Summerfolk

The social breadth of Pargolovo and its adjoining settlements became a stereotype of the time. It is stressed in D.N. Mamin-Sibiriak’s Features from the Life of Pepko, a novel recounting the adventures of two students (the narrator, Popov, and his friend Pepko) who are trying to make careers as writers in the early 1870s. Popov has been confined to St. Petersburg for the last two summers, and this year he still does not have the money to go home and visit his family. But, inspired by Pepko’s can-do attitude, he joins his friend in taking a suburban train out north to Pargolovo III, the remotest and cheapest of the three Pargolovo settlements. Their means are so limited as to make them extremely implausible dachniki: their Petersburg landlady bursts into convulsive laughter when she is told their plans for the summer. On the way to Pargolovo they pass through a number of unglamorous dacha settlements (among them Udel’naia), but Popov finds even these uplifting: “So here were the first dachas with their run-down quaintness, their puny little gardens, and their modest desire to create the appearance of an untroubled refuge for simple dacha happiness. But I like these dachas that are cobbled together out of barge timber and remind you of birdhouses.”39 Arriving at Pargolovo III, the two friends discover that it is much more a village than a dacha settlement (by 1894, the time the novel was completed, it had been much more intensively developed as a summer destination). Popov and Pepko rent a no-frills izba for the fantastically low price of 10 rubles for the season. Their experiences tally with the (admittedly far from neutral) journalistic accounts of the time, which described Pargolovo as a dreary backwater whose few attractions—horseback riding, rowing, country walks, fresh milk—were quickly exhausted.40

Privately owned estate lands were not, however, the only source of dacha plots. From the middle of the nineteenth century land owned by the state and directly by the imperial family (the latter known as udel’nye zemli, or appanage lands) were increasingly made available for such purposes. A law of 1850 specified the procedures whereby state land could be transferred into individual ownership; that is, by a kind of hereditary lease called chinsh.41 Ten years later the availability of chinsh land was extended to the Moscow dacha areas of Sokol’niki (twenty-seven plots) and Shiriaevo Pole (seventeen). Regulations were fairly strict: residents were not allowed to engage in commercial activities and were forbidden to build high fences around their houses, which, it was emphasized, should have a “decent appearance.” But they were also given twenty years’ exemption from property taxes and from responsibility for upkeep of the road, and the right to roam freely on the surrounding lands as long as they caused no damage.42