Summerfolk

Another great strength of the dacha has been its role in nurturing informal social interaction. Historians have often accorded Russian society in the last two centuries two complementary characteristics: first, the weakness of forms of grass-roots association that might form the bedrock of a “civil society”; second, the intensity of subpolitical forms of social interaction. The result has been a society in which the role of informal networks has been much greater than in the West. Here again the dacha may be seen to have played its part: by providing a setting for free-and-easy socializing across boundaries that in the city might prove rather less porous, and by contributing to the development of forms of intense informal intellectual association. It has served a similar purpose for Russia’s many nonintellectuals, who have discovered in exurbia gentler forms of sociability, a more satisfying sense of community, and a less relentless rhythm of life than in the metropolis.

Though spatially detached from the urban hubs of political and economic activity, the dacha is not a marginal or esoteric topic for investigation. Far from being an obscure background phenomenon taken for granted by generations of Muscovites and Petersburgers, it has consistently engaged a wide range of beliefs, values, allegiances, and identities. It has formed complicated relationships—of convergence and divergence, antagonism and rapprochement—with several other models of settlement and modes of living: the small-town one-family home, the peasant izba, the suburban dwelling, the country estate, the villa, the allotment garden. It has evoked delight in and also hostility to leisure. It has been associated with estrangement from and rejection of agricultural labor and (more recently) with a “return to the soil.” It has served as an emblem both of social rootlessness and of Russianness. It has been closely bound up with consumption, property, privilege, domesticity, and relations between the sexes. The fact that several of these aspects are contradictory does not necessarily make the dacha incoherent or radically discontinuous as a historical phenomenon. Rather, it suggests that a study of the dacha can help us to reconstruct, in all their complexity and interactivity, some of the major social and cultural processes at work in modern urban Russia.

1. The few people who have written on this subject all agree, from their varying perspectives, on the broad outlines of this periodization: see O.I. Chernykh, “Dachnoe stroitel’stvo Peterburgskoi gubernii, XVIII–nachala XX vv.” (dissertation, St. Petersburg, 1993); P. Deotto, “Peterburgskii dachnyi byt XIX v. kаk fakt massovoi kul’tury,” Europa Orientalis 16 (1997); Iu. M. Lotman, “Kamen’ i trava,” in Lotmanovskii sbornik, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1995); M. V. Nashchokina, “Dachnye poselki vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX vv.,” in Sel’skie poseleniia Rossii: Istoricheskii i sotsiokul’turnyi analiz, ed. O.G. Sevan (Moscow, 1995).

2. B&E, s.v. “Sankt-Peterburg,” 28:307; Sankt-Peterburg: Issledovaniia po istorii, topografii i statistike stolitsy, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1868), 46.

3. Sankt-Peterburg, 46–51.

4. See John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, 1988).

5. T. Nefedova, P. Polian, and A. Treivish, Gorod i derevnia v Evropeiskoi Rossii: Sto let peremen (Moscow, 2001), 384.

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Prehistory