Summerfolk

The main casualty of the dacha boom is often assumed to be the country estate. From well before Emancipation observers bemoaned the decline of the landowner lifestyle and its replacement, under economic pressure, by more densely populated forms of settlement. Regrets of this kind gathered force over time. When Anton Chekhov’s Lopakhin purchased Ranevskaia’s estate, complete with its cherry orchard, he was setting the terms for much subsequent discussion of the “decline” of the Russian nobility in the second half of the nineteenth century. Opinions differ on the nature of this decline—it is unclear, for example, whether the sale of estates by noble families should be seen as a symptom of socioeconomic crisis or as a rational response to changing economic conditions after 1861— but its role in furthering dacha entrepreneurship is undeniable.22

On occasion the development of new dacha settlements did conform to the Cherry Orchard model. One example was Koz’ma Soldatenkov (nicknamed Koz’ma Medici), who bought the Naryshkin estate at Kuntsevo in 1865 and promptly started renting out plots of land to wealthy merchant families.23 But other scripts were also possible. Most merchants were nowhere near as wealthy as Lopakhin or Soldatenkov, and bought themselves quite small plots of land that met only the needs of their own extended family. And well-to-do urban families might lease land directly from a village in order to build themselves country retreats. One example was the merchant and Old Believer Sergei Karlovich Rakhmanov, who in 1870 built a dacha for his son in Dunino, a village in a scenic spot at the western end of Moscow guberniia. The son subsequently married the manager of the Rakhmanov dachas in the village. The house of Rakhmanov fits had around ten spacious rooms; it also had a room for a live-in servant and came with several outbuildings. Sergei Karlovich’s own dacha next door was even grander: in Soviet times it served as several discrete family dwellings. By the 1900s the village existed primarily to service the dachniki, who had taken the most picturesque sites overlooking the river.24

Noble families, too, could show themselves to be alert to the commercial possibilities of their holdings. In the 1850s and 1860s, for example, landowners along the Nikolaevskaia railway line (between Moscow and St. Petersburg) were so keen to clear their land for sale that they met peasant resistance.25 The Nikolaevskaia line was subject to particularly intensive development, as land tended to be cheaper there than in traditional dacha locations.26 Another major focus for development was the Northern line from Moscow to Sergiev Posad, which opened in 1861. Pushkino, for example, became a thriving dacha colony in little more than a couple of years. Muscovites with spare cash were encouraged to build by the opportunity to obtain land on a ninety-five-year lease for 24 rubles per year per desiatina (a separate but lower charge was made for the forested land that dachniki were entitled to use).27

Dacha entrepreneurship, on various scales, was also encountered in more heavily developed locations nearer the city. In 1877, 1878, and 1882 the family of the young Alexandre Benois (subsequently a renowned artist of the fin de siècle) was at the Kushelev-Bezborodko dacha, formerly one of St. Petersburg’s elite suburban residences, which had just recently been sold off in lots; the previous owners had built a few villas in the grounds “partly for their own house guests and partly to let.” The dacha dwellers had as their immediate neighbors an English cotton factory, a paper factory, a brewery, and a rope factory (which had been started up by Benois’s uncle); the largest dacha on the site was rented as a community center for foreign workers at the rope factory. So Benois had as the aural backdrop to his summer vacation “a single, not unpleasant, blur of sound that resembled the noise of a waterfall.”28

The dacha of Rakhmanov fils