Dachas, of course, did not provide a marker for a distinct social estate, but they became a useful shortcut for identifying people living in the major cities who were not peasants. The dacha came to be seen as one of the defining attributes of a late imperial “middle class.” All urban people, from members of the high political establishment down to shopkeepers, might own or rent a country house for the summer months. For all the changes in the dacha and its social constituency in the nineteenth century, one thing remained more or less constant: dachas were almost always used intermittently by people whose main place of work and residence was the city. They were a form of settlement spatially separate from the city but in every other way—socially, culturally, economically—contiguous with it. Summerfolk, unlike the noble families of Russian cultural iconography who repaired to their country estates, did not take up residence out of town so as to relinquish their ties to the urban environment. Take the following rapturous musings by a recent bride strolling up and down a dacha platform with her husband in Chekhov’s “Dachniki” (1885): “How wonderful it is, Sasha, how wonderful!. . . You really might think that all this is a dream. Just see how cozy and affectionate the trees look. How lovely these solid, silent telegraph poles are! They . . . liven up the landscape and tell us that over there, somewhere, there are people and—civilization.”110 The dachnik was by definition a marginal figure in the rural landscape: a heavy-footed intruder breathing tuberculosis and the Neva onto the ruddy-faced village population, an Adam munching his own urban apple in an (admittedly far from paradisiacal) Russian Eden.111
This is not to suggest that the summerfolk were a monolithic bunch. Of course, the dacha differentiated as much as it united. Members of the State Council took their summer vacations in surroundings rather unlike those experienced by a tradesman. Quite apart from such obvious differences in scale and splendor, dacha users varied strikingly in the ways they thought of their summer houses; and such variation was socially and culturally marked. The conflicts and convergences between engagé intelligentsia and commercial elite, between noble and nonnoble, between visual and verbal culture were modeled by attitudes toward the dacha and—especially—the dachnik.
In an account of the dacha it is thus easy to rehearse familiar truths about the failure
of the late imperial middle to cohere into a self-conscious, civically active bourgeoisie.
What seems more noteworthy, however, is the extent to which the dacha engaged the
attention and the cultural energies of Russian urban society. On a personal level,
most members of this society had a stake in the out-of-town experience. Dachas were
valued subjectively as a relaxing and pleasurable amenity, as a way of testing a lifestyle
prophesy made in the first issue of Russia’s equivalent of
