Summerfolk

Even a set of definitions as broad as this does not include everything that went under the name of “dacha” in the last third of the nineteenth century. It is fitted specifically to the dacha patterns of St. Petersburg guberniia and so does not even claim to reflect the trend for locations much farther from the city. People with the freedom and the inclination to absent themselves for the whole of the summer might rent a house in the country several hours away in remote corners of neighboring regions. In the early 1870s dachas might be located fifty versts or more from the nearest railway station. This new model of the dacha as a full-fledged summer retreat rather than as a temporary vacation cottage within easy reach of Moscow or St. Petersburg was exemplified by the habits of Fedor Dostoevsky. Recently returned from a lengthy period abroad, the writer spent the summer of 1872 in Staraia Russa, a medium-sized provincial town in Novgorod guberniia. In a letter to his sister he explained all the advantages of his decision: “It’s cheap, it’s quick and easy to move here, and finally, the house comes with furniture, even with crockery, the station has newspapers and journals, and so on.” The Dostoevskys rented this house from a local priest; the following summer they chose a dacha owned by a retired lieutenant colonel that subsequently—in 1876—they bought outright. As Dostoevskys wife reported, it was “not a town house, but rather took the form of a country estate, with a large shady garden, a vegetable garden, outbuildings, and cellar.”8

After Dostoevsky’s time, the spread of locations continued to expand and prices to come down. In the 1880s, for example, it was nothing out of the ordinary for Petersburg dachniki to venture far into Finnish territory, renting often rather modest houses in a long string of settlements that extended all the way to Vyborg. Muscovites were even more adventurous in their summer habits: for them the dacha concept had become broad enough to include houses near provincial towns such as Tver’ and Rybinsk, or in distant regions such as Ukraine. By the 1900s, moreover, newspapers carried a healthy sprinkling 61 of advertisements for “dachas” in the Crimea, a location that was no longer by any means the preserve of pleasure-seeking high society.9