Summerfolk

The extension of urban settlement affected the character not only of peasant communities. Back in the 1840s, writers of the “physiological” school were observing that the northern districts of St. Petersburg (the Petersburg and Vyborg Sides) were turning into low-rent suburbs. From the 1860s on this state of affairs became even more pronounced. The shortage of cheap housing in the city center ensured that many of the wooden dacha-type houses on the islands and the Vyborg Side were occupied year-round.56 Former green-belt areas had in effect become slums. According to one sketch of the 1870s, the previously well-to-do Karpovka was now “the poorest part of the city,” inhabited “primarily by low-ranking civil servants.” During the winter these unfortunates huddled together in dachas, paying little or no rent for the privilege, as owners were only too glad to have someone to keep an eye on their property. Often bachelors moved in with a married friend and split the costs of the household; at times they were reduced to fishing bits of wood out of the river or to filching it from neighbors’ fences in order to keep warm. In the dacha season these young men gave way to the dachas’ owners, relocating to attics, barns, and empty stables. Sometimes they even slept out on the bank of the Karpovka.57 The Petersburg Side in the 1860s and 1870s was recalled as being a place where people would live all year round in wooden houses and where the absence of domestic comforts was only partially compensated by the cleaner air.58

Dacha areas on the city’s immediate outskirts had become decidedly seedy. Novaia Derevnia, not much favored by journalists at the best of times, was reckoned to be the preserve of hard-up civil servants and loose-living young people. The requirements of its population were reflected in the range of entertainments offered: operetta had forced out theater, inns had supplanted libraries, and cafés chantants had displaced the “delights of ins Grüne”59 Isler’s Mineral Waters, the institution to which Novaia Derevnia owed much of its original popularity, seemed tame by comparison with the forms of entertainment fashionable in the 1880s. The nearby Chernaia Rechka was fast becoming an insalubrious suburb for low-paid office workers. Houses were packed close together, brick dwellings were very few (although many residents spent the whole year there), and hygiene was dreadful (there was no proper sewage system and canals often smelled foul).60 Nor were the smarter Neva islands invulnerable to change; the common perception was that they had been colonized by merchant families.61 Even Kamennyi had “long since been democratized and just about the majority of its dachas have come into the possession of prosperous market traders.”62

Other suburban districts were even less fortunate, being taken over by factories and overcrowded worker settlements. The example most frequently cited was the route leading along the south side of the Gulf of Finland—the Peterhof Road, where the modern dacha phenomenon had originated. The old-style dacha on the Peterhof Road was still alive in the 1870s, when advertisements for fifteen-room furnished residences with stables could still be found. The family of Alexandre Benois lived there for a couple of summers when Benois’s father was a court architect. And Felix Krzesinski, successful dancer at the Aleksandrinskii Theater and the nineteenth century’s most celebrated exponent of the mazurka, rented a dacha at Ligovo in the early 1870s.63 By the 1880s, however, it was a commonplace to associate the first section of the Peterhof Road—at least to the settlement of Avtovo—with urban squalor. The next section, leading to Krasnyi Kabachok, was taken up with garden plots; it was only beyond Ligovo that uninterrupted woodland was to be found—and even here almost all villages were densely populated by summerfolk.64Ekaterinhof, although it retained in its restaurant traces of a more upmarket past, was taken over on holidays by disorderly workers from the nearby factories, who formed a “garish crowd with the cheapest pretensions to entertainments”; the air and the river smelled foul, and a temporary hospital for infectious diseases was set up.65 Settlements in the Peterhof direction such as Volynkina were becoming little more than shanty sprawl with inadequate sanitation and educational provision.66