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

The pattern of life fictionalized by Zhukova is confirmed (and sometimes bemoaned) by other sources. As a leading guidebook of the time observed, the dacha plots on the Peterhof Road had long since been sold by their original owners, and most of them now contained several subsidiary houses for rent to separate tenants. Peasant villages adjacent to the road also served as dacha locations.66 One former resident recalled at the end of the century that “by the 1850s the once fashionable Peterhof Road had become completely empty [empty, that is, of the beau monde], although by comparison with what it is now it might seem full of life.”67

Other observers were less wistful as they noted the weakening presence of high society in dacha areas. Much of Karolina Pavlova’s Double Life (1844–47), a late-Romantic society tale, takes place at a dacha in Moscow’s Petrovskii Park, a location that is depicted as being antipathetic to meaningful human relations:

Several days had passed since Vera Vladimirovna had moved into one of those nice pseudo-Gothic-Chinese buildings that Petrovsky Park is strewn with. Here too everything corresponded to the demands and conditions of society. Surrounding the luxurious cottage was a luxurious garden, its greenery always an excellent, a choice, one might say an aristocratic greenery. Nowhere a faded leaf, a dry twig, a superfluous blade of grass; banished was everything in God’s creation that is coarse, vulgar, plebeian. The very shrubbery around the house flaunted a kind of Parisian haughtiness, the very flowers planted in every available space took on a certain semblance of good form, nature made herself unnatural. In a word, everything was as it should be.68

Pavlova’s critique of the undue formality, false friendliness, and servile cordiality of Russian high society may be seen as continuing a venerable tradition started by foreign observers such as the Wilmot sisters. A similar view was taken by A. F. Tiutcheva, lady in waiting for two empresses, in her diary: in Tiutcheva’s view, the empty daily rituals of life in Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo served to entrench a strict hierarchical order that precluded warm and genuine relations between individual members of the palace entourage.69 Even the reforming Alexander II (ruled 1855–81) brought no perceptible change to court mores. When Alexander went out to stroll in the Tsarskoe Selo grounds in the late 1850s, aristocratic hangers-on would make a point of being there too. As one witness commented, “everyone tried to come before the eyes of the emperor. [They all wanted to see] whom he would speak to, and who would only receive a bow.”70

Such unflattering impressions of official society had as their corollary an alternative tradition that, by presenting the dacha as a way of avoiding the contamination of public life, sought a more authentically rustic experience. V.Bykova, born in 1820 and a graduate of the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, issued an exalté farewell to her dacha (rented on the Peterhof Road) in a diary entry of August 1841: “Farewell, pleasant strolls, farewell bright days and moonlit nights!” Although Bykova was susceptible to the entertainments available at Isler’s Mineral Waters, she continued (as an older woman, by now a teacher at the institute, in the 1850s) to steer clear of the more densely populated dacha locations. In 1854, for example, she went to Kolpino with her sister and another family, the two groups renting adjacent cottages. The view from her window was “simple, quite rural. No constraints at all, life was free, quiet, and peaceful.” Two years later she found the social scene at the Pavlovsk station concerts much less to her taste: the program was monotonous, consisting exclusively of waltzes and polkas; the conductor, Strauss, was too high and mighty, even getting a servant to turn the pages for him; and there was too much audience chatter in foreign languages.71