In Gleb Uspenskii’s
“Excuse my asking, but what kind of title might you have?”
“Why do you need to know that?”
“Just so’s I know, sir. You know, where are you from, how did you get here? These days, as you know yourself, you get all sorts of charlatans turning up.”
“I’ve come to spend the summer at the dacha,” I replied categorically. “I need to spend time in the country for my health.”
“So that’s what it is. You mean, you’ve come to us from Petersburg for your health in actual fact?”
“In actual fact for my health. Don’t you feel what the air is like here! Well, I want to fill my lungs with it.”
“With the air, sir?”
“Yes, with the air.”
“But isn’t there any air in Petersburg?”
“There is, but it’s awful.”
“Well, I never! So you mean it’s just for the air?”
“Yes!”
“Aha. You came here by machine [i.e., by train] actually because of the air?”
Silence.
“Nice to have you here.”
He fell silent and looked at me goggle-eyed, as they say.107
Peasants’ unreceptive attitude toward the dacha impulse is the subject, albeit from a different perspective, of a sketch by N. A. Leikin: a servant of peasant origin leaves her masters’ employment when she discovers they have rented a dacha near Oranienbaum, which she considers a “backwater”: “We purposely left the village to come to Piter [Petersburg] , and here you are dragging us back to the village. What kind of dacha is that—in a village!”108
Perhaps the most famous account of failed communication between dachnik and peasant is Chekhovs “New Dacha” (1898). In this story an engineer and his family take up residence in a dacha and make every effort to build bridges with the peasants of the neighboring village. (In fact, the engineer has quite literally built a bridge in their village.) But here again the peasants have difficulty understanding the dacha concept as it is explained to them: “In the new estate . . . they won’t be sloughing or sowing, they’ll just be living for their own pleasure, just so as to breathe the fresh air.”109 The peasants soon reach the conclusion that these dachniki are no more than landowners in disguise (“They’re landowners just the same”) and treat them accordingly: they shamelessly steal from them and encroach on their property, and at the same time expect their appointed feudal lord to keep an eye on them and resolve their problems.
THE PEASANTS in the stories by Uspenskii and Chekhov are bewildered by the designation “dachnik” until they impose their own very partial interpretation of it. Yet for all their ignorance, they were not so very unusual for their time in finding difficulties in understanding and using the language of social description. Discussion of imperial Russian society was based largely on the ostensibly fixed categories of “estates,” which, especially by the 1890s and 1900s, concealed a huge amount of social fluidity. The word “peasant,” for example, covered a multitude of occupations and social identities, many of them—especially in the Moscow and St. Petersburg areas—distinctly and increasingly urban in orientation.
