House by the road: estate, dacha, railway in historical and literary aspects (19 – early 20 century)

Abstract

The study highlights relationship between changes in material culture (development of railroad network), social infrastructure (spread of dacha villages) and poetics of literary works in Russia of the second half of the 19th – early 20th c., addressing “dacha topos”. The paper draws on the texts, which introduce railroad as a symbol of destruction of traditional values under the pressure of bourgeois “industrialism” and pernicious “infernalityˮ (А. М. Zhemchuzhnikov, F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy, A. S. Serafimovich, А. А. Blok and others). The author shows that dacha, wrought by railroad civilization, is conceptualized as part of packed, petty-bourgeois, low-minded and soulless city as opposed to country estate as a lone “paradise on earth” and hermitage of high culture (А. P. Tchekhov, N. А. Leykin, А. P. Kamensky and others). The paper draws attention to metamorphoses of artistic time in passing from “estate topos” with inherent temporal static and cycliсity to “dacha topos” with precipitous and irreversible unfolding in time. The author concludes that the changes in artistic topics and temporality when addressing successive phenomena of estate and dacha are largely due to such new details of subjective figurativeness as the railroad and its attributes (locomotive, rails, wagons, anonymous passengers, travel speed etc.).