Summerfolk

Life at the dacha was not, however, a consumer goods paradise; it entailed significant practical difficulties. First among them was the ordeal of searching for a place to rent. By 1880 St. Petersburg had an agency dealing with dachas, but most people chose less formal channels: they simply went to a village or settlement where they wanted to spend the summer and negotiated directly with potential landlords. The dacha search could, by all accounts, be a time-consuming and frustrating business, but often it was unavoidable. Urbanites needed to make a good choice, as in many cases the dacha would become a family’s main or only residence over the summer months. To retain an expensive city apartment during the dacha season was a luxury that relatively few could afford. The tendency was, it seems, for cashstrapped dachniki to spend longer and longer time in the country each summer so as to delay their return to the urban rental market with its inflated prices.15 But this practice made finding a new apartment, given the housing shortage in the major cities, even more problematic. An editorial of 1912, for example, contrasted the “torment” of looking for an apartment in St. Petersburg in the autumn with the ease of finding accommodations in a town in Ohio that was much smaller but had an efficiently functioning real estate office.16

The difficulties did not end even after city dwellers had found a dacha to rent. They then had to move their furniture and other possessions to their summer house. Departing dachniki might hire movers—although, to judge by most accounts, they had few guarantees that their furniture would arrive intact. Journalists delighted in making puns on the term lomovoi izvozchik (which means moving carter, although “lorm-’ is the root of lomat’ “break”).17 To judge by newspaper reports and the advice dispensed in the press, dachniki did themselves no favors by piling their carts too high.18 It was only the wealthier dachniki who could afford to leave much of their furniture behind in the city. A typical bourgeois or petit bourgeois family might rent unfurnished dachas in several locations over the years; only if their material situation became more secure did the spring ritual of moving out of town become less onerous.19

A modest design of the 1870s (from “Arkhitekturnyi sbornik” sel’skikh postroek i modnoi mebeli [Moscow, 1873])

A more elaborate dacha of the late imperial era (from A.I. Tilinskii, Deshevye postroiki [St. Petersburg, 1913])

And then there was the problem of keeping the household running through the summer in the absence of an urban range of shops and services. To a large extent summer visitors were at the mercy of the local population, who were able to ask high prices for basic foodstuffs and services. Take the following description of a dacha landlord in the mid-1870s: “When renting the place out she promised everything you like—a laundry, a barn, an icehouse—but once she’d got the deposit and the money in advance, she didn’t even begin to think that her tenants wouldn’t find any of these things at her dacha.”20 In view of such cases, one household magazine urged dachniki to discuss the provision of basic services (laundry, firewood) in advance, and under no circumstances to rely on caretakers or watchmen. Summer visitors were also advised to check the details of their accommodations before arrival, as landlords—like landlords the world over—were liable to pass over in silence inconvenient details. Dacha owners liked to create more rooms for rent, and so more windows were installed and insulation deteriorated; the best safeguard against dank rooms was to heat the dacha through and give it an airing in advance of arrival.21

The Growth of Dacha Settlements, 1860S-1890S