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Abstract:

Fyodor Dostoevsky turned to the dacha in the 1840s as a health-improving kind of “urban topos”, but in the 1860s he rethought dacha topics in the aspect of public demands of Russia during the era of liberal reforms. A sharp surge of interest in the dacha in the late 1860s, under conditions of estate nobility’s loss of the leading position in Russia, was caused by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s search for a platform for dialogue between the social groups of Russia, within which a common worldview was developed and the new “best people” were identified. However, along with the rejection of the social class hierarchy inherent in dacha, openness and freedom, the writer also noted negative features — human personality sovereignty restriction (dictate of public opinion, inability to hide from prying eyes) and deterioration (gossip, drunkenness, quarrels, vulgar flirting, etc.). In the 1870s, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s interest in dacha as a promising socio-cultural model had been fading, and he would fully share the prevailing attitude towards it as a focus of everyday vulgarity and mediocrity, in the last third of the 19th – the early 20th century, switching to the further development of the “estate topos”. Further, the article traces these antinomies in the image of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s dacha in the literature of the Russian Fin de siècle (Georgy Chulkov), in Soviet (Yury Trifonov) and post-Soviet (Aleksey Varlamov, Yuri Mamleev and Eugene Vodolazkin) prose. The conclusion is made about the viability of the “dacha text” in the Russian literature of the 20th century due to its partial convergence with the inspiring estate topics.