Although the Russian intelligentsia’s much-fabled oppositional unity was coming under
severe strain as early as the 1880s, some of their cultural hierarchies have remained
intact to the present day. And the dachnik has often been located near the bottom
of such hierarchies, on a par with the meshchanin. It is worth pondering why. The reason appears to be that, in the eyes of the opinion-forming
intelligentsia, dachniki, unlike meshchane, ought to know better. They have education and—by definition—leisure, and have an
obligation to do more with these advantages. Take the following soapbox pronouncement
made by a character in Gorky’s sub-Chekhovian Dachniki (part of a trilogy of plays that Gorky, with his customary light touch, envisaged
as a critique of the “bourgeois-materialistic intelligentsia”): “The intelligentsia—that’s
not us! We’re something else . . . we are dachniki in our own country . . . some kind
of foreign visitors. We rush about, try to find ourselves comfortable niches in life
. . . we do nothing and talk a disgusting amount.”59The opposition between talking and doing is a standard contribution to a cultural
tradition: several generations of literary heroes (Chatskii, Onegin, Rudin) had shown
talk to be cheap and ineffectual. But dacha folk were doubly vulnerable to criticism
because they both liked talking and—unlike Rudin and Gorky’s character—were unconcerned
by their failure to “do” things. Dachniki were strangers in their own land: not tortured
“superfluous” people but something akin to the self-satisfied German tourist, the
butt of much unkind comment in our own time. This notion is picked up in a sketch
by Nadezhda Teffi, one of the leading contributors to the humor magazine Satirikon: “The first dachnik arrived from the West. He stopped near the village of Ukko-Kukka,
had a look around, uttered the words ‘Bier trinken,’ and sat down. And around him
a croquet lawn, a card table, and a red-hemmed canvas parasol instantly materialized.”60
The quotations from Teffi and Gorky also convey the shameless self-interest assumed
to be characteristic of dacha folk. In typical accounts, dachniki are neglectful of
other people’s property and of the environment; they are, moreover, unreceptive to
anything that does not contribute to their material gain or short-term amusement.
Thus in Ivan Bunin’s “Na dache” (1895) an architect’s son is sent for carpentry lessons
to a Tolstoyan, Kamenskii, who lives at a nearby mill. In due course Kamenskii is
invited to dinner by the dachniki, who want only the opportunity to poke idle fun
at him.61 The dacha was commonly associated with a suspect detachment from the burning social
and political issues of the day. In A. I. Gomolitskii’s “Na dache” (1911), descriptions
of the view out of a dacha window are humorously and incongruously interposed with
reflections on contemporary politics.62 The fourth of Sasha Chernyi’s “epistles” from a Baltic resort in 1908 observes the
peaceful and harmless pursuits of other dachniki who in their working lives—as admiral,
chief of police, teacher, and bureaucrat—are rather less inoffensive.63
Despite the prevalence of these unsympathetic portraits, however, it would be a serious
oversimplification to divide dacha commentators into two opposing camps: a killjoy
intelligentsia and a fun-loving proto-bourgeoisie. For one thing, representatives
of the self-appointed cultural elite could not stand apart from the dacha phenomenon
in the same neat way they could distance themselves from many manifestations of urban
entertainment culture (taverns, cafés chantants, dance halls, and so on). Quite simply, they needed the dacha for their own purposes,
a fact that was never wholly obscured by their attempts to draw a distinction between
authentic and inauthentic models of exurban life. The same Gorky who railed against
the dachniki in his play of the same name was a regular summer vacationer; he was
even observed to shed tears at a melodrama playing at the local cinema in Kuokkala.64
