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 Main | Archive | Issue 4/2008 |
The Russia of Dachas
Column: Things Russian
In Gorbachev's times, Western correspondents and press services racked their brains over the untranslatable political Russicisms perestroika, uskoreniye, and glasnost. These arc not the only linguistic problems facing foreigners in Russia, however. The most insoluble of them was: What is a dacha? To those, who will manage to translate this word into their native tongue the present author is ready to take his hat off and present them with a prize cigar. I'm sure, though, that my smoking tobacco will remain untouched: none other than Hedrick Smith himself, who is the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the bestseller The Russians (1976), admitted his inability to cope with this linguistic phenomenon. Heaven save you from translating dacha as "country house": the bulk of my countrymen are not provided with similar urbanist excesses. If you can describe English civilization as one of stone, Chinese civilization as one of clay, then Russian civilization... let's better not define it more precisely. "That which is healthy for a Russian, is deadly for a German,” reads the maxim coined by a certain Slavophile that became proverbial. The Westerner relaxes in order to work, whereas the Russian works in order to relax. He prefers a poetic contemplation of life to life-long business drudgery. The dacha is perhaps one of the symbols of his national mentality. Maksim Gorky's famous play is called exactly so: Dachniki ("Summer Folk"). And where is laid the scene in half of Chekhov's works? Yes, exactly, in dachas. It's for the dacha that the characters of Dostoyevsky's novel Idiot are heading to settle their final accounts. And it's there, on these poetic verandahs that Russian 19th-century beauties sat for their portraits.
The Bolsheviks were just on the point of breaking their compatriots of their habit to live in their beloved dachas. They drove them together in labor files and forced them to construct industrial monsters.
The people were crying out and constructing, constructing and crying out. The national substance was subjected to unheard-of overstrains. A powerful industrial Rome was emerging before the very eyes of the amazed West. But, once the brutal Stalin superintendents have relinquished their leading positions, urban Russia rushed again for their dacha grounds while shaking off en route the civilization imposed on it by iron Moloch. Incidentally, one never knows, who will prove more pleasing to God when the trumpets of the Last Judgment will resound and the trembling tribes and peoples will appear before Peter's gates: Slav dreamers with their bottomless blue eyes or Western workaholics, who are born to work from dawn to dusk--to work, work, and work so as to eventually die, much to their surprise. But let's return to the Russian dacha.
Not always breathed it tranquility and placidity, though. In the 1930s, Stalin turned dachas into an obligatory type of rest for the Soviet elite. Those country cottages that were confiscated from their former owners were renovated, put in order, fenced in-and lime alleys, as they were described by Ivan Turgenev, filled with men wearing squeaky shoulder-belts and accompanied by girlfriends with Comintern badges on their severe bosoms. Some time on, this recreational innovation became a regular feature: every district, province party committee, every republic's central committee, ministry, and department were obliged to have dachas of their own. Thus, round-the-clock control over the ruling caste was introduced. Stalin was not content with overseeing it during the working day. The dachas became an extension of the offices. Pieces of furniture, kitchen utensils and tableware-all this had registration numbers and was supplied against receipt. Comfort and control-such was the lifestyle of the Soviet dachas at that time.
Stalin himself adhered to this style. His "near" and "remote" dachas became part and parcel of the Soviet Union's political folklore. In the last years of his life, he practically never left them. It was there that the country's leaders gathered for their protracted night-long meetings-feasts. It was there that decisions were taken that caused a splitting headache of half the world the day after.
The high-ranking dacha residents themselves had a splitting headache now and then; occasionally, their heads even flew off. Most often, arrests were made on dachas, far away from office residences. Nikita Mikhalkov's film Burnt by the Sun splendidly captures this somber, gothic esthetics of top-ranking Soviet Herculaneum. In this film the scene-from the first to the last sequence-is laid in a dacha. Look for this picture in your home video archive and decide for yourself whether or not you would be ready to live and relax under such conditions.
Nowadays, the Russian dacha environment again replicates the epoch style. It is split into mutually hostile camps. The Diplomat reader, who leaves Moscow in any direction, can see dozens of luxurious villas made of expensive composite bricks. Against the backdrop of one-storied wooden houses in the vicinity of Moscow they look like Martial palaces. By the way, half of them are unfinished, their cast-iron fences are leaning over, and the windowpanes in many of them are broken out. These are mansions owned by post-Soviet Nouveaux Riches, who were trying to outdo the Western living standards. Their motto reads "Live in Russia but with English comfort." Oh, how naive they are! Sergey Yakovlev in his novel, A Letter from Soligalich to Oxford, speaking in the name of the protagonist, an English lady, argues about the above-mentioned attempts to fence oneself off from the Soligalich countrymen with Oxford-style country houses and arrives at these gloomy conclusions.
In the final analysis, these parvenus will have to breathe in the same smog, ride along the same bumpy roads and use the same ruined utilities, remain with outed gas, electricity, and water, be subjected to the State's wild arbitrary rule, get into the same accidents and catastrophes and-on top of it-sense the glowing hatred-filled looks of the destitute mob and fear for their own life and that of their near and dear ones. They are mistaken if they expect to save their life behind the thick brick walls and cast-iron railings. There will be no escape for anyone. (Novy Mir, No. 5, 1995)
Let's leave this apocalyptic forecast to the author's conscience. And yet, the truth is that people respect the rich in the West and hate them in Russia.
That portion of our countrymen, who started digging, puddling, planning, sowing, building, manuring, growing, and winning the physical niche of life from post-perestroika chaos deserve a deep respect because they are real "New Russians," who defend their human dignity not at rallies or in shops or haunts run by criminals. They used to be engineers, researchers, employees, party officials, and writers. But when the next team of political scoundrels began cracking down at the next period of our own history, they refused to get involved in that barbarous undertaking and formed an individual, labor opposition, so to speak. This massive Robinsoniad, the exodus of millions of people from the eternally drunken ship of Russian statehood constitute-we are deeply convinced of it-the main event of our recent domestic history. It is, of course, very sad to find ourselves-on the threshold of the third millennium-in the position of Abraham's sons and his herds, but, on the other hand, we perceive some sort of pedagogical usefulness in this voluntary-forced return from zoon politicon to zoon naturae. Sometimes, there's no harm in hitting the beloved countryman's head against soil so that the whole of his living substance be shocked and get back to normal. Who did say that the man was born for happiness and the bird for the flight? Nobody promised the man anything like that. Something quite different was said instead, namely, "Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow until thou shalt return to the earth from where thou wast taken." This phrase is designed exactly for those, who still yesterday were sated, drunk and took Aeroflot flights to any destination. To put it plainly, one's own natural economy and hard physical work are becoming a source of subsistence for millions. Nowadays, everybody is heading for his fields, woods, and vegetable gardens thus mastering the science of great simplification professed by Leo Tolstoy. This pantheisation of a whole generation, its familiarization with primary, Hellenic elements of life represent the supreme, almost ontological achievement of the new authorities, of which they are most probably even unaware. Just talk to one of this host of new agrarians about a current literary-political subject, and, after the second phrase, he will pass over to his predictions about the harvest in the fall, forecasts of a bad or fair weather; he will also amaze you by his knowledge of tomato seedling secrets and cabbage bed philosophy. After which he will cry out, "I've missed my evening watering!" and rush away to catch the still running commuter train while pressing another beloved seedling to his heart. In other words, instead of a degraded person, you will discover a purposeful transformer, philosopher, and even a poet.
What a happiness it is to toil for yourself and your family from dawn to dusk making a roof, tilling soil mindful of your food, creating a world of your own, imitating the Lord in his creation of the universe. A lot of new ideas strike your head while your hands are busy with muscular, physical or carpenter's work, while you are setting yourself reasonable, physically performable tasks that reward you with joy and success; while you are cutting something with your axe for six hours in succession or digging soil in the open air.
These are not our words. The cited lines were written by Boris Pasternak, a refined, thin-fingered esthete. And yet every provincial reader would put his name to them.
Valery Serdyuchenko,
Doctor of Philology.
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