This quest left its mark in literary accounts of the time, which, by rejecting the
ambience and the poetics of the salon, may be said to have brought the dacha into
the realist age. Ever since Mariia Zhukova received a favorable mention from the celebrated
critic Vissarion Belinskii in the late 1830s (which, in typical style, he drastically
revised a few years later), she has intermittently been regarded as a herald of the
shift from Romanticism to realism; and her two best-known works are set at the dacha.
In
Barouches, carriages, cabriolets swept along the roads, colorful crowds strolled in the gardens, balconies turned into living rooms, whole families with their samovars and their numerous children and nannies hurried over to Krestovskii or to the hospitable garden of Countess L., they spread out with their cold supper, ice cream, and tea on the slope of the hill or under the dense lime trees on the very shore. You saw there a German craftsman and his good family, and high-spirited groups of young civil servants, and a Russian merchant with his wife and children of all ages, and two young artists discussing a forthcoming exhibition, and the chic mantilla of a high society beauty, and a servant girl’s pretty kanzu.63
The main focus of the story, however, is not the day trippers on Krestovskii but the
dacha of an elderly lady, Natal’ia Dmitrievna Shemilova, in the Karpovka district—a
mere stone’s throw from the dachas inhabited and fictionalized by Pushkin. Shemilova’s
dacha serves as a framing device for the stories that make up the body of
