Summerfolk

This is by no means to say, however, that the dachniki were a homogeneous and like-minded group. Summer houses in the late imperial era took many forms and bespoke various and sometimes incompatible values and cultural allegiances. Many meanings were attached to and generated by the summerfolk in the last few prerevolutionary decades. A particularly prestigious and influential idea was of the dacha as a rural retreat, a scaleddown country estate. A less culturally prestigious but more commonplace response was to associate exurbia with a distinctive lifestyle, centered on leisure, entertainment, and domesticity. Another approach was to judge dachas by the people who used them, and to construct an often unprepossessing general image of the summerfolk. Yet another move was to accord the dachniki a place in discussions of Russian society and its prospects. The dacha, for all its apparent marginality, held some prominence in the late imperial imagination. As an exposed and precarious outpost of urban civilization in an overwhelmingly rural and undercivilized country, it served as a focal point for the anxieties of an educated society that was extremely complex, rather unsure how to describe itself, and in general darkly apprehensive of what the future might hold.

The Dacha as Country Retreat

In the last third of the nineteenth century, summerfolk were no longer recent and insecure arrivals in exurbia. Their presence had been felt for several decades, and they represented sections of the urban population whose social prominence and economic clout were rapidly increasing. Now dachniki might try to shed once and for all their parvenu status by swapping their vacation cottage for a full-fledged country retreat, and thereby laying claim to the authentically rural, even arcadian, spirit associated with the country estate (usad’ba).

Opportunities to meet aspirations of this kind were offered most obviously by architecture. The late imperial era entertained a widening eclecticism that allowed everyone from the urban dachnik to the rural landowner to choose styles ranging from the English cottage to Mauritanian Gothic. But this eclecticism had rather different priorities from those of Kukol’nik and Furmann in the 1830s and 1840s. It formed part of a national revival whereby details of izba architecture might be appropriated by wealthy estate owners (as, for example, in the various outbuildings at Savva Mamontov’s Abramtsevo) or by exurbanites less well endowed with land and money. By the 1870s, although neoclassical symmetries still retained some prominence in dacha designs, they no longer enjoyed supremacy. The emphasis had firmly shifted to wood instead of brick as the building material of preference and to vernacular styles instead of the Palladianism that had still been current in the 1840s. Pattern books of the 1870s suggest strongly that the boundary between the “rural house” (sel’skii dom) and the dacha had become blurred. Dachas, in other words, were not mere villas or “out-of-town” houses, whose main function was to provide a brief respite from the rigors of the city; rather, they were properly embedded in the rural landscape and represented a more substantial commitment by city dwellers to an alternative lifestyle.1 By the 1880s, in the words of one scholar, “cottage life became estate life writ small.”2 Thanks at least in part to an emerging arts and crafts movement, rusticity gained further ground in house design and interior decoration in the last part of the nineteenth century; by the early twentieth, it found a home on the pages of so Westernized a publication as the lavishly illustrated lifestyle magazine Stolitsa i Usad’ba, which in general projected itself as an arbiter of taste for the anglophile moneyed classes. In between advertisements for cigars and automobiles could be found recommendations to patronize the vernacular culture: “any remotely cultured family that does not want to ‘fall behind the times,’” the magazine informed its readers, should without fail acquire at least a few pieces of antique Russian furniture.3

But, as one recent historian of the usad’ba is at pains to point out, even if the architectural forms of the dacha sometimes bore a resemblance to those of the country estate, its “culture” was still of a rather different order: