The Bakhrushins were not alone among major merchant families in moving from a relatively modest rented dacha to something grander. P. M. Tret’iakov and his wife spent their first three summers together in a rented dacha off the Smolensk highway. They then spent ten years in Kuntsevo, about ten versts to the west of Moscow, in a two-story log house rented from the landowner Solodovnikova. The settlement was not wholly secluded, but the total number of dachas was small: eight owned by Solodovnikova, fifteen by the merchant Soldatenkov, and a few by another local landowning family, the Shelaputins. Kuntsevo was effectively an enclave for Moscow’s merchant elite, as is evinced by its rich cultural life and its level of amenities (most families, for example, had their own bathing tents moored to the bank of the Moscow River). The tempo and style of life were modeled more on the country estate than the dacha settlement. In the 1870s, for example, there were no permanent trading points: the baker staggered over regularly from a neighboring village, the butcher and the greengrocer came by cart from Moscow twice a week, and all other foodstuffs were bought from the local peasants. Yet Kuntsevo was close enough to Moscow for a merchant paterfamilias to commute to work daily throughout the summer.17 When the time came for a move, Tret’iakov was extremely resistant to his wife’s idea of buying a property “of the Turgenev type.” In his daughter’s words, he “did not recognize the right to own land of people who did not work the land with their own toil.” The compromise eventually reached was the long-term rental of a middling estate, Kurakino, on the Iaroslavl’ railway line. This move transformed the social life of the Tret’iakov family—not least because it brought them closer to the Mamontov clan, who owned an estate nearby.18
Savva Mamontov’s Abramtsevo is perhaps the most famous case of intervention by new money in the cultural life of late imperial Russia. Mamontov bought the estate from the descendants of I. S. Aksakov in 1870; his subsequent development of the property neatly illustrates the transition from the old world of the country estate to something more culturally dynamic. Mamontov sought to invest the forms and some of the traditions of life on the estate with a radical new content: guests were invited not for their allegiance to a clan but rather for the contribution they could make to the life of the community. Once again, whether we should describe Abramtsevo as a dacha depends on whose perspective we adopt. Mamontov himself, as the owner of the property and manager of its affairs, certainly regarded it as an estate; but his visitors perhaps thought of it more casually as a dacha, where they had no household responsibilities and were in residence only temporarily. In the opinion of Il’ia Repin, Abramtsevo was “the best dacha in the world."19
At the dacha, better than anywhere else, we can find evidence of the coming together of merchant bourgeoisie and intelligentsia—of the creation of a cultivated “middle-class” lifestyle. The self-sufficiency and cultural hermeticism of even elite members of the merchant estate around 1840 contrasted strikingly with the Westernized self-confidence of the Tret’iakovs and Bakhrushins in the 1900s. Merchant families of this third generation were able to see themselves as a leisured class and were quite prepared to think of themselves outside their social and occupational contexts.20 An exuberant contribution to this new leisure culture was made by the Alekseev merchant dynasty, one branch of which bought the estate of Liubimovka (at Tarasovka, on the Iaroslavl’ railway line) in 1869: fifty desiatinas remaining from the formerly enormous landholdings of the Trubetskois and Belosel’skiis in this area. Liubimovka soon became the venue for numerous amateur performances, initially in a decrepit outbuilding but then (from 1877) in a purpose-built theater. Among the most enthusiastic participants was the young Konstantin Alekseev (better known by the name he later assumed, Stanislavsky). As a grown man, Stanislavsky, as much as anyone, sought to develop a socially and culturally mature intelligentsia by overcoming the boundaries separating commercial and cultural elites. And in his experience, no setting did more to erode those boundaries than exurbia.21
