Summerfolk

Socializing of a less intimate but still extremely informal nature was made possible by a wide range of other settings and activities. The local railway stop provided an important focus for social activity and offered opportunities, relished especially by the younger generation, to make unplanned acquaintances. Dachniki in search of diversion would wait there looking for conversation, amusement, and, if we are to believe the magazines, husbands. Once acquaintances had been made, they could be pursued in other gatherings. In the smaller settlements, the atmosphere often approached that of a large house party, as the dacha tenants would go on walks in large groups and arrange musical evenings; young people had opportunities to meet in the grounds or on the tennis court.46 Outdoor games and other physical activities figured large: besides tennis, croquet, river bathing, and hiking were among the favored pastimes. Locations near the coast offered the still more invigorating exercise of sea bathing, an activity that was claimed to yield benefits both physical and moral. Not only did it make the human organism generally more robust, conscientious parents could also safeguard their children against the “English sickness” of masturbation by immersing them, morning and night, in the cold salt water.47 The largely sedentary people who made up the dachnik population were urged to use the summer months to restore some of the bodily vigor that the cramped city had sapped. Urban culture at the turn of the century was acquiring an “obsession with fresh air and exercise” that could be generously indulged in exurbia.48

Dachas also gave summerfolk scope to explore the new technologies of leisure. Cycling had caught on, first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow, in the early 1880s; by the early 1890s there were twenty cycling societies in Russia and numerous smaller associations.49 This new means of locomotion was extremely well suited to life out of town. Whereas cycling was permitted only in specific places in the city, it did not fall foul of any regulations out of town. More positively, it brought settlements closer together and was valued especially by young people for providing them with an exciting new form of exercise and for greatly expanding their freedom of movement. Dacha periodicals regularly passed comment on the cycling phenomenon: some articles assessed its health benefits, while others referred to the nuisance value of two-wheel speed demons on narrow rural roads. Cyclists, according to one observer, were “afraid of nothing and no one,” and at critical moments thought nothing of maiming themselves or others; in some settlements ditches had been dug to hinder the progress of these “pioneers of bicyclical civilization.”50

The impact of the phonograph came slightly later but was even more marked. The first Russian recordings date from the late 1890s, but it was not until around 1910 that the phonograph became a commonly owned piece of equipment rather than a technical innovation to be marveled at. In dacha settlements it provided a novel aural backdrop to all manner of domestic activities and gave new life to social gatherings: now people could have music to bring a festive spirit to social occasions at all times of day and night.51 The main cultural effect of sound reproduction, as of other innovations such as bicycles, improved rail links, telephones, and street lighting, was to give people a new sense of control over their own time.

Postcard view of Kliaz’ma station. Courtesy of Helsinki Slavonic Library.