Summerfolk

New settlements such as Losinoostrovskaia aimed to avoid the urban blight that had infected Novaia Derevnia and other city outskirts adjacent to the center. In part they took their inspiration from the garden city movement, which had a growing public profile in Russia.88 Confronted with ever worsening overcrowding in Moscow and St. Petersburg, some observers looked to Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb for inspiration. As one journalist wrote, fresh from a trip to Britain, “it’s not just for fresh air and greenery that people want to move to garden cities. They want more: a more integrated, friendly, straightforward life, less conflict, more institutions for the common good, new legal and economic forms.”89 The optimal size for a garden city was held to be 2,400 desiatinas, of which 400 desiatinas were to be built up and the remaining 2,000 were to provide a surrounding agricultural belt. Adopting a line of argument characteristic of Russian thinking in many fields, the first book-length treatment of Ebenezer Howard’s ideas argued that Russia, by virtue of its late entry into modernity, could take advantage of the accumulated experience of urban planning in the West and integrate this experience into its own traditions of settlement.90 Russia’s characteristic small town (malyi gorod) made it especially suitable for the garden city: the prerevolutionary period abounded in planning proposals for pleasant green suburbs around major cities of the Russian Empire.91 The small town, which for most of the nineteenth century had been a powerful symbol of backwardness, came to be regarded, improbably, as the cutting edge of urban development. The reception and implementation of exurbanizing ideas varied from city to city in the Russian Empire. Of Nizhnii Novgorod, for example, it was written that “only very wealthy people go to the dacha. Run-of-the-mill folk are quite happy with the city parks.”92 But exurbia was by no means restricted to the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions: several other densely populated cities—Warsaw, Odessa, Kiev, for example—shared an interest in using out-of-town areas for summer habitation.93

The interest in exurbanizing projects brought with it a cult of English simplicity and practicality in house design. The new ideal of the pared-down kottedzh drew explicitly on foreign, mainly Anglo-Saxon, models. The Russians, it was commonly claimed, tended to overreach, to opt for surface grandeur rather than comfort, to give up domestic space for public entertaining, and to underequip the family’s private quarters. They did not mold the domestic environment so as to meet the requirements of convenience and efficiency; they failed, for example, to understand that entrance halls, instead of presenting a formal and forbidding front to visitors, could be used as living spaces. The Russian striving for showy effect over habitability was thought to be reflected in the taste for elaborate dacha design. A simply furnished, solidly built cottage with a plot of land was much preferable to the “Hellenic” and “Gothic” excesses of the time. Often, it was felt, foreign architectural models were transplanted unthinkingly to Russian soil with little account taken of the differences in climate. An ostentatious fountain in the front garden was to be avoided; the Russians should emulate the English commitment to comfort and ease of living. Thus, for example, the kitchen should be at the front of the house, while living quarters should look out onto a quiet back garden.94 The garden should itself be light, airy, and well maintained; paths laid out geometrically in the French style would not work without open perspectives from which to view the arrangement, and tall trees, if too densely planted, would only make the garden cold and damp.95 As one commentator admiringly noted: “An Englishman lives at home, in the family, and for this very reason the pride of English architecture is a residential house, a cottage. Not beauty, but practicality and utility—that is the top priority for the English!”96 The kottedzh was the ideal, the culmination of progress and civilization in domestic design. And not the least important of its features was the compact garden that gave the home a touch of “poetry” as well as making a gesture toward cozy self-sufficiency.97