Many of them, it might well have been thought, were drunk, though some of them were
wearing smart and elegant clothes; but among them were also men who looked very peculiar,
in peculiar clothes and with peculiarly flushed faces; some of them were army officers
and some were far from young; there were also among them men who were comfortably
dressed in wide and well-cut suits, wearing diamond rings and cufflinks, and magnificent
pitch-black wigs and side whiskers, with an imposing though somewhat fastidious expression
on their faces, who in society are, as a rule, avoided like the plague. In our holiday
resorts [
Dostoevsky was not the only observer to notice a distinct change in the composition of concert audiences at Pavlovsk. Newspapers of the 1870s readily passed comment on the “mixed public,” which included “workmen with unpleasant faces,” “salesmen and minor civil servants and their families”; Pavlovsk, it was alleged, had become “the haunt of all ranks and all social estates.”70 In 1891 a feuilletonist commented that the moneyed bourgeoisie had largely elbowed aside the titled aristocracy; even worse, “physiognomies of the Jewish type” and “ladies of’that’ kind” had made their appearance. All in all, a public holiday in Pavlovsk had become indistinguishable from those in open spaces in the center of the city.71 Rents were considered to have been kept too high in view of competition from places such as Shuvalovo and Ozerki.72 By the early twentieth century, Pavlovsk was even starting to look neglected.73
The report on vacation places with built-in social commentary became an established minor genre of journalistic prose in the second half of the nineteenth century. Take the following description, contemporaneous with Myshkin’s Pavlovsk misadventures, of a public holiday in the sleepy spa town of Lipetsk:
The public walk around the paths in twos and threes, with dignity, maintaining a deep silence, with long faces and placid expressions, as if forming some kind of procession. . . . There’s no liveliness or gaiety, no originality in dress, no variety in peoples behavior; everyone looks at everyone else, worried that they might stand out from the others in some way. This is obviously a provincial public who expend all their energy on not compromising themselves in the eyes of visitors from the capital by undue familiarity or anything unusual.74
Here the emphasis was on provincial backwardness, but reports on dacha places near the two major cities were most often presented specifically as evidence of the nobility’s weakening social position, which might be construed as social degeneration or as a more healthy social development, according to the author’s preference. The latter view was taken by one Moscow journalist in 1860:
These days Sokol’niki is more the home of merchants, foreign traders, in fact all foreigners, who spend more on their lifestyle and are more expert in doing so than the enlightened Russian nobility. But whining patricians to this day don’t like rubbing shoulders with the middle estate, they don’t even like observing them at close quarters. I don’t know what has caused this: whether it’s simply an inherited Asiatic caste prejudice or vanity gnawing away inside or, finally, an unexpressed awareness that real advantages these days do not at all correspond to estate privileges.75
