«Proščanie s letom»: sovetskie marginalii k dačnomu toposu

The current article continues the author’s research carried out in the articles “At the Origins of ‘Dacha Topos’” (“Russian Estate in a Global Context”, issue 2) and “On the Concept of Petersburg ‘Dacha Folklore’” (“Russian Estate in a Global Context”, issue 6). This article examines the fate of Russian “dacha culture” in the 1920s, following the revolutionary break of 1917. Such seemingly opposite concepts as “amateurism” (a fundamental element of Russian Silver Age summer dacha life and all its daily rituals) and “self-activity” (the complex creative initiative of the “grassroots”, an important element in the political discourse of the Soviet government in the 1920s) are brought into focus. Relying on sources of various kinds (journalistic, theatrical, literary, folklore, and everyday life), the author aims to revise the dialectical relationship between “loss” and “gain” as applied to the dacha summer leisure of the democratic strata of the Russian-Soviet population before and after the revolutionary shift, as well as to the places where it took place.