and for genteel (but markedly nonaristocratic) pleasures. In this respect, it can be seen as analogous to various sites in the United States and Western Europe of the same period where bourgeois habits and identities were constructed and consolidated: spa towns, vacation resorts, affluent suburbs.

These parallels should not be taken too far, however. Russia differed from Western “bourgeois” societies (and the Western societies, let it also be said, differed from one another) in two important respects. First, in the pattern of its urban and exurban development. As Russia’s major cities frayed at the edges, the dacha could no longer always be located safely on the far side of a sharp boundary between town and country. Other societies—notably the United States and England—were much more successful in creating and shoring up middle-class enclaves within a framework of high-speed urban expansion. Second, Russia differed in its social structures and ideologies. The middling urban-ites who formed the dacha’s largest constituency were a motley group whose most vocal spokesmen (often known as the intelligentsia) were becoming increasingly fractious and suspicious of any bourgeoisie that might coalesce under the watchful eye of an oppressive and autocratic state. The middle of the century may be regarded as a transitional period when the dacha gained by distancing itself from the upper-class entertainments of a slightly earlier age and thus positioning itself comfortably between the pompous court and the grimy city. By the 1870s this advantageous intermediate status was coming to seem extremely problematic, and by the end of the century it would be untenable, largely because it left the summerfolk unconnected to the vast rural world outside the court and the city. The history of the dacha was about to become a lot more complicated, contentious, and diverse.

1. Ot konki do tramvaia: Iz istorii peterburgskogo transporta (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1993), 10. The first intercity stagecoach (between St. Petersburg and Moscow) had started running in 1820; the first year-round omnibus routes in St. Petersburg were established in 1847.

2. V. Bur’ianov, Progulka s det’mi po S. Peterburgu i ego okrestnostiam, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1838), 3:4.

3. Spravochnaia knizhka dlia lits, poseshchaiushchikh peterburgskie dachi i zagorodnye uveselitel’nye mesta (St. Petersburg, 1858). The routes given in a slightly earlier guidebook are oriented more toward the west (the Peterhof direction) than toward the north (although mention is already made of a regular coach to Pargolovo via Kushelevka): see A. Grech, Ves’ Peterburg v karmane (St. Petersburg, 1851), 193–95.

4. On the relatively neglected suburban railway lines, see J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964), 45–50. Long-distance routes were of course prioritized because of their economic and military significance.

5. Bulgarin edited Severnaia pchela, the first privately owned newspaper in Russia and the first periodical to aim at a Russian “middle-class” audience. But he also “acquired notoriety as a police spy, a master of intrigue, and the progenitor of the Russian sensational press”: N. Schleifman, “A Russian Daily Newspaper and Its New Readership: Severnaia pchela, 1825–1840,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 28 (1987), 127.

6. F. Bulgarin, “Dachi,” Severnaia pchela, 9 Aug. 1837, 703.