Summerfolk

The unpredictability of dacha life is evoked more artfully in Dostoevskys The Idiot. Dostoevsky is above all a novelist of urban enclosure (both in Petersburg and in the small towns of Devils and The Brothers Karamazov), and the early sections of The Idiot contain some of his most claustrophobic writing, corresponding to the Gothic gloom of the interiors and to Myshkin’s heightened perceptions of his urban environment as, dimly aware of being pursued by Rogozhin, he approaches an epileptic state. In Part 2 of the novel Myshkin manages to extricate himself from the city and, convalescent after his fit in the stairwell, takes up residence in a dacha sublet to him, surprisingly, by the reptilian Lebedev, who occupies one of the wings with his family. But the dacha does not provide the restful environment that Myshkin was expecting: life continues at an urban pace with a near-identical (in fact expanded) cast of characters. In some ways, the pace of life actually intensifies, as the dacha, unlike a city flat, is open to the street: one door gets you into the main room. And the shorter distances and more relaxed etiquette of the dacha serve to facilitate the unexpected visits so common in Dostoevsky. The dacha terrace is a boundary space more highly charged even than the threshold, whose significance in Dostoevsky’s poetics was noted in Mikhail Bakhtin’s celebrated study. In The Idiot the openness of the dacha to all comers is emphasized by the fact that this is a space where Myshkin is the host; so social rules are nonexistent and conversation becomes a free-for-all. The Epanchins, by contrast, have an imposing dacha of their own just 300 yards away; but its presence is largely symbolic, and the Lebedev dacha remains the focus of the novel’s frenetic goings-on.

The main consequence of dacha informality, judging by the numerous short stories and feuilletons on this subject, was that it provided ample opportunity for summer romances (conventionally conducted in pavilions and avenues). The miniature love story set at the dacha, sentimental and facetious by turns, became a staple of light magazine fiction. The garden at the country estate had been established for several decades as a location for trysts, but the park at the dacha settlement had the advantage of being a semipublic space offering a certain anonymity while at the same time guaranteeing the observance on the male side of certain conventions of decorous restraint (a parody of these conventions is to be found in Prince Myshkin’s early-morning meeting with Aglaia Epanchina in The Idiot). The dacha park in nineteenth-century culture seems to be a more productive location for the romantic rendezvous than the garden at the country estate, whose atmosphere, soaked as it is in sentiment, tends to be overlaid with oppressive poignancy.43 Most accounts suggest that at the dacha life proceeded without such constraints; formal social rules were, if not entirely disregarded, then at least coyly subverted. As point 1 of Chekhov’s “Dacha Rules” has it: “The following people are forbidden to live at the dacha: lunatics, the insane, carriers of infectious diseases, the elderly, juveniles, and the lower ranks of the army, as nowhere is there a greater danger of contracting matrimony than in the open air.”44 So common was the association between dacha parks and nonpublic interaction between the sexes that respectable “young girls” were advised not to go walking in remote avenues where it might be suspected that they had arranged a meeting with an admirer.45