Summerfolk

Theater was another important form of collective entertainment for dachniki. Many of the larger settlements had theaters where performances were held regularly throughout the summer season. Besides forming the audience for visiting professional companies, dacha folk might also be involved in their own amateur productions. In the latter case, participation went far beyond merely bestriding the stage: a theatrical production was an enterprise that required coordinating the forces and resources of an entire dacha community. The standard practice, often remarked on in memoirs and fiction, was for a few enthusiasts to take the initiative and ask members of the community to contribute their time or money.52 For both amateurs and professionals, the staple repertoire consisted of comedies, vaudevilles, and one-act plays, many of them insubstantial farces set at the dacha, with stock situations and characters.53 Plays were often put on by close-knit groups of acquaintances (such was the case with the gatherings at Abramtsevo and Liubimovka), but performances might also be arranged for a broader section of the local population. Unsurprisingly, amateur theater met a hostile response from many of the theater journals, which took it upon themselves to defend the high art of the professionals. But the amateur performances, as far as we can judge, were generally well attended and well received. They were, it seems, a rather different kind of cultural institution from the “serious” theaters, deriving much of their appeal from easy audience identification with the events acted out onstage.54 Dacha theaters, allied to the many other summerfolk recreations, testified to a cultural independence and assertiveness that was unwelcome to some observers.

Discourses on the Dachnik

As will perhaps be apparent by now, social observation in late imperial accounts of the dacha was often overlaid with stereotype and prejudice. The dacha, despite—or rather because of—its ever increasing accessibility to urban Russians, had an increasingly serious image problem from the 1870s on. More precisely, the dacha had become too broad a phenomenon to condemn out of hand, and so distaste for the petit bourgeois philistinism (meshchanstvo) that it seemed to harbor was displaced onto the dachnik. Run-of-the-mill comfortable middle-class pleasure seekers were anathema both to wealthy conservatives and to the Russian intelligentsia, being seen by the former as vulgar upstarts and by the latter as unbearably complacent and materialistic. A lot of the objections raised were familiar from earlier generations of exurban commentary. The dacha boom was seen to be driven by fashion, by a “herd instinct of imitation.”55 A soulless love of luxury was replacing the stylistic restraint of earlier decades; ostentatious dachas were subject to disapproval as being parasitical.56 Where owners had to choose between superficial flourishes and basic building standards, they opted for the former. Just as earlier in its history, Krestovskii Island was cited as an overcrowded enclave for “cardboard houses imitating Gothic castles and Greek villas.”57 Fears of declining taste, commonly expressed from the 1840s on, only intensified in the early twentieth century. “The main decorative element in our dachas is provided by innumerable carved decorations, which give the buildings a vulgar and unsettled look that absolutely does not harmonize with the natural environment.”58