Prehistory
The dacha, now largely synonymous with life in a private sphere free from public surveillance, was in its medieval origins the result of a gift bestowed publicly. Derived from the verb “to give,” the word “dacha” was present in Old Russian from the eleventh century, but by the seventeenth century it tended to denote specifically land given out to servitors by the state. It became a key concept in land surveys conducted from the time of Ivan the Terrible on; during the General Survey that was carried out from early in the reign of Catherine II right up to Emancipation, the dacha was the main legal and administrative form for the allocation of property rights.1 This brief overview attests both to a long-term semantic transition and to a tension persistent in Russian history and rather significant for an analysis of the modern dacha; namely, the problematic relationship between the role of informal arrangements (the dacha received as a mark of grace and favor) and the public imperative to institute formalized legal relations (the dacha as a piece of property guaranteed by rights).
This tension was exacerbated—some would say created—by the Petrine era, a period that, among many other things, brought into being a new kind of dacha. Peter the Great, like the rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had plenty of land available for distribution; but, unlike his predecessors, he was particularly eager to hand out dachas in order to accelerate the development of a modern urban space—St. Petersburg, his new city on the Gulf of Finland. Thus, for example, city-center plots between the Fontanka River and the tree-lined Sadovaia Street were doled out to the families of courtiers in the 1710s—but on strict condition that these families actually built on them and saw to their upkeep. As one historian has it:
After you had received a plot of land for nothing, it was impossible just to offer your thanks and relax—Peter the Great might accidentally pay you a visit in his chariot to see how the recipient of his gift was getting on in his new place, and if the Emperor found that diligence had been lacking, justice and punishment were summary: Peter the Great was never parted from his cudgel.2
But Peter and his eighteenth-century successors were also able to offer land in locations that lay well outside the city’s boundaries. Here dachas began to be developed as suburban residences designed primarily for leisure. The first such instance came in 1710, when Peter, as a response to his successful campaign against the Swedes, started to hand out plots of land on the route running between St. Petersburg and his new palace at Peterhof. Terraces were built, trees were planted, and the shore was banked up so as to give protection against flooding. The dimensions of the plots were regular—100 sazhens wide by 1,000 deep; they were thus laid out like the keys of a giant piano pressed up against the south shore of the Gulf of Finland.3
The Dacha as Court Residence
Peter conceived of the Peterhof Road as a single architectural ensemble modeled on the route from Paris to Versailles. Residents were, for example, required to take good care of their property and strictly forbidden to chop down trees along the road: the more land owned and the wealthier the owner, the greater were Peter’s architectural expectations of the residence erected on a dacha plot.4 Subsequent eighteenth-century rulers took further measures to smarten the road up and improve its infrastructure. A decree of 23 August 1739 allocated funds for setting up milestones. In the mid-1750s paving of the road was undertaken, and in 1769 owners of dachas were made responsible for its maintenance (although in practice the money continued to be drawn from state revenues). In the early 1770s birch trees were planted along the road at public expense.5 In 1777 came a proposal for rebuilding a substantial portion of the route. Throughout the eighteenth century, special measures were taken to ensure that public order was maintained for the entire length of the road. In April 1748, for example, the chief of police received instructions to conduct a thorough inspection in advance of the imperial party so as to avoid “disorders”; taverns were to be removed from the roadside.6
The desired result of these measures was to create a row of imposing residences with elaborate and extensive gardens stretching all the way to the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. As early as 1736, Peder von Haven, arriving in St. Petersburg as secretary and preacher for a Norwegian sailor, commented on the row of “extremely fine out-of-town households” that he saw as he was driven into the city along the Peterhof Road.7 Eyewitness accounts of the Peterhof Road, like those of St. Petersburg itself, were not uniformly enthusiastic in its early days,8 but by the mid-eighteenth century they were consistently rapturous. Particular attention was lavished on the gardens of the princes Naryshkin, which were left open to the public.9 The positive assessments lasted well into the nineteenth century. A visitor of 1805 admired the view on heading out of Strel’na toward St. Petersburg: “As a parting gift my eyes were taken up by an unbroken chain of picturesque dachas—each one finer than the last—right up to the barrier at the entrance to St. Petersburg.”10 Fifteen years later, the author of an early guidebook found that the view from Strel’na had lost none of its charm: “From here a splendid mounded road leads to the magnificent dachas of the grandees and the wealthy.”11
The prime function of these dachas was public sociability: their owners were able to receive a stream of visitors from foreign delegations, prominent noble families, and of course the imperial court. In July 1772, for example, Prince L. A. Naryshkin laid on a lavish set of entertainments at his dacha eleven versts along the Peterhof Road. The guests started assembling at three o’clock and were able to amuse themselves by wandering through the gardens with their intriguing patterns of streams and paths. At seven o’clock the empress arrived and a “Temple of Victory” (in honor of the recent victory over the Turks and Tatars) was spectacularly unveiled. The entertainment was completed with fireworks and a masked ball.12 Five years later the Swiss scholar Jean Bernoulli called in at the Naryshkin dacha and commented especially on the tasteful English-style design of the gardens; he also noted with interest that the property was opened to the public twice a week.13 Count Stroganov, similarly, liked to entertain in the grand style: his generous hospitality cost him 500 rubles each Sunday as he threw open his dacha for music, dancing, and refreshments.14
The Naryshkin and Stroganov dachas in several ways conformed to the pattern of life often held to be characteristic of the elite country estate in the same period: display was valued over substance, short-term ostentatious hospitality over longer-term comfort. But this assessment needs to be qualified on two counts. First, the way of life on the Peterhof Road and at the country estate was not simply fixated on public spectacle. The Catherinian period was to a significant extent constructed by the new empress and her ideologues as a reaction against the artifice, luxury, and corruption of the reign of Elizabeth (1741–1762) and as a return to the austerity of Peter I’s time. The turn away from showy festivity and toward the “English” virtues of practicality and emotional depth found expression in the taste for Romantic garden designs; it also led to a change of culture at the country estate, where far niente went out of fashion, the simple country life (or its appearance) came to be more highly valued, and greater emphasis was laid on purposeful and reflective pursuits—notably reading.15 Life out of the city was, moreover, associated with a rejection of the status distinctions that underpinned social contacts in the city and at court. This relaxation of social rules prefigured an important and enduring cultural stereotype that would be articulated more forcefully in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: exurbia was seen as a uniquely “democratic” site for social interaction. As the poet and state servant Gavriil Derzhavin observed of parties de plaisir he attended in the 1770s:
Leaving behind in the city
All that our minds does trouble,
In simple cordial fresh air
Do we spend our time.
. . .
We resolved among friends
To preserve the laws of equality;
To abandon the conceits
Of wealth, power, and rank.
И все, смущает что умы,
В простой приятельской прохладе
Свое проводим время мы.
[. . .]
Мы положили меж друзь��ми
Законы равенства хранить;
Богатством, властью и чинами
Себя отнюдь не возносить.16
Second, the social and economic functions of the dacha in eighteenth-century Russia were quite distinct from those of the country estate. A residence on the Peterhof Road enabled people to have a break from the city without taking themselves too far afield. It allowed a lifestyle of short, habitual holidays instead of a single annual absence of several months at a far-flung country estate. The emergence of a modern (that is, post-Petrine) dacha depended on an administrative order that required regular and reasonably continuous attendance in the office or at the court by a class of state functionaries and noblemen. Its prime function was to enable prominent families to maintain contact with the grandees on whose favor their advancement depended, to safeguard their position in Petersburg’s peculiarly patrimonial bureaucracy. This point was understood perfectly by F. F. Vigel’, a memoirist unusually well placed to observe the overlapping worlds of aristocracy and elite civil service. In 1800 Vigel’ was driven out to the residence of Count F. V. Rostopchin to request in person an appointment in the prestigious Board of Foreign Affairs. Not yet fourteen years of age, Vigel’ was traveling along the Peterhof Road for the first time, and he marveled at the chain of splendid dachas that extended “almost uninterruptedly” on both sides for twenty-six versts. This was, he commented, the only place around Petersburg where “rich folk of all estates [vsekh soslovii]” could spend their summers; people of lesser means could not afford such a luxury. His remarks confirm the Peterhof Road as a place for the social elite; equally, however, they suggest that membership in this elite was determined not simply by aristocratic lineage but also by money and by position in state service. As an older man, Vigel’ was less admiring of the dacha habits of St. Petersburg’s mandarins, who, in his opinion, had abandoned the expansive ways of the country estate and opted instead for cramped and undignified suburban dwellings in their overriding anxiety to maintain proximity to the court. Their houses were, from this point of view, more reminiscent of servants’ quarters than of truly aristocratic residences.17
This somewhat jaundiced view of the Petersburg dacha and the implied unfavorable comparison with the more autonomous estate culture of the Moscow aristocracy would become a mainstay of later social commentaries. Such typological distinctions between Russia’s two major cities do, however, tend to obliterate historical nuances. Even in the eighteenth century, the social function and composition of the Peterhof Road was far from static. In the early days, its orientation toward the Peterhof palace was indeed at least as important as, if not more important than, its proximity to the city. But this initial stage of the modern dacha s history came to a symbolic end with the completion of the Winter Palace by Bartolomeo Rastrelli in 1768, after which the imperial household relocated to Petersburg. In actual settlement patterns, understandably enough, there was no such clear break; the palaces retained their social prominence and the more adjacent outskirts of the city were only gradually made fit for dacha colonization. Even so, one can observe a shift in elite residency toward the “East End” of the Peterhof Road in the second half of the eighteenth century.18
This spatial reorientation was accompanied by changes in social composition. In 1762 the first section of the road toward Peterhof—between the Fontanka and a substantial dacha named Krasnyi Kabachok—was subdivided into smaller plots and handed out to new owners. Krasnyi Kabachok had been given by Peter I to a translator named Semen Ivanov with full rights of inheritance (though without the right to sell the land), but when Ivanov died in 1748 his family was approached by the chief of police, Vasilii Saltykov, who had designs on this potentially profitable stretch of land. Under huge pressure, the family gave in to his demands and sold their estate for a mere 600 rubles. But Ivanovs sister appealed to Empress Elizabeth, who promptly canceled the contract of sale and allowed the Ivanovs to sell the property to whomever they pleased. Ivanovs sister soon took advantage of this ruling and cashed in her assets, and Krasnyi Kabachok changed hands several times over the following decades.19
The case of Krasnyi Kabachok is symptomatic of a liberalization of the property market on the Peterhof Road. As one observer noted in 1829, a change of ownership took place at the turn of the eighteenth century: “enormous seigneurial castles were replaced by the pleasant-looking cottages of the merchantry, or had entered the hands of this estate."20The diversification of the property market is reflected in the St. Petersburg court newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, which from the late 1760s ran advertisements for dachas along the Peterhof Road. In February 1769, for example, P. B. Sheremetev put up for sale several plots of land, including “a seafront property twelve versts from Petersburg, comprising a seigneurial residence [gospodskie khoromy] on a stone foundation, fully equipped and furnished, with two outbuildings, servants’ quarters, kitchen and cellar, stable and farmyard, a planned garden, orangeries with trees and greenhouses, three ponds with fish of various kinds, among them a fair amount of carp; on the territory of the dacha [v dachakh] there is a good supply of wood and hay.”21
The “Out-of-Town” House and the Environs of St. Petersburg
In the first half of Catherine’s reign, the meaning of “dacha” as “plot of land” was clearly still primary. The word could, moreover, be used interchangeably with myza or (less frequently) dvor, both of which suggest more a farmstead than a primarily residential property. While these miniature estates would generally have a main house solidly built on a stone foundation, they also had space for extensive domestic agriculture (livestock, orchards, kitchen garden, even, in some cases, greenhouses). In the 1780s, although dachas were still thought of as plots of land rather than as homes, we begin to find evidence of a more rapid turnover of owners and a wider range of locations (including the Vyborg Side, the Neva islands, and the Tsarskoe Selo Road). In addition, there were signs of increased commercial exploitation of dacha plots as owners began to rent out smaller houses: “At the dacha of the privy councilor, senator, and knight Mikhailo Fedorovich Soimonov, near Ekaterinhof, two houses are available for rent complete with stables, outbuildings for carriages, and icehouses.”22 At the beginning of the nineteenth century a new concept begins to emerge: that of the out-of-town house (zagorodnyi dom) or house for summer entertainment (dom dlia letnego uveseleniia), both of which typically came with less land and fewer amenities. lust occasionally, individual rooms were made available for rent. For the first time, the house and associated lifestyle were becoming more important than the land on which the house stood.23 It is in the last two decades of the eighteenth century that we can trace the origins of a new kind of entertainment culture: the focus was slightly less on lavish parties thrown for court society or on elaborate fêtes champêtres than on fluid and decentered forms of social interaction. This was, in other words, the beginning of a shift from the aristocratic gulian’e (fête) to the progulka (promenade) in a small group of family or friends, from the individually owned landscaped garden as a site for collective entertainment to the more public venues of park, embankment, and pleasure garden (uveselitel’nyi sad).24
A corresponding change can be observed in visual representations of the city and its outskirts. Early paintings of St. Petersburg offer “elemental” views, which typically exaggerate the width of the Neva, emphasize the river’s importance by crowding it with ships, and provide a few grand facades on the embankments as the only evidence of lasting human intervention in the landscape. Over time, as the city territory was more densely settled and the natural elements were seen to have been tamed, came a shift to representations that emphasized rather the city’s more “civilized” aspect, its straight lines, open spaces, and imposing grandeur. Later still, in the first part of the nineteenth century, norms changed again as artists began to abandon the distant, all-encompassing, admiring perspective on the city and instead to adopt a more intimate and “enclosed” viewpoint.25. These long-term aesthetic trends had direct implications for the way artists depicted the city’s outskirts. A bleak view reminiscent of the earlier eighteenth century is the Swedish artist Benjamin Paterssen’s View of the Outskirts of Petersburg by the Porcelain Factory (1793). Paterssen was a prolific painter of the city’s central areas, such as the Admiralty and Senate Square, but in this work he shows a flat and empty rural scene with carriages heading both toward and away from the city and a peasant woman and child wandering along the side of the roadway; the left side of the painting is dominated by a river, here associated not with the granite grandeur of the city but with the Finnish fishermen who are often counterposed to it in the Petersburg myth.
But Paterssen himself was at the forefront of a new trend that emerged at the turn of the century: suddenly artists were not so reluctant to present views of suburban life or to draw such a sharp distinction between city and noncity scenes. The first examples of the genre were paintings of aristocratic suburban residences such as the Stroganov dacha, painted by Andrei Voronikhin in 1797 and by Paterssen in 1804. These paintings were, however, in the same distanced style as the austere early representations of St. Petersburg’s central squares and embankments. More striking were depictions whose foregrounds were filled with scenes of suburban life. Paterssen’s View of Novaia Derevnia (1801), for example, has some people strolling along the embankment of Kamennyi Island in small family groups. But, although this is a location detached from the city, formality has not been abandoned. Families are dressed smartly, as for a stately promenade; although some people are clearly in gentle motion, they are depicted as static, without individualizing gestures that might hint at a narrative; and two uniformed figures on horseback hover at the entrance to a neatly tree-lined avenue. Moreover, the location, though certainly not urban, is hardly secluded and private: as these well-to-do families stroll, they are approached by peddlers, and on the opposite bank of the Neva they are faced by the densely settled Novaia Derevnia, by all appearances a well-appointed suburb. By 1804, in his picture of the Kamennyi Island Palace from Aptekarskii Island, Paterssen was taking a significantly different approach. The palace is in this case merely a pretext: it is, admittedly, located in the center of the picture, but in the distance, almost on the horizon. The foreground is dominated by a scene of domestic activity on the near shore. Here there are four groups of figures and two distinct narratives. A woman greets or takes leave of a uniformed man at the steps to her family’s residence; and a cabriolet sets off, pursued by a dog and watched by a woman with three children. Both the woman and her children are dressed informally; and the unconstrained domesticity of the scene is emphasized by the uncluttered view of the opposite bank, by the sparse and unsculpted arboreal backdrop, and by the indistinct boundary between road and grass verge.26
В. Paterssen, View of Novaia Derevnia from Kamennyi Island (1801). Courtesy of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (171 c.229).
B. Paterssen, The Kamennyi Island Palace As Seen from Aptekarskii Island (1804). Courtesy of State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (171 c.229).
The point of this excursus into the visual arts is not only to show how the outskirts of St. Petersburg were acquiring independent aesthetic and cultural value but also to suggest the increasing diversity and vitality of dacha life in this period. The dacha seems to have become a fixture on the social scene in the early part of the nineteenth century, when renting a summer house became a universal aspiration for well-to-do sections of Petersburg society. In 1802 F. F. Vigel’ was struck by a transformation that had taken place since his first visit: arriving in September, he was surprised to find the city “empty,” as people had not yet returned from their summer houses. During the two years he had been away from Petersburg, he surmised, the dacha habit had “already spread to all classes.” Even if some allowances need to be made for Vigel’’s youthful impressionability, his observation is strengthened by further details of the time. The early years of the reign of Alexander I brought a construction boom in Petersburg and its environs; land was drained, trees were felled, and dachas went up steadily.27 In the early nineteenth century, moreover, dachas were advertised more widely and with greater attention paid to their commercial possibilities. Take the following notice from 1820, which is revealing of the contemporary craze for horticulture:
An orangery 60 sazhens long with fruit trees, for example peaches, apricots, and plums . . . , next to it four sections with their own hothouse, which has vines, a barn for cherries of 20 sazhens, in it up to 150 trees in tubs, a kitchen garden 65 sazhens long, 12 sazhens wide, in it up to 20 rows of Spanish strawberries, red currant, black currant, white and pink currants, various kinds of gooseberry, and in addition, in various sections and the greenhouse, up to 200 pots of roses and up to 2,000 pots of other flowers, and also ten of the best kinds of hothouses for watermelons and melons.28
By the turn of the eighteenth century, the dacha market was not at all restricted to the routes linking the city and the palaces at Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, and the more recently built Pavlovsk. It now notably included the various islands in the Neva. In the first years of St. Petersburg’s existence, these islands were handed out to Peter’s relatives and favorites. Thereafter, during the eighteenth century, they changed hands quite frequently as their owners were disgraced and dispossessed or decided to cash in the gift they had received. Prince Aleksandr Menshikov was the first owner of Krestovskii Island; after his disgrace, the island was given to Count Minikh by Empress Anna Ioannovna in 1731. Then, after Minikh’s involvement in a palace plot of 1742, the island passed to the Razumovskii family. The Razumovskiis then became property entrepreneurs, renting out houses on the island to civil servants. In 1804 P.K. Razumovskii sold the island to Prince A.M. Belosel’skii-Belozerskii, who quickly took an even more entrepreneurial approach by increasing the number of plots.29 An unflattering description of dacha life on the island was given by Iu. Arnol’d, who spent a summer there as an adolescent in 1827. To the east, he recalled, there were thirty-three peasant households, to the west no more than six or seven; amenities were limited to a tavern, an inn, and a small trader’s stall; the island was cross-cut by only two roads. The peasant houses were rented out to “gentlemen”:
It was left to the tenants to concern themselves with making these dwellings more or less habitable and if possible comfortable. For this reason the “dachas” were usually rented for about five years. Our “dacha” . . . consisted of a house with six rooms, a mezzanine of three little rooms, and various outbuildings in a closed yard. At the front, facing the street, was a little patch of garden, and behind the yard an enormous expanse of communal meadow.30
The first references to dachas on Petrovskii Island came in the early 1790s. The island was given over to the Free Economic Society for agricultural purposes;31 but these activities were abandoned after the disastrous flood of 1824. Instead, houses were built for rent, bringing in 3,950 rubles in the first year. After that, plots were let out for tenants to build their own houses; these buildings then became the property of the society. In 1841 the island was transferred to the future Alexander II. Dacha owners suffered a period of uncertainty as to whether their contracts with the society would remain in force, but after some discussion they were given assurances that they would retain rights to their houses. Aptekarskii Island, home of the first botanical garden in Russia, was kept under close imperial supervision until 1799, when private construction was first allowed there. When more intensive settlement did occur, it took place quite haphazardly, with winding streets and dead ends, and Aptekarskii gained a reputation as the most unplanned of the islands.32
The most splendid of the islands in the Neva delta was no doubt Kamennyi. Its early owners were G.I. Golovkin (the first Russian chancellor), his son A.G. Golovkin, and, from 1746, A. I. Bestuzheva-Riumina, wife of the then chancellor. Her husband was arrested and disgraced in 1758; he was rehabilitated at the beginning of Catherine II’s reign and in 1765 sold the island to the empress, who presented it as a gift to her son Paul, the future emperor. Dacha construction began in the late 1780s, and on a rather more secure basis than earlier in the island’s history: Catherine’s charter of 1785 had given nobles reason to hope that in future their property would not be subject to sudden confiscation. Paul allotted the first plots on Kamennyi to favored courtiers, thus establishing the island as the main site for official residences outside the suburban palaces. Here is a description of one of the early buildings, advertised for rent in 1789: “A rebuilt wooden manorial house, unfurnished, with two outbuildings, one of which has a bathhouse and large servants’ quarters, the other has a kitchen, inside the yard there is a stable with six stalls, a cellar with an icebox and several storerooms, behind the yard [there is] forest and land tilled for a kitchen garden.”33 Residences and gardens on Kamennyi were, it seems, kept in impeccable condition, as befitted a place where members of the imperial family were liable to take strolls. In 1818 a visitor to the dacha of a senior civil servant observed that “everything about it was irreproachably clean and neat, every tree was nurtured like a rare tropical plant”; guests were forbidden to drive their carriages up to the entrance of the house for fear of disrupting this exemplary orderliness.34
By 1800, seventeen plots had been handed out on the eastern part of the island. Alexander I tried to keep strict control over new building: inns, shops, and coffeehouses were strictly forbidden, and the building of private dachas was kept to a minimum. But there was still considerable turnover of ownership, as in the Dolivo-Dobrovol’skii dacha, subsequently famous for the two summers that Aleksandr Pushkin spent there (in 1834 and 1836). The plot was originally given by Alexander I to a Naryshkin; it was then sold first to another old noble family, the Pleshcheevs, then (in 1816) to a petit bourgeois (meshchanin) named Kamenshchikov, from whom the plot was confiscated for debts in 1820. Then, in 1821, it passed briefly into the hands of a merchant before being sold to a woman named Dolivo-Dobrovol’skaia, wife of a high-ranking civil servant. The house where Pushkin lived was built between 1822 and 1830.35 Contemporaries all agreed that it was not cheap; the writer’s wife leased it after the money had arrived for the first issue of Sovremennik (The Contemporary), the journal that Pushkin hoped would rescue him from his straitened financial circumstances. The handful of memoirs that have come down to us paint a picture of domestic contentment and informality in his household. A summer on the island presented ample opportunities for socializing. Quite apart from the neighbors on the island, the opposite bank of the Neva (Novaia Derevnia) was well populated; among its residents were the members of the Guards Regiment to which Pushkin’s later antagonist, Georges d’Anthès, belonged.36
Pushkin, the best-known dacha resident of the period, was already a habitué of the islands. In the summer of 1830 he spent a lot of time with his friend Anton Del’vig, who had rented a dacha near Krestovskii Island. Del’vig’s younger cousin (subsequently state inspector of private railways) recalled how the two of them went around Krestovskii noisily engaging the attention of passers-by in a way they had clearly done since their schooldays; for Pushkin, this was the last opportunity to enjoy the bachelor lifestyle.37 Then and subsequently, Krestovskii had a reputation for strolling crowds, mildly unruly behavior, and a low level of actual residency. As a married man Pushkin spent a couple of summers at Chernaia Rechka (near the Stroganov gardens, on the north side of the island), later infamous as the location for his fatal duel. His landlord on both occasions was F. I. Miller, head butler under two tsars and one of the first dacha entrepreneurs. These were no mere vacation cottages: in a letter to her daughter in Warsaw, Pushkin’s mother reported that her son’s dacha had “over fifteen rooms.”38
Pushkin left an insight into this socially exclusive dacha world in his fragment “The Guests Were Assembling at the Dacha” (1828). Here we discover that the dachas on the islands were so close to the city center that people could go there not just for a day or two but for part of a day, or even for part of an evening. In this unfinished story the guests have come straight from the theater and plunge immediately into drawing room conversation. The tone is free and easy, even facetious, but high society norms still obtain: the prolonged tête-è-tête of a married woman with an admirer on the balcony is noted by everyone and marked down against her. The dacha offers the opportunity for private communication in a very public setting—with all the risks it entails. In a word, this dacha is an exurban salon and the story is a society tale. If the setting may be said to give this highly conventional genre its own particular coloring, it is perhaps in a certain ease of narrative style. The fact that all the guests have come from a distance and crossed the urban/suburban divide divests them of their social biography; the dacha is a location where characters can be brought together and left to interact without too much scene-setting. It is significant that Pushkin’s unfinished story is supposed precisely for this reason to have caught Lev Tolstoy’s eye as he was mulling over his own tale of adultery, Anna Karenina, four decades later.39
The connection of these early suburban residences to the values of urban high society was emphasized by their design. Most owners took the Italian villa as their model.40 The simple, heavy, “laconic” architectural style typical of the Alexandrine period was particularly prevalent on Kamennyi Island, as in the dacha of Prince Ol’denburg: “The round hall under the cupola is wonderfully fine: modest and solemn at the same time. This is precisely that ‘wealthy simplicity’ which was so well understood by artists of the first half of the nineteenth century; this is the ideal of a suburban house combining country-style coziness with refined luxury.”41
And suburban was what these residences were becoming in the 1820s. Their closer relationship with the city was signposted by a law of 1833 that extended the jurisdiction of the St. Petersburg police to dacha areas from the Okhta to the Vyborg Side. But, although residents of such areas now had the assistance of the city authorities in maintaining “safety” and “decency,” they retained a freedom in their use of space and architectural design that was denied to inhabitants of more densely settled parts of the city.42
As the mention of locations such as the Vyborg Side suggests, in the early nineteenth century there were other sites for dacha life besides court residences and island villas. To judge by advertisements of the time, several other areas had houses for sale and summer rental. Many of them were located in the northern part of the city, on the Petersburg Side or even farther afield. There was plenty of room for people to have spacious residences only a short carriage ride from the center; St. Petersburg still appeared bucolic to travelers who approached it in the 1800s.43 Most dachas for rent came with outbuildings, kitchen garden, and furniture, and they commonly offered accommodation of ten rooms or so. Houses were made available for rental not only by grandees, prosperous merchants, or prominent civil servants but also by humbler folk. Peasants on Krestovskii Island, as we have seen, were letting out houses for the summer from the late eighteenth century, and villages on or near the Peterhof Road were similarly full of cheap rental opportunities for summering Petersburgers in the early nineteenth century.44
Among the earliest dacha landlords from a humble milieu were the German “colonists.” German immigration to the St. Petersburg region dates back to the early years of the reign of Catherine II. Foreigners were attracted by a set of extremely favorable conditions, including freedom of confession, free lodging for six months on arrival, land grants, exemption from taxes, and start-up loans. The first German settlers duly arrived in St. Petersburg via Lübeck in 1762 and 1763; their first colony was named Novaia Saratovka and had an initial population of sixty families, each with thirty-five desiatinas of land. The next wave of settlement came in the 1800s, when a colony was established at Strel’na, on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland. In 1808 Alexander I made up to 20,000 desiatinas available for further German settlement in the region. In 1809, one hundred more German families moved from Poland to a new colony near Oranienbaum. This settlement was soon disbanded and the German peasants were resettled because the land proved unsuitable for agriculture, but the other colonies remained. The colonists at Strel’na, for example, paid quitrent (obrok) to the landowner; they did not have the right of private ownership, but neither were they constrained by the commune traditional in Russian peasant villages. They were able to make a living from the land under conditions much more favorable than those enjoyed by the majority of the population of the Russian Empire. And thanks to the surplus income they generated, the relative economic independence they enjoyed, and the favorable and expanding property market that obtained in the Petersburg region, many of them were able to build and rent out summer houses and to buy more land. The number of such settlements continued to increase in the second half of the century, and locations such as Strel’na and Novaia Derevnia had the reputation of being overwhelmingly German in their population.45
It is in the early nineteenth century also that we find the origins of another extremely enduring model of dacha life. In the 1810s, A. N. Olenin, president of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts and director of the public library, brought together many of the leading literary and artistic figures of his day at his residence, Priiutino, located seventeen versts from St. Petersburg, beyond the Okhta, in the direction of Lake Ladoga. Although in certain respects this property was a landed estate by virtue of its rural location and its relative detachment from the city and from other centers of social activity, visitors commonly referred to it as a dacha. Its function was not agricultural production but rather the encouragement of convivial and predominantly intellectual relations within a particular circle. Priiutino was the setting for a succession of prolonged house parties, and certain habitués—such as the poet and translator N. I. Gnedich and the celebrated poet and fable writer I. A. Krylov—were practically in permanent residence in the summer.46 Olenin had built several smaller houses on the grounds of his own residence specifically in order to accommodate such long-term guests. And the guests kept on coming: one visitor recalled that even the seventeen cows at the dacha struggled to produce enough cream for all the writers and artists summering at Priiutino. The social responsibilities of guests were strikingly limited: a bell summoned them several times a day to meals, but otherwise they were free to amuse themselves.47
Olenin’s literary acquaintances were not slow to express their gratitude for this relaxed hospitality, especially given that Priiutino was easily accommodated within their early-Romantic worldview. In 1820, Gnedich dedicated to Olenin’s wife a poem in which, playing lightly on the dacha’s name (priiut means “shelter"), he spoke of the dacha as a blessed refuge from the noise and vanity of the city, as a place to flee life’s “turbulence” and seek spiritual repose.48 Konstantin Batiushkov, similarly, referred to Priiutino as a “refuge for kind souls” and a setting for “rustic festivities.”49 Olenin’s country retreat may therefore be seen as setting up a powerful legitimizing model for dacha life: far from being a site for empty-headed entertainments, the dacha was a place for spiritual recuperation from the rigors of city life, informal and friendly social interaction, and intense intellectual and artistic creativity.50
Moscow
So far the discussion has been focused on one city and its environs. It is true that Petersburg was in the vanguard of the early history of the dacha, because the urban/suburban divide opened up more suddenly and decisively there than elsewhere in Russia, and because of the concentration of imperial institutions and resulting opportunities for careers. The entertainment culture of the Moscow nobility was, moreover, structured rather differently from that of St. Petersburg. The city was ringed by aristocratic palaces, which were major social centers in their own right and for the time being obviated any need to create new entertainment-oriented suburban settlements.51 A survey of advertisements for property in and around Moscow in the 1800s reveals that dachas, in the sense that is relevant here, are simply not mentioned. The nearest equivalent is the comfortable town house with spacious gardens but minimal landholdings (khoziaistvo).52 Even in the 1830s the word “dacha” was used less often in Moscow than in Petersburg, and the distinction between a dacha or zagorodnyi dom and a “town estate” or gorodskaia usad’ba was much less clear-cut. Take the following advertisement: “On the Serpukhov Road, at the fifth verst from Moscow, in the village of Verkhnie Koshly for summer rent: two houses together or separately with all amenities, with furniture or without, completely dry, built in a pleasant location from which the whole of Moscow can be seen; on the dacha itself [i.e., the plot of land] there is a small stream.”53
In the early nineteenth century, however, Moscow gained ground on Petersburg. Turgenev’s First Love (1860), for example, is set in 1833 in a dacha opposite Neskuchnoe at the Kaluga gates, at the same time Pushkin was occupying his fifteen rooms at Chernaia Rechka, yet it reveals a quite different model of dacha life. The colonnaded main house is occupied by the family of the narrator, Vladimir, who is sixteen at the time of the events described. It is flanked by two other buildings: one has been converted into a small wallpaper factory, while the other is rented out to summer guests. The tenant who arrives to spend the summer in this unprepossessing outbuilding is a pretentious “princess” whose first concern is to ask the narrators parents to pull strings on her behalf to resolve a legal difficulty in which she has found herself entangled. Vladimir’s mother is dismayed by the “vulgarity” of her neighbor, but she cannot avoid having something to do with her; Vladimir, by contrast, is much taken with the neighbors daughter, Zina. What he fails to see is that his father is himself conducting an affair with Zina. First Love is of interest as a unique experiment in the dacha genre by a writer associated primarily with the country estate. The suburban setting seems to bring with it a change in psychological dynamics: the characters are thrown together more randomly than they would be at the country estate, and the revelation of the father’s infidelity, though not surprising to the reader, is more shocking than anything in Turgenev’s measured and evenly paced longer works. In a pattern quite characteristic of Russian literary representations in the later nineteenth century, the dacha is shown as a place that undermines traditional forms of social intercourse: first, by bringing together a larger and more socially diverse set of characters; second, by allowing this expanded cast greater freedom of action (notably, the freedom to transgress marital boundaries).54
Besides making a valuable contribution to the emerging poetics of the dacha, First Love indicates that the subdivision of estates into dachas for rent was under way in the Moscow region in the 1830s.55 In this period the most significant new factor in dacha development, and one common to Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the sale of substantial 25 areas of land just outside the city limits as dacha plots. In the St. Petersburg area, for instance, land belonging to the Forestry Institute (Lesnoi Institut) was initially sold off as eighteen plots in 1832; the demand was so great that more were made available two years later.56 In Moscow the main example in this period was Petrovskii Park, an area totaling seventeen desiatinas located between the city gates and the Petrovskii Palace, in the direction of Tver’. The first aristocratic dachas there dated back to the late eighteenth century, but they were all destroyed during the Napoleonic invasion. Later, in the 1830s, the park was revived as an up-market summer residential area: peasants were bought out from the surrounding land and building plots were handed out to elite nobles. There were to be no inns or similar watering holes, as the “purpose of building these dachas [was] respectability of aspect and conduct [blagovidnost’ i prilichie].” Mikhail Zagoskin, director of the Moscow theaters in the 1830s, had a dacha of the requisite decorous appearance. “The balconies and squares were bedecked in flowers; wire gates, topped by a fragrant flowerpot or convolvulus, were surrounded by small gardens.”57 Purchasers of plots in Petrovskii Park were to have their house designs approved by the Building Commission, and if they failed to build within three years, their plot would be resold at public auction. Against those restrictions, they received ten years’ relief from taxes and loans of up to 5,000 rubles from the commission.58 Observers were quick to sense that these developments had brought about a change in the leisure habits of Moscow’s social elite: in the opinion of the memoirist M. A. Dmitriev (1796–1866), for example, the picnics and parties de plaisir favored by some aristocratic families became much less common in the 1830s, as Petrovskii Park offered them a more permanent base for exurban recreation and invited new forms of sociability.59 In the 1840s the park remained a place for the summer residences of the Moscow aristocracy and a venue for refined entertainments such as costume balls.60
BY THE mid-1830s we can see much of the dacha’s subsequent nineteenth-century history in embryo. The period from 1780 to 1820 weakened the hold of the aristocracy and the court elite over the semirural retreats around St. Petersburg and brought Petersburg society closer to what might be called a “modern” leisure culture. That is, the arena for unofficial social interaction became polarized between, on the one hand, a small circle of family and intimates and, on the other, the anonymity of public spectacle. Attempts to combine the two spheres of public and private entertainment—as had occurred, for example, in the grand festivities at the Naryshkin dacha on the Peterhof Road—were made less frequently.
But this early stage in the dacha’s history also has the virtue of illustrating the limitations of such ideal-typical accounts; it already points to a diversification not only of the social composition of the dacha public but also of the available models for dacha life. On the one hand, we have the dacha as an appurtenance of political influence, as a place where personal and official forms of social interaction are intertwined. The role of patronage in European political life of this period was doubtless enormous, yet Russia has often been seen as an extreme case: as representing an unattractive hybrid of indiscriminately applied forms of Western civility with none too deeply concealed systems of patrimonial power. This is what Martha Wilmot, a guest at numerous aristocratic dachas in the 1800s, was alluding to when she pointed to the “mixture of familiarity and pride” in the people she encountered; and her sister Catherine, somewhat older and a more penetrating observer, described Russia as “a superstructure from France—the Monkey rampant on the Bear’s back” and as a “clumsy romping ignorant girl” with a “Parisian cap on her head.”61 The court dacha, as a place explicitly orientated toward informal socializing but at the same time embedded in networks of political and social influence, may seem to embody the contradictions identified by the Wilmots. The same point emerges, though in a much more positive light, from the memoirs of V. A. Sollogub. Famous as a conceited fop who almost fought a duel with Pushkin, Sollogub was born in 1813 into a family from the old Lithuanian nobility that had by the early nineteenth century bonded closely with the Russian aristocratic elite. His grandfather had married a Naryshkin, and in the 1820s he spent several summers in Pavlovsk in dachas rented from the Naryshkins and the Volkonskiis. Exhibiting a trait common to almost all dacha memoirists, Sollogub looked back on this time with immense fondness: “Life seemed to be a fragment of past times and past ways living out its days, a vanishing idyll of a patriarchal life that was disappearing forever.”62
Despite the regretfully retrospective tone of Sollogub’s description, the association of the dacha with “patriarchal” values would resurface later in the century, as would the idea of the dacha as a focus for superficial status consciousness. Yet even in the period he was writing about, as we have seen, several other models of dacha life were available. The Olenin estate at Priiutino can be seen as laying the foundations for an enduring intelligentsia tradition of conversation and creative work at the country retreat; the German colonists and other dacha owners and landlords of modest means were the pioneers of the low-rent summer vacation.
But what makes the phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fundamentally different from what followed, what makes them part of the prehistory of the dacha as opposed to its main narrative, is the fact that they did not occasion the same self-consciousness as their later developments. The meaning of the word “dacha” had not settled down sufficiently; and it had not settled down because it was not yet important enough to people to distinguish between dachas and other forms of residence. To use or own a dacha did not yet make one a dachnik. All this would soon change radically, as we shall see, in line with the development of Russian urban society and culture in the 1830s and 1840s.
1. This is the first meaning given for “dacha” in Vladimir Dal’’s Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Moscow, 1880–82). The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia, similarly, discusses “dacha” in the context of the General Survey (B&E, 10:162–63). For extensive references to “dacha” as a legal concept, see the index to I. D. Mordukhai-Boltovskii, Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (St. Petersburg, 1912). On the early history of the word, see Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–XVII vv. (Moscow, 1975–). The Slovar’ akademii rossiiskoi (St. Petersburg, 1806–22; this volume published in 1809) gives four meanings for “dacha”: (1) “the giving of something”; (2) “a payment”; (3) “a particular area of land outside the town given by the Tsar or the government into someone’s ownership, or acquired by purchase and built on”; (4) “lands belonging to an estate owner, or to state peasants.”
2. P. N. Stolpianskii, Peterburg (1918; St. Petersburg, 1995), 297.
3. For a survey of early maps of the Peterhof Road, see A. Korentsvit, “Dachi na Petergofskoi doroge,” Leningradskaia panorama, no. 4 (1988), 35–37.
4. P. N. Stolpianskii, Dachnye okrestnosti Petrograda (Petrograd and Moscow, 1923), 5.
5. P. N. Stolpianskii, Petergofskaia pershpektiva: Istoricheskii ocherk (Petrograd, 1923), 16–17.
6. P. N. Petrov, Istoriia Sankt-Peterburga s osnovaniia goroda, do vvedeniia v deistvie vybornogo gorodskogo upravleniia, 1703–1782 (St. Petersburg, 1884), 514.
7. Iu. N. Bespiatykh, Peterburg Anny Ioannovny v inostrannykh opisaniiakh (St. Petersburg, 1997), 309.
8. Foreign travelers’ accounts of St. Petersburg under construction in the first half of the eighteenth century are analyzed in chap. 7 of J. Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture (Chicago, 1988).
9. See, e.g., M.I. Pyliaev, Staryi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 1887), 409.
10. K. P. Shalikov, Puteshestvie v Kronshtat 1805 goda (Moscow, 1817), 53.
11. F. Shreder, Noveishii putevoditel’ po Sanktpeterburgu (St. Petersburg, 1820), 9.
12. “Opisanie maskarada i drugikh uveselenii, byvshikh v Primorskoi L’va A1eksandrovicha Naryshkina dache, otstoiashchei ot Sankt-peterburga v 11 verstakh po Petergofskoi doroge, 29 iiulia 1772 godu,” reprinted from Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti in Sovremennik 38 (1853), sec. 2, 96–102.
13. “Zapiski astronoma Ivana Bernulli o poezdke ego v Rossiiu v 1777 godu,” Russkii arkhiv, no. 1 (1902), 11–12.
14. See E. Amburger, Ingermanland: Eine junge Provinz Rußlands im Wirkungsbereich der Residenz und Weltstadt St. Petersburg–Leningrad, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1980), 1:547–48. These entertainments ended in 1811, when Stroganov died.
15. See M. Floryan, Gardens of the Tsars: A Study of the Aesthetics, Semantics, and Uses of Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Gardens (Aarhus, 1996), 34 (on Catherine’s taste for all things English) and 142–49 (on the new approach, dating from the 1770s, to horticulture as a practical hobby or even business). On anglophilia in garden design, see also A. Cross, “By the Banks of the Neva”: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, 1997), 266–85, and P. Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven, 1995), chap. 3. In the early nineteenth century, moreover, growing numbers of Russian noblemen were choosing to spend time on their estates and cultivating the lifestyle of the English gentry (Roosevelt 98). On changing models of estate life, see O. S. Evangulova, “Gorod i usad’ba vtoroi poloviny XVIII v. v soznanii sovremennikov,” Russkii gorod 7 (1984): 172–88.
16. G. R. Derzhavin, “Pikniki” (1776), in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1957), 79.
17. F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1928), 1:98, 211.
18. See Amburger, Ingermanland, 1:473.
19. Stolpianskii, Peter gofskaia pershpektiva, 21–22.
20. P. Svin’in, quoted in S. Gorbatenko, “Rastsvet Petergofskoi dorogi,” Leningradskaia panorama, no. 7 (1989), 40.
21. SPb ved, 24 Feb. 1769, suppl., 3. The turnover of ownership on the Peterhof Road at a later period is reflected in a complaint of 1824 by a civil servant’s widow, Elizaveta L’vova, regarding the use of water from the Ligovskii canal. L’vova noted that her plot had been left without an adequate water supply after the redrawing of dacha boundaries (her dacha was located between the larger landholdings of Baron Rall, who had accumulated several plots. and Krasnyi Kabachok), and that she did not have the resources to have a pipe laid herself; she therefore appealed for Rall’s water supply to be diverted to her plot (see RGIA, f. 206, op. 1, d. 562, l. 1). A comparison of lists of dacha residents on the Peterhof Road for 1779 and 1838 (presented in Amburger, Ingermanland, 2:924–31) makes clear the shift from primarily noble to more socially diverse patterns of residency.
22. SPb ved, 17 Mar. 1780, 272.
23. This shift in meaning is reflected in Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka (Leningrad. 1984–), which gives “recreational house out of town” as a new meaning for “dacha” that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century.
24. These developments are hinted at in I. G. Georgi, Opisanie rossiisko-imperatorskogo stolichnogo goroda Sankt-Peterburga i dostopamiatnostei v okrestnostiakh onogo, s planom (1794; St. Petersburg, 1996), 454–58. Georgi notes, for example, that outings in carriages and on horseback were not restricted to young men, but were also enjoyed by “ladies of the first classes and of the middle estate” (457).
25. For a much more elaborate treatment of these ideas, see G. Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts (Stanford. 1997).
26. See G. N. Komelova, G. A. Printseva, and I. G. Kotel’nikova, eds., Peterburg v proizvedeniiakh Patersena (Moscow, 1978). For works by other artists (for example, Semen and Sil’vestr Shchedrin) that continue the trends I have identified in Paterssen’s oeuvre, see G. Grimm and L. Kashkarova, Peterburg—Petrograd—Leningrad v proizvedeniiakh khudozhnikov (Moscow, 1958), and A. M. Gordin, Pushkinskii Peterburg (Leningrad, 1974).
27. Vigel’, Zapiski, 1:148, 180.
28. Quoted in V. N. Toporov, “Aptekarskii ostrov kak gorodskoe urochishche,” in Noosfera i khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo (Moscow, 1991), 248n.
29. V.A. Vitiazeva, Nevskie ostrova (Leningrad, 1986). See also P. N. Stolpianskii, Staryi Peterburg: Aptekarskii, Petrovskii, Krestovskii ostrova (Petrograd, 1916), 47–52. Georgi (Opisanie, 455) wrote ten years earlier of the number of entertainments available on Krestovskii and noted that city dwellers sometimes rented houses for several weeks over the summer in the village on the island.
30. Vospominaniia Iuriia Arnol’da, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1892–93), 2:56–57.
31. The Free Economic Society (Vol’no-Ekonomicheskoe Obshchestvo) was a major scientific institution founded in 1765 with the aim of conducting research in agronomy.
32. Stolpianskii, Star yi Peterburg, 41–45, 1–24.
33. SPb ved, 17 Apr. 1789, 465.
34. D. N. Sverbeev, Zapiski (1799–1826), 2 vols. (Moscow, 1899), 1:283. Alexander I was indeed apt to wander through the island: see the anecdote recalled in P.A. Viazemskii, Staraia zapisnaia knizhka (Leningrad, 1929), 204.
35. On the island’s various dachas and their owners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see V. A. Vitiazeva, Kamennyi ostrov (Leningrad, 1991), 112–220.
36. S. L. Abramovich, Pushkin: Poslednii god (Moscow, 1991).
37. A. I. Del’vig, Polveka russkoi zhizni: Vospominaniia A.I. Del’viga, 1820–1870 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1930), 148.
38. A. M. Gordin and M. A. Gordin, Pushkinskii vek: Panorama stolichnoi zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1995), 355–60. Nor was this exceptional by the standards of the time: a visitor from Riga left a description of a similarly spacious island residence, opposite Kamennyi on Aptekarskii, occupied by the director of the Postal Department, Konstantin Bulgakov. See V. V. Lents, “Prikliucheniia Lifliandtsa v Peterburge,” Russkii arkhiv, no. 4 (1878), 451.
39. On the conventions of the 1820S, see N. Cornwell, ed., The Society Tale in Russian Literature: From Odoevskii to Tolstoi (Amsterdam, 1998). This volume follows much previous scholarship in linking the society tale to a new emphasis in Russian literature on observation and analysis (as opposed to imagination and invention).
40. An influence attested by G. K. Lukomskii in his Pamiatniki starinnoi arkhitektury Rossii (Petrograd, 1916), 388.
41. “Posledniaia staraia dacha na Kamennom ostrove,” Starye gody, July–September 1910, 181–85.
42. See PSz, ser. 2, 8, no. 6660 (22 Dec. 1833). The first move in this direction had occurred in 1828, when police jurisdiction had been extended to the settlements (slobody) on the Okhta; an exception, however, had been made for dachas in this vicinity, as it was considered inequitable to subject dacha owners there to a property tax, given that, being rather thinly spread, they had relatively little need of the police, and also that dacha owners in other areas were not taxed (see PSz, ser. 2, 3, no. 2054 [25 May 1828]).
43. J. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), 34–35.
44. One such village is the setting for an episode in Faddei Bulgarin’s engaging picaresque Ivan Vyzhigin (1828): see Bulgarin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1990), 323–25.
45. See A. Fon-Gernet, Nemetskaia koloniia Strel’na pod S.-Peterburgom, 1810–1910 (St. Petersburg, 1910); Amburger, Ingermanland, 1:271–81; and T.A. Shrader, “Pravovaia i kul’turnaia adaptatsiia nemetskikh kolonistov v peterburgskoi gubernii v poreformennoe vremia,” in Peterburg i guberniia: Istoriko-etnograficheskie issledovaniia, ed. N. V. Iukhneva (Leningrad, 1989). For a clear summary of the early German immigrants’ privileges, see R. P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (Cambridge, 1979), 47–48.
46. A short posthumous biography recounts how Krylov, renowned for prodigious feats of gluttony, uncharacteristically acted on the advice of his doctors and took to visiting dachas. Priiutino was farther from the city than most such places, but it was a “dacha” none the less. See M.E. Lobanov, “Zhizn’ i sochineniia Ivana Andreevicha Krylova” (1847), in I. A. Krylov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, eds. A.M. Gordin and M.A. Gordin (Moscow, 1982) 73.
47. Dnevnik Anny Alekseevny Oleninoi (1828–1829), ed. O. N. Oom (Paris, 1936), xv–xvi.
48. N. I. Gnedich, “Priiutino,” in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1956), 117–21. Gnedich was also the author of “Rybaki” (1821), a longer poem that on first publication was billed as “the first attempt at a Russian national [narodnoi] idyll” (ibid, 195–204). He takes a dachnik’s viewpoint, conveying the idyllic quality of the national landscape by focusing on a pastoral space that derives its meaning above all from its proximity to the city. The spire above the Peter and Paul Fortress, for example, is contrasted to the empty and unspoiled banks of the Neva.
49. K. Batiushkov, “Poslanie k A.I. Turgenevu” (1817–18), in his Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964), 235–36.
50. Moscow’s bucolic environs could also inspire early-Romantic rapture, as in A. Raevskii, “Okrestnosti Moskvy,” Syn otechestva, pt. 25, no. 40 (1815), 53–65.
51. On the exurban habits of the Moscow nobility in the early nineteenth century, see D. Blagovo, Rasskazy babushki; Iz vospominanii piati pokolenii (Leningrad, 1989), 158–63.
52. This conclusion is based on a general reading of Moskovskie vedomosti in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
53. Moskovskie vedomosti, 15 Mar. 1833, 1000.
54. First Love was apparently Turgenev’s favorite of his own works because it was not “made up.” On the autobiographical resonance of the story, see the notes in the standard Russian edition: I. S. Turgenev, Pervaia liubov’, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1978–86), 6:479–80. The dacha location featured in Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin, the village of Emel’ianovka on the Peterhof Road, is the venue for another scene of acute tension brought on by social misrecognition (an orphan girl from a noble family fallen on hard times is insultingly propositioned by a lecherous older man who, it turns out, was instrumental in ruining her mother): see Bulgarin, Sochineniia, 328–29.
55. The first signs of this practice can be dated even earlier. It seems that the Sheremetevs rented out buildings on their Ostankino estate as early as the 1810S, though the occupants at that time resembled more closely “paying guests” than impersonal “tenants”; the beginnings of a “dacha industry”—the construction of houses specifically as dachas on plots belonging to house serfs—would have to wait until the 1830s. See E. Springis, “Moskovskie zhiteli v sele Ostankine: K istorii dachnoi zhizni stolitsy serediny—vtoroi poloviny XIX veka,” Russkaia usad’ba 5/21(1999).
56. PSz, ser. 2, 9, no. 7464 (16 Oct. 1834). An 1843 account of life in Lesnoi Institut is quoted extensively in Amburger, Ingermanland, 1:563.
57. [S. Engel’gardt], “Iz vospominanii,” Russkii vestnik 191 (1887): 703.
58. PSZ, ser. 2, 9, no. 6882 (5 Mar. 1834). A general history of the park can be found in S. Malafeeva, “Poltora veka Petrovskogo parka,” Moskovskii arkhiv 1 (Moscow, 1996): 107–17.
59. M.A. Dmitriev, Glavy iz vospominanii moei zhizni (Moscow, 1998), 278. The emergence of Petrovskii Park as a dacha location was mentioned by one contemporary observer as an important step in the direction of the Petersburg model of exurban development, although dachas were still considered to be a much less commonplace phenomenon in Moscow than in the imperial capital (see V. M-ch, “Peterburgskie i moskovskie dachi,” Severnaia pchela, 17 Aug. 1842, 723–24). The significance of the creation of Petrovskii Park and the role played in it by the entrepreneurial A. A. Bashilov are noted in Blagovo, Rasskazy babushki, 1:160–2, and in S. M. Zagoskin, “Vospominaniia,” Istoricheskii vestnik, no. 1 (1900), 60–61.
60. P. Vistengof, Ocherki moskovskoi zhizni (Moscow, 1842), 90. Of the thirty-four dachas listed in one guidebook of the late 1840s, twenty-six were in Petrovskii Park or “beyond the Tver’ gates”: see M. Rudol’f, Moskva s topograficheskim ukazaniem vsei ee mestnosti i okrestnostei (Moscow, 1848), 31–34·
61. M. Wilmot and C. Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, ed. The Marchioness of Londonderry and H.M. Hyde (London, 1934), 48, 195, 223.
62. V.A. Sollogub, Vospominaniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931), 213. Sollogub goes on to emphasize the point by recalling a trip to an estate his mother had just bought in Simbirsk province, where he learned that “besides the world of the court . . . there was another world too, a world with deep Russian roots, the world of the common people” (219).