Summerfolk

88. I. Domosedov (pseud.), “Peterburg zarechnyi,” in Russkii il/iustrirovannyi al’manakh (St. Petersburg, 1858), 140, 151.

89. “Santimental’noe puteshestvie Ivana Chernoknizhnikova po peterburgskim dacham,” Sovremennik 22 (1850), sec. 6, 60.

90. “Peterburgskaia letopis,” SPb ved, 6 June 1850, 501.

91. I. Chernoknizhnikov, “Novye zametki peterburgskogo turista,” Vek, no. 24 (1861), 765.

92. Ibid., 761.

93. Nikitenko, Diary, entry of 15 May 1854·

94. On street entertainments, see A. F. Koni, Peterburg: Vospominaniia starozhila (Petrograd, 1922), 76–77.

95. This was especially true of places just north of center with a high density of lower-class population. One such area was the much-derided Novaia Derevnia: see Domosedov, “Peterburg zarechnyi,”152. Gogolleft a dismayed description of one of these gulian’ia in a letter home to his mother (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:140).

96. Representative examples can be found in “Santimental’noe puteshestvie,” Sovremennik 22 (1850), sec. 6, 177–257; Kniaz’ Kugushev, “Stseny na chistom vozdukhe: Fotograficheskii snimok s natury,” and A. Iaroslavtsev, “Na dache i na bale, eskiz iz pisem molodogo cheloveka,” both in Sbomik literatumykh statei, posviashchennykh russkimi pisateliami pamiati pokoinogo knigoprodavtsa-izdatelia Aleksandra Filipovicha Smirdina (St. Petersburg, 1859), 5:147–218 and 219–49, respectively.

97. D. Andreevskii, Dachemaniia ili Razve my khuzhe drugikh? held at St. Petersburg State Theater Library, Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books, 1.38.2.33 (this quote on 6–7). Later in the play, the wife swoons stagily in order to have her way.

3

The Late Imperial Dacha Boom

In the 1850s, dachas were still an exciting symptom of the recent emergence in Russia of a nonaristocratic urban public. By the end of the century, this public was widely considered to have all but taken over the major cities; confirmation of the waning powers of the aristocratic elite was no longer required. Commentators on the dacha phenomenon happily abandoned all restraint. Like later historians of the Western European bourgeoisie, they spoke of inexorable expansion fueled largely by recruitment from lower social classes. One apparently overworked architect reflected in 1894:

Who isn’t looking to go to the dacha these days? From the petty shopkeeper, salesman, and member of a work cooperative right up to the rich banker, office director, and man of leisure inclusive—all of them, as soon as the first days of spring are upon them, dream of nothing but how to spend the summer outside the “dusty” city, at the dacha, in the “fresh air.”1

So deserted were the central areas of St. Petersburg after the annual mass departure for the dacha that the police had to take special measures in the early 1880s to safeguard the property of absent residents. Local superintendents were required to compile a list of all the apartments where property had been left under the supervision of servants or caretakers (dvorniki); police officers were then expected to keep an eye on these addresses and caretakers to conduct inspections to check that locks to outside doors were intact.2 Mstislav Dobuzhinskii recalled of his childhood in the 188os: “Petersburg was empty in summer,the ‘gentlefolk’ had all headed off to their dachas or to various foreign countries, and cooks, janitors, and maids became the masters of the city.”3

The dacha boom of the last third of the nineteenth century was linked to several economic and demographic factors, not least the further development of the railways. The travel season reached its peak with the heavy dacha traffic in June and July, and the late nineteenth century saw a significant rise in the proportion of short trips (in 1894, 58 percent of passenger trips in the Russian Empire were of less than fifty versts).4 Steam trains were supplemented by other forms of transport: Russia’s first horse-drawn railway (in St. Petersburg) started operations in 1863, and its network was steadily extended during the 1860s and 1870s. The first experiments in using steam-driven trams took place in 1880, and in 1886 routes for regular traffic were opened.5