Summerfolk

As well as placing a premium on feminized domesticity, the dacha brought a release from the strict standards of urban decorum. Instead of going to the expense of taking with them all the furniture from their city apartments, summerfolk were urged to fill sacks with hay and use them as armchairs. Immobile intellectual pursuits were to be avoided; much better were tennis, croquet, boating, and bathing—and even “loud and lively conversation” could do much to aid the digestion.38 The three key elements in conduct at the dacha were “simplicity,” “hospitality,” and “modesty.” Casual visitors should be given a light snack (the servants should unobtrusively be asked to bring something in). Hosts should not treat longer-term house guests with urban formality. And guests should reciprocate by treating servants and animals in a friendly manner.39 To set store by urban hierarchies was to invite ridicule. In a sketch of the 1890s, a civil servant named Maksim Nikolaevich walks past a garden in his dacha settlement where the residents are playing cards. He himself is itching for a game, but is reluctant to invite his neighbors to visit because he considers them his social inferiors: one is a cook, the other a barber. To engage them in conversation, he contrives a pretext for stopping outside their fence: “I like your association. The fact that you’ve associated with one another and formed at least a small entertainment society. You know, this has a real European flavor.”40 The dacha, as presented in advice literature and illustrated magazines, was tied in with the search for new, more “civilized” forms of social intercourse, such as small talk, that allowed free, non-hierarchical, nonsexualized relations between men and women. As in so many other areas of late imperial middle-class culture, England was the preferred model for emulation.

Social mixing of this relatively unstructured kind did, of course, leave considerable scope for embarrassment, as people of high social station—especially women—often had to enter relationships with their inferiors. There was no harm in such unequal acquaintances, one etiquette guide suggested, as long as both sides maintained “tact” and “delicacy"; but they also held potential for unpleasantness if one or another of the parties took liberties. If relations did become strained, the return to the city at the end of the season was an “extremely convenient” occasion to break them off. A social hierarchy was clearly implied in the ways visits were conducted. Those of higher social status could clearly expect to receive more visits than they paid. But with equals it was recommended that one take the initiative by paying visits to neighbors on arrival (just sending a card would not do, although a card pour prendre congé at the end of the season was permissible).41 The notion that the informality of dacha life made residents vulnerable to impromptu and prolonged visits from friends and relatives became a commonplace in journalism and fiction alike. One humorous “encyclopedia” of dacha life had a special entry for “Guests”: “they ‘descend’ the day before holidays and on the holidays themselves. They wreak complete havoc at the dacha, drinking and devouring everything that is available.”42