The image of a dacha in modern Russian cinema and TV series

English dictionaries state that datcha is “a rural house or cottage, which is used in Russia as an additional place of residence or a weekend home.” However, this meager definition of a borrowed word can hardly exhaust the range of feelings and thoughts that arise when our compatriot hears the word “dacha”. Time passes, and this Russian pre-revolutionary, and then purely Soviet – six hundred square meters – phenomenon is acquiring new mythology. It is also reflected in modern Russian cinema.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

The dacha is a place where strange things happen, as in “The Rag Union” by Mikhail Mestetsky. Metaphysical space, where one gets through a forest path from a rural disco, as in “The Mental Wolf” by Valeria Gai Germanika. Where the train inevitably takes you when you want to get away from the hassle of the city or simply have nowhere else to live, as in the recent “1993” by Alexander Veledinsky. A dacha is a place of escape from elders, as in the debut “The Edge of the Broken Moon” by Svetlana Samoshina, where the youngest daughter is evacuated from the hated guardianship and lies of her mother and older sister. Or, conversely, searching for elders. “There are people sitting there who have nowhere else to go,” as the heroes of the long-standing “Tin” by Denis Neimand said, who were looking in the dacha area for an intelligent maniac born of a Soviet childhood, played by Mikhail Efremov. Maniacs love dacha life – dark forests and evenings, when the windows of the verandas glow so welcomingly, and fearlessly cheerful pioneers march to tea and chocolates (as in the recent “Fisher” by Taramaev and Lvova). “The night is dark, the night is hot, but I can’t find any warmth or greetings in it,” “Aquarium” sang about the vague anxiety that settled in the country house of Academician Bashkirtsev, where the connection between generations was interrupted and devils were creeping out of all corners. The USSR has arrived at the final station, passengers are asked to leave the carriages.

The current, generally post-Soviet cinematic image of a dacha, of course, has little to do with Chekhov’s dachas or, say, Mikhalkov’s. It is further and further from the six hundred square meters distributed in the late 1950s (“Moscow does not believe in tears”). He is unlikely to inherit the academic and literary dachas of Komarovo and Peredelkino, although it happens that new residents settle in these properties. And then the dacha will inevitably transform their life and everyday life into something special, because it is a magical locus of memory. It is not without reason that in the series “A Short Course in a Happy Life” by Germanika Peredelkino it turns into a looking glass of comfortable and modern metropolitan life. In a similar way, the grandmother’s dacha is deformed into an art object thanks to the selfless work of an art group of muscular guys in “The Rag Union.”

Actually, the conflict of rejection and appropriation of someone else’s heritage was comprehended by our cinema already at the end of the Soviet world – remember how at the beginning of “Mirror for a Hero” the main character and his family are brought to the Moscow region, where he wants to rent a country house for his father. The autumn courtyard of the dacha, which once belonged to a famous sculptor (“He died on time, was buried with honors,” explains the brother of the late owner), is strewn with concrete statues of leaders. For the tenant, this is a curious place, but for his dad, a relict Soviet man, it is suitable. The dacha is history. And the past is safe, perhaps, only for those who do not want to know anything about it. “We’ve had this site for a long time, since 1937, and before that some criminals lived here,” the hero of “The Rag Union” ingenuously tells his friends.

The ruins of a Soviet dacha on the Russian movie screen are truly devoid of tranquility. This is not a peaceful landscape, a restless memory. There is neither the static pastoral courtliness of François Boucher, nor the solemnity of Hubert Robert, nor the romantic melancholy of Caspar David Friedrich. Our dacha is always in full swing, if not with work, then with hysterical life. Arriving in Tarkovsky’s world, on the flooded verandas of the Karelian Isthmus, the heroines of “The Edge of the Broken Moon” immediately begin to pump out water and dry out the family house, as if this could somehow improve their relationship. Evgeniy Tsyganov’s hero in “1993,” also a family man, is constantly building something—either a gazebo or a toilet—on his plot. Around the same years, in the series “Peace, Friendship, Chewing Gum,” Yura Borisov adapted his grandfather’s five-walled device to the needs of life. The heroine of Varvara Shmykova should move there with her children.

The idea even arises that a dacha is never a location, not a point in space or time, but rather a process. This movement is either forward – more and more often lately, especially in TV series, you can see comfortable country houses looking towards a bright future, which cannot even be called a dacha – or back to the past. The collision of two such “dachas”, racing on a collision course along the chronological axis, is quite wittily shown in last year’s thriller “Like a Man,” where a successful businessman (Anton Lapenko) confronts a less successful neighbor. This is not a battle of people or worldviews (both heroes are equally disgusting), this is a battle of houses, intentions.

Or maybe a dacha is just a projection of a person and his desires? Like a country family hut to which Alexei Serebryakov’s hero in “Rabies” by Dmitry Dyachenko brings his dissolute drug-addicted son. For the father, this is the last attempt to improve relations with the child, and, of course, the dacha is the only place where such a dialogue is possible. There are projections in the literal sense of the word, like the father’s house generated by the thinking ocean in Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Space, despite its seemingly fantastic isolation from earthly concerns, is a very familiar place for post-Soviet people. Mastered and abandoned. Space has a certain similarity with the dacha and a number of common properties. He is also far away, he is inextricably linked with a heritage that is burdensome, but at the same time evoking pride and nostalgia, he constantly requires extreme efforts.

“The station body is corroded,” the cosmonauts lovingly and with trepidation inspect Salyut 7 in Klim Shipenko’s film of the same name before getting down to business. In a week, they must heat their orbital house, cope with the flood (literally wipe everything; “you have plenty of rags there,” the Mission Control admonishes), extinguish the fire and turn the solar panels, which will have to be straightened with a sledgehammer under Pugachev from the radio. There will also be neighbors – Americans, who drove up in their shuttle like they were driving a new car. The current ISS in the recent “Challenge” seems to be a similar, stuffy place, littered with accumulated belongings over the years and, of course, necessary belongings. A person takes all his dreams, illusions and habits to the top. The dacha myth also takes away – the utopia of passing on experience and respect for heritage through grandmother’s dishes and candied jam. Ingeniously, the family home from “Solaris” is transformed into a family farm and moved to Mars in the recent “Cyber ​​Village.” It’s just a stone’s throw from our native cyber-birches: a couple of parsecs by train on the space railway, and then an hour and a half in a UAZ with an anti-gravity function. Yes, there is a washbasin in the yard and the internet is not very good, but the air is fresh. And what stars in the evenings!

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