Summerfolk

As these examples may begin to suggest, dachas have enjoyed a widening social constituency over the last two centuries; not since the eighteenth century have they been restricted to the elite. A crucial step toward diversification was taken in the first third of the nineteenth century, when the section of the Petersburg population that was not proletarian yet worked for a living increased noticeably. Members of the nobility (dvorianstvo) moved to the capital and began to pursue careers in the government bureaucracy, which many young men and their families now saw as a better route to material security and social status than military service. The number of nobles in the city more than tripled, from just over 13,000 in 1801 to almost 43,000 in 1831, while the overall population doubled in the same period, from just over 200,000 to well over 400,000. By the mid-1860s, the proportion of nobles in the Petersburg population was higher still: around 80,000 out of a total of nearly 540,000.2

Although they retained their formal membership in the dvorianstvo, many of the noblemen who took up residence in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg followed a professional career path and were at least partly dependent on the salaries and other benefits they received. If they owned landholdings in other parts of Russia, these properties did not always supply the means to support a decent standard of living in the big city. And even when Petersburg-based nobles could count on a substantial unearned income, their connection with the country estates that generated this income was weak: they were urbanites first, landowners second.

These noble but not necessarily wealthy Petersburgers proovided one element in a new, nonaristocratic, dacha-frequenting public that emerged in the early nineteenth century. They were joined by nonnoble contingents in the bureaucracy and other occupations, particularly by the raznochintsy, Russia’s “men of various ranks,” mostly sons of low-ranking army officers, civil servants, and priests, who provided the office workers of the Petersburg civil service and would acquire in the second half of the century a strong presence in professions such as journalism, law, and medicine. A third element in the dacha public was the merchant class, which, in the major cities at least, contained a reasonably affluent and socially aspirational upper stratum that was acquiring immovable property and adopting urban ways. In the 1830s these three sections of society (including dependents) together numbered in the tens of thousands, and by the mid-1860s they had reached a total well in excess of 100,000 (or nearly 25 percent of the overall population).3

The out-of-town public was recognized by contemporaries as a remarkable new phenomenon in the late 1830s and (especially) the 1840s. To many observers the dacha habit served notice of the changing character of urban life. Now Petersburg contained tens of thousands of people engaged in nonmanual occupations who lived in apartments rather than detached houses, called the city their home, and had no ancestral estate or other property to which to repair during the summer months. For tenants of this category, rented dachas had several advantages: they offered a safe haven from terrifying epidemics, they served as a recreational amenity, and they saved money, being cheaper to rent and maintain than apartments in the city center.

The dachniki were a striking new group in Petersburg society not just for the fact of their summer migrations. Equally noteworthy was their intermediate cultural and social status: they occupied a middle ground between aristocratic sociability and popular culture. The bulk of the dachniki were not part of a beau monde constructed around dynastic association, patronage, and intensive ritual socializing, but they also kept their distance from the fairground, the tavern, and other sites of mass urban entertainment. Dachas formed part of an emerging leisure culture that had less to do with public spectacle, display, and revelry than with individual enjoyment and sociability in a relatively small circle of family, friends, and colleagues.