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