the early nineteenth century the dacha fashion spread to the minor gentry, who built more modest houses in the countryside.
In contrast to the formal classicism of the urban palace, the dacha was constructed in a simple Russian style. It was usually a double-storeyed wooden building with a mezzanine verandah that ran all round the house with ornate window and door-frame carvings seen more commonly on peasant huts, although some of the grander dachas might incongruously add a Roman arch and columns to the front. The dacha was a place for Russian relaxations and pursuits: picking mushrooms in the woods, making jams, drinking tea from the samovar, fishing, hunting, visiting the bath house, or spending the whole day, like Goncharov’s Oblomov, in an oriental khalat. A month in the country allowed the nobleman to throw off the pressures of the court and official life, to become more himself in a Russian milieu. It was common to dispense with formal uniforms and to dress in casual Russian clothes. Simple Russian food took the place of haute cuisine, and some dishes, such as summer soup with kvas (okroshka), fish in aspic and pickled mushrooms, tea with jam, or cherry brandy, became practically synonymous with the dacha way of life.104
Of all the countryside pursuits, hunting was the one that came the closest to a national institution, in the sense that it united nobleman and serf as fellow sportsmen and fellow countrymen. The early nineteenth century was the heyday of the hunt - a fact that was connected to the gentry’s rediscovery of ‘the good life on the estate’ after 1812. There were noblemen who gave up their careers in the civil service and retired to the country for a life of sport. The Rostovs’ ‘Uncle’ in War and Peace was typical:
’Why don’t you enter the service, Uncle?’
’I did once, but gave it up. I am not fit for it…I can’t make head or tail of it. That’s for you- I haven’t brains enough. Now hunting is another matter…
There were two kinds of hunting in Russia - the formal chase with hounds, which was very grand, and the simple type of hunting by a man on foot with a solitary hound and a serf companion, as immortalized in Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1852). The formal chase was conducted in the manner of a military campaign, sometimes lasting several weeks, with hundreds of riders, huge packs of dogs and a vast retinue of hunting serfs camping out on the estates of the nobility. Lev Izmailov, Marshal of the Riazan Nobility, took 3,000 hunters and 2,000 hounds on his ‘campaigns’.106 Baron Mengden kept an elite caste of hunting serfs with their own scarlet livery and special Arab horses for the hunt. When they left, with the baron at their head, they took several hundred carts with hay and oats, a hospital on wheels for wounded dogs, a mobile kitchen and so many servants that the baron’s house was emptied, leaving his wife and daughters with only a bartender and a boy.107 This type of hunting was dependent on the gentry’s ownership of vast serf armies and virtually all the land - conditions which persisted until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Like the English hunt, it was serious and stuffy, rigidly observing the social hierarchy, with the hunting serfs, if not running with the hounds, then clearly in a subservient role.
By contrast, Turgenev’s type of hunting was relatively egalitarian -and it was so in a distinctly Russian way. When the nobleman went hunting with his serf companion he left behind the civilization of his palace and entered the world of the peasantry. Squire and serf were brought together by this type of sport. They dressed much the same; they shared their food and drink when they stopped along the way; they slept side by side in peasant huts and barns; and, as described in Turgenev’s Sketches, they talked about their lives in a spirit of companionship that often made them close and lasting friends.108 There was much more to this than the usual ‘male bonding’ around sport. As far as the squire was concerned, the hunt on foot was a rural odyssey, an encounter with an undiscovered peasant land; it was almost incidental how many birds or beasts were shot. In the final lyrical episode of the Sketches, where the narrator sums up all the joys of hunting, there is barely mention of the sport itself. What emerges from this perfect piece of writing is the hunter’s intense love of the Russian countryside and its changing beauty through the different seasons of the year:
And a summer morning in July! Has anyone save a hunter ever experienced the delight of wandering through bushes at dawn? Your feet leave green imprints in grass that is heavy and white with dew. You push aside wet bushes - the warm scent accumulated in the night almost smothers you; the air is impregnated with the fresh bitter-sweet fragrance of wormwood, the honeyed scent of buckwheat and clover; far off an oak forest rises like a wall, shining purple in the sunshine; the air is still fresh, but the coming heat can already be felt. Your head becomes slightly dizzy from such an excess of sweet scents. And there’s no end to the bushes. Away in the distance ripening rye glows yellow and there are narrow strips of rust-red buckwheat. Then there’s the sound of a cart; a peasant drives by at walking pace, leaving his horse in the shade before the sun gets hot. You greet him, pass on, and after a while the metallic rasping of a scythe can be heard behind you. The sun is rising higher and higher, and the grass quickly dries out. It’s already hot. First one hour, then another passes. The sky darkens at the edges and the motionless air is aflame with the prickly heat.109
Russian forms of dress became the height of fashion after 1812. At balls and receptions in St Petersburg, and from the 1830s at the court as well, society ladies began to appear in national costume, complete with the sarafan tunic and kokoshnik head-dress of old Muscovy. The Russian peasant shawl was hugely popular with noblewomen in the 1810s. There had been a fashion for oriental shawls in Europe during the last decades of the eighteenth century which the Russians had copied by importing their own shawls from India. But after 1812 it was Russian peasant shawls that became the rage, and serf workshops emerged as major centres of the fashion industry.110 The Russian gown (kapot), traditionally worn by peasant and provincial merchant wives, entered haute couture slightly earlier, in the 1780s, when Catherine the Great took to wearing one, but it too was widely worn from about 1812. The kaftan and khalat (a splendid sort of housecoat or dressing gown in which one could lounge about at home and receive guests) came back into fashion among noblemen. The podyovka, a short kaftan traditionally worn by the peasantry, was added to the wardrobe of the nobleman as well. To wear such clothes was not just to relax and be oneself at home; it was, in the words of one memoirist, ‘to make a conscious statement of one’s Russianness’.111 When, in 1827,
Tropinin painted Pushkin wearing a khalat (plate 22), he was portraying him as a gentleman who was perfectly at ease with the customs of his land.
A fashion for the ‘natural’ look took hold of noblewomen in the 1820s. The new ideal of beauty focused on a vision of the purity of the female figures of antiquity and the Russian peasantry. Fidel Bruni’s portrait of Zinaida Volkonsky (1810) illustrates this style. Indeed, according to society rumour, it was precisely her simplicity of dress that had attracted the amorous attentions of the Emperor,112 who was himself susceptible to all of Nature’s charms. * Women took to wearing cotton clothes. They dressed their hair in a simple style and rejected heavy make-up for the pale complexion favoured by this cult of unadorned Nature.113 The turn toward Nature and simplicity was widespread throughout Europe from the final decades of the eighteenth century. Women had been throwing out their powdered wigs and renouncing heavy scents like musk for light rose waters that allowed the natural fragrance of clean flesh to filter through. There it had developed under the influence of Rousseau and Romantic ideas about the virtues of Nature. But in Russia the fashion for the natural had an extra, national dimension. It was linked to the idea that one had to strip away the external layers of cultural convention to reveal the Russian personality. Pushkin’s Tatiana in Eugene Onegin was the literary incarnation of this natural Russianness - so much so that the simple style of dress worn by noblewomen became known as the ‘Onegin’.114 Readers saw Tatiana as a ‘Russian heroine’ whose true self was revealed in the memories of her simple childhood in the countryside:
’To me, Onegin, all these splendours, This weary tinselled life of mine,
* The Emperor Alexander began taking a daily promenade along the Palace Embankment and the Nevsky Prospekt as far as the Anichkov bridge. It was, in the words of the memoirist Vigel, a ‘conscious striving by the Tsar for simplicity in daily life’ (F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski, chast’ 2 (Moscow, 1892.), p. 32.). Before 1800, no self-respecting nobleman would go anywhere in Petersburg except by carriage, and (as Kniazhnin’s comic opera testified) vast personal fortunes would be spent on the largest carriages imported from Europe. But, under Alexander’s influence, it became the fashion in St Petersburg to ‘faire le tour imperial‘.
This homage that the great world
