Summerfolk полностью

The greatest source of angst for late imperial dacha commentators, as for educated Russian society in general, was the native Russian peasant. As early as the summer of 1860, a Moscow columnist sent in a report from Kuntsevo, where he was staying at one of the dachas belonging to the Naryshkin family. The journalist assumed the position of one of the Naryshkins’ house guests, admiring the views, the hospitality, and the picturesque local peasants. But the latter refused to keep a respectful distance: “Peasant kids of both sexes run around the gardens trying to get tangled up under your feet and offering you bundles of lilacs or other flowers from the fields or the forest, depending on the season.”96Although this incident presented only a very mild inconvenience and would hardly have registered with journalists two or three decades later, it anticipates yet another argument mobilized in late imperial Russia against the dacha: the summer vacation industry was held responsible for diverting peasants from their fitting agricultural or artisanal occupations. Peasants who had not left to take menial jobs in the city occupied themselves with small-scale kitchen gardening, woodcutting, fishing, and petty trade—all with the dachnik consumer in view.97 Some villages had given up agriculture and handicrafts and moved over entirely to the dacha economy; such cases were inevitably treated with severe disapproval, as they were seen as contributing to the moral erosion of the countryside.98The incursion of a money economy into the villages was supposedly cutting peasants loose from feudalism and pushing them in the direction of an unwholesome modernity.

The prolific feuilletonist V. O. Mikhnevich was reluctant to use the neutral krest’ianin in reference to the dacha peasantry; instead he wrote of “dacha paysans” of “suburban peasants” (prigorodnye muzhichki), or of posadskie (suburban tradespeople), a term that, although archaic by the time he was writing (the 1880s), Mikhnevich felt captured the dislocated status of this group. For evidence to support his disapproving attitude Mikhnevich turned to the population of Pargolovo, a location beloved of journalists ever since the 1840s. Pargolovo peasants, he found, did not share the kindly nature of their patriarchal counterparts. They had ambitions above their station, but refused to work to realize them by honest labor. Instead, they looked to make large profits from supplying the local dacha population with goods and services (laundry, gardening, wood chopping) and to bend their backs as little as possible. Such peasants were commonly described disapprovingly as “prosperous.” It was very hard to define the occupation of these small-time traders; they had certainly lost all interest in working the land. Very often they leased out land for richer folk to build themselves dachas. On paper, these agreements were advantageous to the peasants, often stipulating that when the lease expired, the land with all buildings on it would revert to the original owners. In practice, however, peasants so desperately needed rent payments in ready cash that the leasing agreement continued indefinitely. The money thus obtained (in the region of 50 to 100 rubles per season even for the humblest of izbas) relieved them of the need for the land that traditionally guaranteed their subsistence.99