Summerfolk

The projection of an exurban lifestyle and the legitimation of far niente can be traced through the proliferating magazines with illustrations (some of them even in color), many of which made tea on the garden terrace a regular tableau and accorded dignity to such activities as promenades, mushroom picking, and even postprandial snoozes. It was no longer shameful to do nothing or simply to want to enjoy oneself. As one columnist opined, after apologizing for what was already a commonplace, “we [Russians] don’t remotely know how to have fun and experience the ‘joys of life.’”31 Various forms of commercialized leisure in Russian cities at the turn of the nineteenth century—shopping, dining, cinema, light music, and so on—were in the business of instilling the requisite decorous joie de vivre and helping Russians to abandon the undesirable extremes of boorishness and undue earnestness that were conventionally ascribed to them. The dacha stood apart from these urban recreations yet in a sense surpassed them, as its whole environment predisposed city folk to relaxation, diversion, and domestic consumption. Such values were, for example, projected steadily in the local dacha periodicals that mushroomed in the 1890s and 1900s. Home decoration and home improvement were regular topics; advice was given on matters such as egg painting and the correct organization of a game of croquet; gossipy reports on local happenings were published in abundance; beauty tips were dispensed to women; and readers of both sexes were invited to savor the fictionalized exploits of dacha “Don Juans” and “Romeos.”32

The association of the dacha with leisure and consumption was strengthened by its detachment from the masculine workplace and its real and symbolic role in family life. Throughout its history the dacha has been above all a place for women and children, as men have generally continued to commute to work throughout the summer months (compare this situation with the parallel, but on the whole much more positively construed, “feminization” of American suburbia from the 1820s on).33 Comforting domesticity was, accordingly, a prime value for summerfolk. A proper family dacha might be of modest size, but it was to be kept clean and well appointed; everything in it should “breathe contentment.”34

Perceived to be a female dominion, dachas gave rise to stereotypes and humorous narratives concerning relations between the sexes. As early as the 1870s the put-upon dachnyi muzh was becoming a cliché of writings on the dacha. In 1899 the term was glossed in a dictionary of catchphrases as “a husband who leaves for work from the dacha and is given various errands by his wife, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, and neighbors.”35 In a Chekhov story, “Superfluous Men” (1886), a dacha husband arrives home tired from work only to find that his wife is out rehearsing for amateur theatricals; when she finally comes back, it is in the company of her fellow actors, and they proceed to conduct a further noisy rehearsal into the small hours.36 Other accounts went further still, suggesting that married women, in the prolonged absences of their commuting husbands, were able to establish suspiciously free-and-easy social relations with other men. The most famous novel of adultery in Russian literature contains a pivotal scene at Peterhof that enables Anna Karenina and Vronskii to have an uninterrupted and crucial tête-à-tête. Perhaps we should not accord too overriding a role in Anna’s affair to the dacha, as her infidelity is so thoroughly overdetermined (quite apart from being constrained by Tolstoy’s chain of symbolic connections, she is pregnant by this stage); but the fact remains that the dacha offered women more latitude than many writers professed to be good for the sanctity of marriage.37