The social breadth of Pargolovo and its adjoining settlements became a stereotype
of the time. It is stressed in D.N. Mamin-Sibiriak’s Features from the Life of Pepko, a novel recounting the adventures of two students (the narrator, Popov, and his
friend Pepko) who are trying to make careers as writers in the early 1870s. Popov
has been confined to St. Petersburg for the last two summers, and this year he still
does not have the money to go home and visit his family. But, inspired by Pepko’s
can-do attitude, he joins his friend in taking a suburban train out north to Pargolovo
III, the remotest and cheapest of the three Pargolovo settlements. Their means are
so limited as to make them extremely implausible dachniki: their Petersburg landlady
bursts into convulsive laughter when she is told their plans for the summer. On the
way to Pargolovo they pass through a number of unglamorous dacha settlements (among
them Udel’naia), but Popov finds even these uplifting: “So here were the first dachas with their run-down quaintness, their puny little gardens,
and their modest desire to create the appearance of an untroubled refuge for simple
dacha happiness. But I like these dachas that are cobbled together out of barge timber
and remind you of birdhouses.”39 Arriving at Pargolovo III, the two friends discover that it is much more a village
than a dacha settlement (by 1894, the time the novel was completed, it had been much
more intensively developed as a summer destination). Popov and Pepko rent a no-frills
izba for the fantastically low price of 10 rubles for the season. Their experiences
tally with the (admittedly far from neutral) journalistic accounts of the time, which
described Pargolovo as a dreary backwater whose few attractions—horseback riding,
rowing, country walks, fresh milk—were quickly exhausted.40
Privately owned estate lands were not, however, the only source of dacha plots. From
the middle of the nineteenth century land owned by the state and directly by the imperial
family (the latter known as udel’nye zemli, or appanage lands) were increasingly made available for such purposes. A law of
1850 specified the procedures whereby state land could be transferred into individual
ownership; that is, by a kind of hereditary lease called chinsh.41 Ten years later the availability of chinsh land was extended to the Moscow dacha areas of Sokol’niki (twenty-seven plots) and
Shiriaevo Pole (seventeen). Regulations were fairly strict: residents were not allowed
to engage in commercial activities and were forbidden to build high fences around
their houses, which, it was emphasized, should have a “decent appearance.” But they
were also given twenty years’ exemption from property taxes and from responsibility
for upkeep of the road, and the right to roam freely on the surrounding lands as long
as they caused no damage.42
