Summerfolk

Owners of medium-sized and large estates in the Petersburg area found a wide variety of ways to generate income. Besides selling agricultural produce, they might earn money by providing a range of services and by renting out all manner of buildings: inns, mills, factories, and of course dachas. It was a rare estate that did not have at least a handful of houses for rent during the summer. Thus in 1886 Count Stenbok-Fermor used his estate of 4,148 desiatinas at Lakhta as follows: a total of twenty dachas were rented out; four houses were leased as inns for 760 rubles annually; one other house was rented as two shop premises; a bowling alley generated 750 rubles; sand was sold for 142 rubles; rights to fish and to collect fruit and mushrooms were also sold; finally, smithies and a raft for laundresses brought in 80 and 50 rubles respectively. The 385 desiatinas owned by Countess Orlova-Denisova at Kolomiagi had, albeit on a more modest scale, a similar range of commercial functions that included nine dachas rented out for a total of 1,735 rubles each summer.29

Changes in nineteenth-century dacha life on private estate lands are well illustrated by the case of Pargolovo, part of the Shuvalov estates to the north of St. Petersburg. Pargolovo became known as a faintly bohemian place in the 1830s, when students from St. Petersburg University would go there for noisy parties in the woods. Dacha life proper began around the same time, when the area began to attract significant numbers of summer visitors. Entertainments—boating, riding, fishing—were laid on by the owners of the estate, while food and accommodations were provided by the local peasants: “Not much tilling of the soil goes on here, and peasants mostly make a living by selling firewood and coal, as cab drivers, and by renting out their homes, as numerous inhabitants of Petersburg move here for the summer and all houses without exception get taken.”30 Then and afterward, although its clientele became extremely varied, Pargolovo had a reputation as a place for intellectuals of modest means. In 1845, for example, Vissarion Belinskii lived there; from 1878 to 1906 the renowned arts critic Vladimir Stasov rented each summer the same peasant-owned house in a village half an hour’s walk from Pargolovo; and the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was married in a church in the Shuvalov park. The population in 1882 was described as “tens of thousands of protean, variegated, but at any rate intelligentsia people.”31