The Soviet Country Cottage, A Photo Book by Fyodor Savintsev
HomeAll Posts...The Soviet Country Cottage, A Photo Book by...
In northern Europe there are varying ideas of what a summer house might be: a place by the water in Scandinavia, a dwelling among vegetables in Germany, or, in the UK, a leaky outdoor room, maybe furnished with a couple of old chairs. In Russia there is the dacha, a more elusive term that is as central to its culture as samovars and vodka. They were bestowed as a favor by a tsar or a Communist official, and at one point, numbered in the millions across Russia, in every shape and size, handed down between generations. Many still remain, but as Fyodor Savintsev’s wonderfully textured photographs in the new book Dacha reveal, they are too often on their last legs.
Accompanied by romantic autochromes dug up by Anna Benn (author of the engaging essay that accompanies Savintsev’s pictures), Dacha: The Soviet Country Cottage is a volume to inspire builders and dreamers. There’s no denying the charm of rushing to one’s dacha every weekend in summer on a crowded, antique train. With its “relaxed sociability” and an incentive to grow things, the concept of a dacha has never been more interesting.
Photography by Fyodor Savintsev, courtesy of Fuel.
Above: Most of the dachas documented in this book are the sort that photographer Savintsev remembers from his childhood summers spent at the dachas of his grandparents and cousins near Moscow. Pre-revolutionary, wooden, with multi-paned windows, they have the romance of a Nordic folk tale.
Above: With parents working during the week in the city, dacha life with the grandparents taught old-fashioned values and rituals such as growing, picking, and preserving.
Above: The Russian writer Alexander Pushkin described the privileged aspects of pre-Revolution dacha living: Easy enough to get to after a night at the theater, they invited subversive behavior “beyond the norms and hierarchies of the city,” says Anna Benn, who reminds us of Pushkin’s influence on the Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina.
Above: At Arkhangelsk, in northern Russia, post-war dachas were small plots of land given out for the purpose of vegetable growing. “Restrictions on the footprint of a building meant that they were often expanded vertically, with overhanging second floors and attics, rather than take up valuable space for attics.” Bourgeois leisure was not the point here.
Above: “The elaborate glazing of many dachas is as much the result of expediency as it is creativity, designed to accommodate small off-cuts of glass, as opposed to large sheets.”
