The state’s encouragement of “creativity” by providing dachas gave rise to a new model
of dacha life, which revived the prerevolutionary concept of the writer’s retreat
and underpinned it with the resources of the Soviet state. The result, in the words
of one sardonic observer of Peredelkino, was a “feudal” settlement where the titans
of Soviet literature took the role of lords of the manor.147 Among the most prominent beneficiaries of these resources was Boris Pasternak, who
in the second half of the 1930s took to spending large parts of the winter alone in
Peredelkino (he visited Moscow about twice a month). Pasternak, like so many members
of the intelligentsia, had been tormented by abysmal living conditions in his Moscow
apartment in the 1920s; in Peredelkino he saw an opportunity to recreate the inspiring
solitude of the student garret: “I am an incorrigible and convinced frequenter of
bunks and attics (the student who ‘rents a cubbyhole’) and my very best recollections are of the difficult and modest periods of my existence: in
them there is always more earth, more color, more Rembrandt content.” Pasternak later
confessed his discomfort after the substantial renovation and extension of the dacha
in 1953–54: “I feel uncomfortable in these surroundings; it is above my station. I
am ashamed at the walls of my enormous study with its parquet floor and central heating.”
So great was Pasternak’s debt to his country retreat that his son saw fit to defend
him against the charge of being a “dachnik” (perhaps he sensed an upsetting incongruity
in the fact that his father had composed much of
Soviet society was everywhere structured by hierarchies that governed people’s access to goods and services. At the same time that the first dachas in Peredelkino were going up, slightly less favored writers were petitioning the authorities to obtain land for a dacha cooperative. Here the plan was for fifty modest wooden dachas of two to four rooms as well as one hostel for thirty people. The petition was signed by cultural figures little associated with collective actions of this kind: Osip Brik, Iurii Olesha, Iakov Protazanov, and, most surprising, Mikhail Bulgakov.149 Galina Vladimirovna Shtange, social activist and wife of a professor whose position entitled him to build a dacha in the Academy of Sciences cooperative, was a typical upper-middling member of the intelligentsia. After three years of tense anticipation and frequent delays, the Shtanges were allocated a building lot in January 1938; while grateful for the chance to have “our own little corner to go to in our old age,” Galina Vladimirovna was under no illusions about its level of comfort: “Like all these cooperatives, ours, the ‘Academic,’ turned out to be not the best quality and the dachas are not quite what we were promised. They’re not equipped for winter, there’s no stove, no fence, no icebox, no shed.”150 Nor were standards always much higher in prestige settlements like Peredelkino. Boris Pasternak complained in 1939 that his spacious retreat was rotting and collapsing a mere three years after it had been built; the new dacha to which he moved that year was supplied with gas and running water only in the winter of 1953–54.151
