Summerfolk полностью

There were, of course, ways of avoiding the charge of banality. As we have already seen from the example of Chekhov, dacha folk from the cultural elite were able to construct their own model of cultured exurban existence, drawing where necessary on the traditions of the usad’ba. Some of the most creative efforts in this vein came from the merchantry, a section of society that had always struggled to find an authoritative public voice but now was growing in cultural activity and assertiveness. This occupational group was large and heterogeneous, like any of imperial Russia’s social “estates” (sosloviia). Membership in a guild had been the main route of social advancement for generations of peasants; most of them remained modest tradespeople rather than prosperous entrepreneurs. As time wore on and their socioeconomic position stabilized, many ordinary merchant families were abandoning their former cultural isolationism, becoming assimilated to urban civilization, and taking up the dacha habit that had emerged as an essential part of this civilization. The journalist N.A. Leikin, a self-made authority on Russia’s Grub Street, was in no doubt of the softening of merchant ways that took place on acquisition of a dacha by the Karpovka: tattered shoes were exchanged for elegant pumps, a printed cotton smock gave way to a linen shirt, and the newly exurban tradesman even stopped eating Lenten dishes on Wednesdays and Fridays.14

The top end of the merchantry made an even more striking contribution to dacha culture. A small number of wealthy entrepreneurial families had intermarried with the nobility and the intelligentsia, and came to play a prominent part in the cultural life of the fin de siècle. For these select clans, the dacha was not an entrée into urban “respectable” society but rather a social center in its own right, a minor country estate connected not so much to the local community as to independent, often literary and artistic social networks. For this reason, they looked farther afield for their summer residences than Pavlovsk, Peterhof, or the Karpovka. A. A. Bakhrushin, head of a family that had made its money in the leather trade and founder of the Theater Museum in Moscow, first rented a dacha when he already had a family, in the late 1890s. After a first summer in Izmailovo, he took a house on the estate of Gireevo for the next few years. His son recalled that these were “not even dachas, but little wooden houses built on someone’s whim and subsequently abandoned.” The dwellings were widely spaced out on the estate lands; a couple were occupied by the owners, the Terletskii family. The oldest Terletskii, who owed his fortune to the vodka trade, was a man of an “antediluvian” stamp. His son, however, by now over fifty, although he had the main estate residence at his disposal, preferred to build himself an “anglified little dacha” with all conceivable comforts (full plumbing, electricity, even a phonograph). The main house was used only for lavish entertaining on the younger master’s name day.15

If the Terletskiis combined the country estate traditions of generous hospitality with a more up-to-date commitment to home comforts, the Bakhrushins valued Gireevo for the opportunity it gave them to rest from the rigors of city and commercial life. A.A. Bakhrushin enjoyed fishing and reading in the open air, while his wife took a more practical interest in planting flowers and tending the garden. Very unusually for people of their social position, in the early 1900s they departed for Gireevo as early as mid-March and returned to Moscow only in mid-September. By 1907, however, they were driven to look for another vacation spot, as the Terletskiis had begun to develop the estate for construction of smaller dachas and the place was quickly losing its secluded and unspoiled feel. They soon accepted an offer from the writer N. D. Teleshov of a spacious dacha on the Malakhovka estate with ten desiatinas of bordered land. This move marked a distinct shift toward a landowner way of life.16