90. Peterburgskie dachi i dachniki (St. Petersburg, 1867). On the rise of anti-German stereotypes in the first half
of the nineteenth century, see A.V. Zhukovskaia, N.N. Mazur, and A.M. Peskov, “Nemetskie
tipazhi russkoi belletristiki (konets 1820-kh-nachalo 1840-kh gg.),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 34 (1998): 37–54.
91. P. K. Mart’ianov, “Nasha dachnaia idilliia,” in Lopari i samoedy stolichnykh nashikh tundr (St. Petersburg, 1891), 249.
92. Leikin, Neunyvaiushchie Rossiiane, 240.
93. Peterburgskie dachnye mestnosti v otnoshenii ikh zdorovosti (St. Petersburg, 1881), 3.
94. Putevoditel’ po S.-Peterburgu, okrestnostiam i dachnym mestnostiam s planom stolitsy,
imperatorskikh teatrov i tsira (St. Petersburg, 1895), 135.
95. Fedotov, Putevoditel’, 7.
96. “Gorodskaia khronika,” Razvlechenie, no. 23 (1860), 288.
97. See S. Cherikover, Peterburg (Moscow, 1909), 203–4.
98. N. Skavronskii, “Nashi dachi,” Razvlechenie, no. 25 (1866), 395–97
99. V. O. Mikhnevich, Peterburgskoe leto (St. Petersburg, 1887), 33–51.
100. PL, 9 and 23 July 1880.
101. PL, 3 July 1880, 2.
102. See, e.g., PL, 21 July 1871, which marks out Pargolovo peasants for their drunkenness, mendicity,
and neglect of the land. The same year’s issues contain numerous reports of assaults
perpetrated by and on peasants in Pargolovo and other dacha locations. For a later,
equally discouraging account of Pargolovo, see Dachnik, 10 May 1909, 2.
103. “Iz dachnykh mest,” PL, 7 May 1880, 3.
104. Dachnik, 10 May 1909, 2.
105. “Na skol’ko my nravstvenny?” PLL, 25 July 1882, 3.
106. See A. Donskov, The Changing Image of the Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russian Drama (Helsinki, 1972), and D. Fanger, “The Peasant in Literature,” in The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. W. Vucinich (Stanford, 1968).
107. G. I. Uspenskii, Beglye nabroski, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (Moscow, 1940–54), 7:243.
108. Leikin, “Pered dachei,” in his Na dachnom proziabanii, 6. The idea that servants, as a “relic of serfdom,” had become less deferential
and less diligent gained such wide public currency in late imperial Russia that extensive
debates took place on the extent and the nature of the police controls to which they
should be subjected. The image of the deracinated peasant servant taken over by urban
and materialistic values also found its way into the fiction of the time. See A. Rustemeyer,
Dienstboten in Petersburg und Moskau, 1861–1917: Hintergrund, Alltag, Soziale Rolle (Stuttgart, 1996), 179–83, 216–19.
109. Chekhov, “Novaia dacha,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:116.
110. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:16.
111. Here I paraphrase Vladislav Khodasevich’s fine poem on the subject, “Bel’skoe ust’e”
(1921), in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1989), 142.
112. Editorial, Stolitsa i Usad’ba, no. 1 (1914), 4.
5
The Making of the Soviet Dacha, 1917–1941
It is a startling fact that dachas, which had enjoyed such a high profile before the
Revolution, had by the 1930s gained a secure niche in a new order that existed under
very different social and economic conditions and espoused an ideology radically hostile
to cultural remnants of the old regime. But is this continuity real or illusory? Can
one really see any meaningful connection between the dachas depicted in Chekhov’s
stories and those of the Soviet elite in the 1930s? Are not these two sets of phenomena
separated by a violent rupture that makes continuity hard to conceptualize in any
satisfactory way?
