Summerfolk

The dacha, then, gained some respectability from its partial cultural convergence with the country estate; but it was also lent legitimacy by perceptions of its unmediated relation to the natural world and to the rural “good life.” Ivan Shishkin may be seen as having initiated this change in sensibility when in 1856, as a promising student at the St. Petersburg Academy, he spent the summer working on landscapes at Lisii Nos, subsequently a dacha location highly valued precisely for its scenery and fine views over the Gulf of Finland.22 In his later career Shishkin painted dozens of forest scenes that became canonical as representations of an authentically Russian landscape.

The following generation of the intelligentsia may be said to have followed Shishkin’s lead by conceiving of the dacha as a secluded retreat entirely removed from the city. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov spent the summer of 1880 on the Stelevo estate, thirty versts the other side of Luga, on which he remarked: “For the first time in my life I’ve had the chance to spend the summer in the genuine Russian countryside . . . everything was in special harmony with my pantheistic mood at that time.” One of Rimsky’s fellow composers went even farther afield, to a dacha in Tula guberniia: “the dacha consisted of a spacious peasant izba. They [the Borodins] didn’t take many things with them. There was no kitchen range, they prepared food in a Russian stove. Life was clearly extremely uncomfortable, crowded and with all kinds of privations.”23

The values of simple lifestyle and natural beauty are often ascribed to the dacha in émigré writings, which are so often informed by the idées fixes of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia. Zinaida Zhemchuzhnaia, by her upbringing very much a creature of the country estate, came to recognize the appeal of the dacha lifestyle in emigration in north China, where she saw thick forest that reminded her of home and breathed air “like in Switzerland.”24 And the writer Boris Zaitsev, visiting Kelomiakki (now Komarovo, a dacha location famous in Soviet times as a center for the Leningrad intelligentsia) in 1935, found it a vivid reminder of the Russia he valued. “How much there is of Russia here!. . . The smells are quite Russian: a sharply sour one of marsh, pine, and birch. . . .And the whole cast of life here is Russian, like before the war.”25

Zaitsev here echoes numerous prerevolutionary voices: at the turn of the century the North came to be seen as the main geographical repository for Russianness. Proximity to the coast only heightened the effect of resorts such as Kelomiakki by drawing attention to a location’s detachment from civilization (to face the sea every morning was, for a Russian, truly to feel that one had reached the end of the world). Seaside retreats, preferably built in the fashionable pseudo-Russian style, gained great cultural prestige through the 1890s and 1900s. The family of Viktor Shklovskii had aspirations to build themselves a vacation home on the Baltic coast, but their money ran out and they had to sell the property.26 More successful was the writer Leonid Andreev, who in 1908 moved into a fifteen-room dacha modeled on an “ancient Norwegian castle” with a turret and splendid views over the Gulf of Finland. The family retained a flat in St. Petersburg, but Andreev increasingly gravitated toward his country residence, which he called a “house,” not a “dacha.”27As the most spectacularly successful Russian writer of this period, Andreev was able to live on the grand scale: several of the rooms were (given the severe winters) impractically enormous, guests arrived frequently, and a large staff of servants was in constant attendance. With its Gothic fittings and dark-oak interior, moreover, the house served as a fitting arena for the writer s increasingly fraught and self-dramatizing behavior.28