Summerfolk

The dacha thus offers important insights into a section of Russian society that cannot easily be isolated or adequately conceptualized: the middling people of the big cities, that is to say, those who did not do physical labor or perform menial service yet were not grandees or landowning nobles. The amorphousness of Russia’s urban middle only increased as the nineteenth century wore on: more nobles became déclassé, more merchants’ sons intermarried with other groups and changed their occupation, and more petit bourgeois folk bedded down in the big city and began to acquire markedly urban tastes and habits. By 1900 the annual dacha exodus involved extremely diverse sections of society: from mandarins all the way to shopkeepers. All of these people, in their different ways, used the out-of-town experience to cultivate distinct lifestyles and articulate individual and group identities.

A middle class, however, is given unity and coherence not only by shared experiences but also by shared values and shared consciousness. Here the dacha can easily be found wanting. By the second half of the nineteenth century Moscow and Petersburg were large and fractious cities; their inhabitants often found it hard to agree on what constituted the authentic out-of-town experience, and the more vocal and articulate of them were usually ready to cast aspersions on the habits of their fellows. Mandarins, shopkeepers, literary intellectuals, and lowly bureaucrats may all have felt the exurban impulse, but it took them in different directions. The dacha thus became an institution that was ideologically charged and invested with various and often conflicting symbolic meanings.

From the 1840s on, dachniki were regularly lampooned and charged with all manner of vices: vulgarity, snobbery, stupidity, and many others. These problems of self-validation were partly a matter of unfortunate timing. The dacha came to prominence just as the noble country estate (usad’ba) was beginning to cast a long cultural shadow. As the heyday of the estate retreated into an increasingly remote Golden Age, the dacha came to be tainted by its association with a supposedly tawdry present. The difficulties it faced in positioning itself culturally were all the greater given the exceptionally polarized relationship of town and country in Russia: to transplant urban civilization beyond the city was to straddle not merely a divide but a chasm. But neglect and disparagement of the summer-folk (a word I will use interchangeably with “dachniki” to denote dacha users), both in scholarship and in other genres of writing, have several further causes. The dacha is a “second home,” and second homes, being “inessential,” draw the disapproval periodically accorded to all luxury items in the bourgeois age. This kind of critique was particularly powerful in Russia, given the widespread distaste (which extended, crucially, to elite intellectual circles) for “unproductive” use of the land, for physical idleness, and for private property. England, from the mid-nineteenth century, had well-defined and widely disseminated ideologies of individual ownership and private life, but Russians discussed these matters in very different ways. The etymology of the word “dacha” (from the root for “giving”) aptly conveys its weak connection to property rights as understood in Western legal systems: originally, in the Middle Ages, a dacha was not acquired but received, and a gift of this kind implied duties and responsibilities as much as wealth and rights. In the nineteenth century, however, the dacha was largely freed of these associations and came to be regarded as an accessory of a comfortable lifestyle. The Soviet period then saw a reversion to the earlier model of state patronage: access to the most prestigious dacha sites was possible only with the approval, or at least the collusion, of the state authorities, and legal opportunities for homeownership were much more restricted than in the late imperial period. Although the basis of property rights was transformed after the Revolution, pre-1917 negative stereotypes of the dacha persisted to a large extent, and independent dachniki had to bear the brunt of periodic official sallies against private property.