Summerfolk [A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000]

The gardens of the opulent dachas on the Neva—notably those belonging to the Stroganovs and the Kushelev-Bezborodkos—to some extent followed suit: as before, they were open to the public, but now they operated on a more commercial footing. In the early 1830s, for example, the Kushelev-Bezborodkos decided to develop a part of their Poliustrovo estate as a dacha zone: twenty plots were offered for sale in 1833, and in the 1840s four-room apartments were available for summer rental by those who wished to take advantage of the local mineral source.46 Yet this was clearly not the only reason to spend the summer at one of the resorts north of the Neva: reports on these locations combined an emphasis on their health benefits with an account of the entertainments they offered (dancing, music, perambulations, open-air games).47 As the memoirs of one resident, the artist P.P.Sokolov, make clear, Poliustrovo was valued by summer visitors for making available a range of refined and enjoyable pastimes: for bringing a mixed bunch of middling urbanites into civilized proximity with the world of the aristocracy without obliging them to conform to its habits and values.48

For several years in the 1830s and 1840s, places of public entertainment performed two rather ambiguously distinguished functions: they continued their traditions of entertainment for a homogeneous social group while at the same time opening themselves up to a broader public. Compare, for example, the above accounts of Isler’s Mineral Waters with a roughly contemporaneous report that is more careful and staid in its description of the entertainments available:

A gulian’e at the Stroganov gardens (from Russkii illiustrirovannyi al’manakh [St. Petersburg, 1858]). Courtesy of Helsinki Slavonic Library.

The events and balls that have for several years consecutively taken place at the mineral waters establishment near Novaia Derevnia have, according to the wishes of many persons, been arranged for this summer as well. They may be attended by nobles, military and state civil servants, honored citizens, merchants, scholars, and artists.49

As this quotation suggests, St. Petersburg’s dacha locations and places of entertainment had their own social geography. Somewhat above the middle of the range was Isler’s establishment, which, even after it became less explicitly exclusive, still had a socially restricted clientele, given the expense of a season ticket (15 silver rubles for a family in the late 1840s). As earlier in the century, an extremely broad section of urban society was encountered at popular festivities (gulian’ia) such as May Day at Ekaterinhof or the equivalent celebration at Sokol’niki in Moscow, which traditionally signaled the start of the summer season.50

Other venues were known to attract more specific sections of the urban population. Krestovskii Island, in the words of one memoirist, “was frequented above all by merchants, low-ranking civil servants, and all kinds of middling Petersburg people.”51 The son of a prosperous merchant family recalled his family taking regular after-dinner strolls there and drinking tea sold by an enterprising meshchanin who had set up a stall with a samovar. Marquees with music and dancing were set up at the end of the island, facing Elagin. A less well-off visitor to the islands was Nikolai Gogol, who during his brief career in the St. Petersburg civil service (1830–31)took frequent walks there in the late evening.52Moscow, too, was developing a suburban entertainment culture whose appeal extended far beyond the traditional social elite. For the son of a well-to-do merchant family in the 1840s, summer could be an endless round of visits, promenades, and balls:

I’m dazed, I’m in the devil knows what kind of state of mind, my head is full of hot, burning kisses! The older folk want me to get down to serious matters!!. . . They don’t understand what’s happening to me!. . . Pokrovskoe keeps getting visited by musicians from Petrovskii Park, and not one band, but two.53