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.