Summerfolk

It is important to emphasize that, when touching on the theme of the gradual increase of typical dacha features in wooden buildings on country estates, we need to be clear that this kind of architecture by no means always served to facilitate the operation in its environment of the superficial, unreflective, banal everyday life characteristic of the dacha.4

Of course, the line between banality and originality is not always easy to draw (particularly in an era of eclecticism), so it is little wonder that some property owners self-consciously took on the role of landowner (pomeshchik) in preference to that of dachnik. The property of Shakhmatovo, acquired by Aleksandr Blok’s maternal grandfather, A.A. Beketov, in 1875, was deemed by its owners to be a landed estate (pomest’e) although its architecture and landholdings easily qualified it to be categorized as a dacha. In the words of Blok’s cousin: ‘It was always emphasized that we live ‘in the country’ and not ‘at a dacha.’ The dacha way of life was a synonym for vulgarity.”5

A floridly rustic dacha of the 1870s (from N. Zheltukhin, Prakticheskaia arkhitektura gorodskikh, zagorodnykh i sel’skikh zdanii [St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1875])

The Beketovs were a well-established noble family who had fallen on slightly hard times after 1861; by the 1870s their social and cultural allegiances made them members of the “old” intelligentsia rather than of the nobility. Their preference for the estate over the dacha was shared, if for rather different reasons, by Anton Chekhov, very much a member of the “new” intelligentsia. Driven by the need to conserve his health and to save money (the cost of maintaining an extended household in Moscow was stretching his means to the limit), but also by a long-standing aspiration to own and maintain an independent rural landholding, Chekhov bought in 1892 the estate of Melikhovo, located in Serpukhov uezd, at the southern end of the Moscow region. But even before that, in the 1880s, the “dachas” that Chekhov rented had tended to resemble usad’by: most of them were buildings rented from estate owners and were remote enough to require an arduous journey. The Pasternaks, who in many ways resembled the Chekhovs (their family too was headed by a brilliantly successful self-made artist from the periphery of Russia), were similarly able to experience the splendid isolation of estate life while holding the formal status of dachniki: from 1903 on they rented a house on a near-deserted and agriculturally inactive usad’ba located one hundred versts southwest of Moscow and owned by one of the princes Obolenskii.6 For those summerfolk willing to make a more long-term commitment to country life, the ideal was to buy up a neglected manorial estate trimmed of its serf landholdings, to repair as necessary its crumbling main residence, and to restore its social and economic vitality.7

A dacha was defined less by the size or design of a house or by the layout of its grounds than by the way its occupants used it. The Melikhovo estate, for example, had become more like a dacha after the residence of its previous owner, the stage designer N.P. Sorokhtin, who had installed an overelaborate carved porch and neglected the landholdings. The Chekhov family directed Melikhovo back toward its function of usad’ba by planting trees, carrying out noncosmetic repairs, and taking very seriously their role as owner-managers. But even so, their lifestyle retained something of the dacha in that they received a steady stream of visitors from Moscow, and Melikhovo became a focus for the informal sociability with which the dacha even then had become synonymous.8