Summerfolk

Despite this point of resemblance, the Chekhovs were keen to dissociate themselves from the dacha. In the words of Chekhov’s sister, “Our country life on our own estate, surrounded by forests and fields, was better than any ‘dacha’ life that we had experienced previously.”9 This attitude was hardly untypical: the culture of the time regularly presented the dacha as a meretricious, low-grade alternative to the country estate, as at best a stepping-stone to the usad’ba. In one of the situation comedies that were a staple of prerevolutionary theater, a disenchanted dacha resident reflects regretfully on his decision to sell his ancestral estate so as to move to Moscow. Now he is renting a drafty and overpriced dacha and enduring an unpleasant daily commute. His wife, by contrast, adores the new arrangement, as she has entertainments at hand and the opportunity to amuse herself by speculating in stocks and shares.10 The uneasy relationship between the world of the traditional landed nobility and that of the dachnik is captured more subtly in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, where the unsympathetic narrator recalls how, as the adolescent son of the lord of the manor, he haughtily turned down his hero’s awkwardly delivered invitation to take part in amateur theatricals.11

But tensions of this kind had emerged only recently. Formerly, roughly up to the 1860s, the distinction between the dacha and the country estate had been relatively clearcut and nonemotive. The dacha was oriented toward the city and represented temporary occupancy and brief periods of leisure unencumbered by the management of extensive lands and agricultural concerns; the estate, by contrast, was embedded in a rural environment, involved some sort of agricultural commitment, and had a markedly “traditional” way of life and set of values based on seasonal and domestic routines and on lasting relationships with neighbors and the local community. What happened in mid-century, in the words of one art historian, was that the country estate moved from being the “subject” of culture to being its “object.”12 Or, more bluntly: it acquired a cultural prominence out of proportion to its social significance. By this time life at the estate had diversified to such an extent that its social profile was complex and not conducive to easy generalizations. Economic factors, moreover, were reducing the scale and the number of country estates. But here a compensating cultural mechanism played its role: the usad’ba became an emblem of a golden age of social harmony, high (especially literary) culture, and rural authenticity. The dacha, by contrast, began to connote “the vulgarity and prosaic aspects of reality and its unattractive, distorted features. This kind of dacha world, in which people lost touch with themselves, could not become the subject of culture.”13 The strength of this stereotype is shown by its power to shape scholarly perceptions even in the 1990s, as the passage quoted above on “the banal everyday life characteristic of the dacha” amply illustrates.