88. I. Domosedov (pseud.), “Peterburg zarechnyi,” in
89. “Santimental’noe puteshestvie Ivana Chernoknizhnikova po peterburgskim dacham,”
90. “Peterburgskaia letopis,”
91. I. Chernoknizhnikov, “Novye zametki peterburgskogo turista,”
92. Ibid., 761.
93. Nikitenko,
94. On street entertainments, see A. F. Koni,
95. This was especially true of places just north of center with a high density of lower-class
population. One such area was the much-derided Novaia Derevnia: see Domosedov, “Peterburg
zarechnyi,”152. Gogolleft a dismayed description of one of these
96. Representative examples can be found in “Santimental’noe puteshestvie,” Sovremennik
22 (1850), sec. 6, 177–257; Kniaz’ Kugushev, “Stseny na chistom vozdukhe: Fotograficheskii
snimok s natury,” and A. Iaroslavtsev, “Na dache i na bale, eskiz iz pisem molodogo
cheloveka,” both in
97. D. Andreevskii,
3
The Late Imperial Dacha Boom
In the 1850s, dachas were still an exciting symptom of the recent emergence in Russia of a nonaristocratic urban public. By the end of the century, this public was widely considered to have all but taken over the major cities; confirmation of the waning powers of the aristocratic elite was no longer required. Commentators on the dacha phenomenon happily abandoned all restraint. Like later historians of the Western European bourgeoisie, they spoke of inexorable expansion fueled largely by recruitment from lower social classes. One apparently overworked architect reflected in 1894:
Who isn’t looking to go to the dacha these days? From the petty shopkeeper, salesman, and member of a work cooperative right up to the rich banker, office director, and man of leisure inclusive—all of them, as soon as the first days of spring are upon them, dream of nothing but how to spend the summer outside the “dusty” city, at the dacha, in the “fresh air.”1
So deserted were the central areas of St. Petersburg after the annual mass departure
for the dacha that the police had to take special measures in the early 1880s to safeguard
the property of absent residents. Local superintendents were required to compile a
list of all the apartments where property had been left under the supervision of servants
or caretakers (
The dacha boom of the last third of the nineteenth century was linked to several economic and demographic factors, not least the further development of the railways. The travel season reached its peak with the heavy dacha traffic in June and July, and the late nineteenth century saw a significant rise in the proportion of short trips (in 1894, 58 percent of passenger trips in the Russian Empire were of less than fifty versts).4 Steam trains were supplemented by other forms of transport: Russia’s first horse-drawn railway (in St. Petersburg) started operations in 1863, and its network was steadily extended during the 1860s and 1870s. The first experiments in using steam-driven trams took place in 1880, and in 1886 routes for regular traffic were opened.5
