In the early nineteenth century, however, Moscow gained ground on Petersburg. Turgenev’s
First Love (1860), for example, is set in 1833 in a dacha opposite Neskuchnoe at the Kaluga
gates, at the same time Pushkin was occupying his fifteen rooms at Chernaia Rechka,
yet it reveals a quite different model of dacha life. The colonnaded main house is
occupied by the family of the narrator, Vladimir, who is sixteen at the time of the
events described. It is flanked by two other buildings: one has been converted into
a small wallpaper factory, while the other is rented out to summer guests. The tenant
who arrives to spend the summer in this unprepossessing outbuilding is a pretentious
“princess” whose first concern is to ask the narrators parents to pull strings on
her behalf to resolve a legal difficulty in which she has found herself entangled.
Vladimir’s mother is dismayed by the “vulgarity” of her neighbor, but she cannot avoid
having something to do with her; Vladimir, by contrast, is much taken with the neighbors
daughter, Zina. What he fails to see is that his father is himself conducting an affair
with Zina. First Love is of interest as a unique experiment in the dacha genre by a writer associated primarily
with the country estate. The suburban setting seems to bring with it a change in psychological
dynamics: the characters are thrown together more randomly than they would be at the
country estate, and the revelation of the father’s infidelity, though not surprising
to the reader, is more shocking than anything in Turgenev’s measured and evenly paced
longer works. In a pattern quite characteristic of Russian literary representations
in the later nineteenth century, the dacha is shown as a place that undermines traditional
forms of social intercourse: first, by bringing together a larger and more socially
diverse set of characters; second, by allowing this expanded cast greater freedom
of action (notably, the freedom to transgress marital boundaries).54
