By the 1870s and 1880s, the Petersburg and Moscow sensationalist press, while it had no particular love for “whining patricians,” tended to view overcrowded and heterogeneous dacha settlements as following a trajectory of inexorable social decline.76 Commentators noted a decline in linguistic propriety: “Instead of the tender murmurs and warblings of young resonant voices you hear flat, cynical quips, coarse jokes, and obscene conversations,” noted one Petersburg journalist of Novaia Derevnia.77 Leonid Andreev wrote that the population of Moscow’s night shelters each summer relocated to dacha settlements, where they slept outdoors and engaged in petty thievery.78 Andreev’s piece, alarmist though it is, does demonstrate that dacha settlements were particularly vulnerable to perceptions of social malaise, because they were filled with people of no instantly definable occupation; scroungers and spongers became stock dacha characters in the feuilletons of the time.79
Newspapers reported with particular relish violent and otherwise socially disruptive
incidents in formerly prestigious settlements such as the Peterhof Road, Tsarskoe
Selo, Krasnoe Selo, Peterhof, and Lesnoi Korpus. Thus in the summer of 1880 it came
to public attention that a dacha governess had been trying to seduce a boy in her
charge, that ladies had been harassed on the station platform at Krasnoe Selo, and
that Peterhof had been afflicted by swindlers and falling prices.80 After a watchman told a cab driver in the Pargolovo area to slow down, the passenger
leaped out, shouted insults, and then physically assaulted him.81 Thirty years later, the tenor of newspaper reporting had changed little. In a dacha
settlement outside Warsaw the bloodied body of a “respectably dressed girl” was found
at the edge of a wood. A youth, “an educated man [
“Dacha delights,” a satirist’s view of the strains of dacha life (from
Reports of suicides tied in neatly with the dubious reputation of many dacha settlements, especially those on the way to becoming suburbanized. Modern civilization, with its soulless cult of luxury and of the individual self, was held responsible for the suicide “epidemic,” as was the migration of hundreds of thousands of peasants to the city, which confronted them with moral dangers that they were ill equipped to resist. Almost invariably, the principle that suicide directly reflected social pathology was taken as axiomatic.85 And so reports of suicides in dacha areas, themselves characterized in the journalistic imagination by social and cultural marginality, were doubly resonant. Here journalists had the discursive support of some of Russia’s leading literary lights. Aleksandr Blok’s “Neznakomka,” for example, a genuine sensation on its first appearance in 1906, evoked the suburban seediness of Ozerki as the setting for the “unknown woman” of the title, who is a louche version of the Lady Beautiful so prominent elsewhere in Blok’s poetry.86
