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