Summerfolk

But Andreev’s house, which reflected so well that writer’s extravagant and obsessive personality, was far from typical. In the 1900s, other representatives of the artistic intelligentsia were busy reinventing the dacha as a place for intense and purposeful sociability, creative work, and self-sufficiency. This dacha ethos was exemplified by Kornei Chukovskii, the self-made critic, scholar, and writer, who by the time he moved to a house in the Finnish seaside village Kuokkala in 1906 was already one of the more prominent figures on the Petersburg intellectual scene. Kuokkala was the perfect place for him to indulge his puritanical habits and overdeveloped work ethic. From his daughter Lidiia’s memoirs we learn that he could not stand idleness—in his own family or in others. Nor could he understand the purpose of purely social visits (here, of course, he differed from most of the nineteenth-century dacha-frequenting intelligentsia). If he dropped in to see one of his near neighbors at Kuokkala (now Repino)—notably Il’ia Repin himself—it was to engage immediately in intense intellectual discussion. He did not shirk physical work, carrying out all home repairs himself. And there was plenty of physical work to be done, as life at Kuokkala was far from luxurious. Water, for example, had to be fetched from Repin’s Penaty; and Chukovskii particularly relished painting fences and other odd jobs. The Chukovskii family stayed at Kuokkala for portions of the autumn and winter, and for this reason saw themselves as authentic “locals,” unlike dachniki, who “scuttled back to Petersburg as soon as autumn, rain, and storms began.”29 The household shared by Repin with his companion, Nataliia Nordman, had a similar commitment to purposeful activity, physical exertion, and straightforwardness of conduct, though it bore the rather specific imprint of Nordman’s vegetarianism and democratism: servants were given a detailed and, by the standards of the time, generous work contract, and visitors were informed on arrival, by a notice placed on a gong stand, that a regime of “SELF HELP” existed at Penaty; guests should not expect a servants help in transferring their outdoor clothing to the hat stand.30

A dacha in the style of “northern modernism,” located at Aleksandrovka (north of St. Petersburg). This dacha served as the summer residence of a professional family before the Revolution. In Soviet times it was split into four apartments.

A dacha at Siverskaia. According to its present owners (who bought the property in 1946), this is the oldest surviving house in the settlement. It was built in the 1890s.

A dacha at Aleksandrovka, another typical prerevolutionary design.

Exurban Recreations

The dachniki I have discussed so far were by and large members of the “free” professions. For them, time unencumbered by work commitments was nothing remarkable: they were well practiced in making what they considered to be gainful use of periods of recreation. But most of the dachniki who “scuttled back” to St. Petersburg or Moscow in the autumn did not have the option of staying longer: they might not own their own house in the country, and in any case their regular presence was required in the city. For summerfolk who were not writers or artists, exurbia brought with it an enticing novelty: a relative abundance of leisure time. The dacha represented a radical break with urban routine, and hence an opportunity to adopt a different, more open-ended pattern of life.