"The Russian word dacha is translated into foreign languages as follows-dacha. That is, there is no translation, only transcription. This does not mean that we are so special and unique. Outside the city, people live everywhere - in villas, ranches... Our dacha is very different from all these diverse manifestations of suburban life in meaning. It does not exist at all in order to relax and enjoy life on it. "What am I, a" new Russian" or something? " - our citizen thinks about this. And not only does he think, but also refuses to call the old Chekhov word "dacha" those country houses where it is customary to rest more" (Nikonov A. Lyubimaya katorga / / Ogonyok. 1998. N 26). The above statement seems to outline the "trajectory of life" of the word dacha in Russian culture and in the Russian language-from A. P. Chekhov to the present day.

But first, let's turn to history. Dacha is an ancient Russian word-from the verb to give (dates). In the XVI century, it meant "gift"," gift","grant". In the XVII century, the word dacha refers to a land plot or forest plot received from the state, i.e. free of charge. In the second half of the XVIII century, this word gets a new meaning: "a country house, a small estate located near the city." In Moscow, such dachas were located within the city limits, along the banks of the Yauza and Moskva Rivers. Since the middle of the XIX century, they began to build cottages in Sokolniki and Petrovsky Park.

During the period of serfdom, nobles had houses in large cities and family estates in the bosom of nature. The middle strata of the population were almost deprived of the opportunity to come into contact with nature in the summer. After the abolition of serfdom, with the emergence of a class of rich merchants and industrialists, a construction boom begins in the vicinity of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Rich merchants bought land from the Appanage Department and built two-story wooden houses on it

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and they rented them out for the summer to the families of merchants, officials, and then to artists, journalists, and artists. Here dacha meant that the premises were rented for a certain period of time.

First of all, dachas appeared along the railways: Nikolaev, Severnaya, Bryansk, Ryazan and Brest (hence the preserved to this day: "What road do you have a dacha on?"). These dacha areas became dacha villages: Khovrino, Skhodnya, Kryukovo, Losinoostrovskaya, Tarasovskaya, Klyazma, Mamontovka, Pushkino, and Perlovka. Dacha villages were built on the territory of woodlands; part of the forest was not cut down, but preserved as a park; usually dachas were located near a river or lake, on the banks of which there were baths. Dacha owners built a theater, a dance circle, a bandstand, a restaurant, etc. near the stations. Football fields, playgrounds or croquet and tennis courts were arranged. There was a special bike path in Klyazma. All this is to attract summer residents.

So, about the merchant B. C. Perlov, who built about 70 dachas along the Northern Railway in the late 1870s, it is said in the book of M. P. Zakharov: "... the whole forest-park is cut with paths rammed with red sand, along which you can walk even (...) after the rain. The Yauza River flows along the outskirts of the dachas, with baths arranged on it (...) Every summer, all dachas are crowded with residents, and the obsequious owner invites music to entertain his tenants, which is played in Perlovka twice a week... "(Zakharov M. P. Moscow's neighborhood along the Yaroslavl Railway, Moscow, 1887).

In many suburban villages there were summer theaters, where the best Moscow and St. Petersburg troupes or groups of famous actors who were free from performances in the city toured. Especially popular were theaters in Losinoostrovskaya, Malakhovka (Malakhovsky Theater), Perlovka, Kryukov, Nemchinovka, Pushkin, and Udelnaya. F. performed there. Shalyapin, L. Sobinov, A. I. Sumbatov-Yuzhin. At the dacha of K. S. Stanislavsky (Alekseyev), near the Tarasovskaya station, the first rehearsals of performances of the Moscow Art Theater were held.

At the beginning of the XX century, the following publications were published: "Malakhovsky Vestnik", "Losinoostrovsky Vestnik", "Vestnik poseloka Lianozovo", "Dachnik", "Dachny Vestnik" (Nashchokin M., "Guests came to the dacha..." / / Monuments of the Fatherland. Podmoskovye, Moscow, 1994, No. 34).

In the Russian language during this period, new formations appeared: summer resident, summer resident, dacha village, dacha theater, dacha owner. The St. Petersburg novelist and playwright I. L. Leontiev (Ivan Shcheglov) wrote the vaudeville "The Country Husband", which made him famous at that time. This phrase has become a household name.

Chekhov visited the environs of Moscow, saw many country villages. So, in the current Mytishchi district, he visited with the artist

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Konstantin Korovin; on the banks of the Yauza River, they fished, passed by brand-new dachas belonging to the tea merchant B.C. Perlov.

Thus, the appearance of the word dacha in A. P. Chekhov's works of art was caused by the malice of the day: the emergence of dacha settlements around Moscow from the late 1870s, which transformed the appearance of the Moscow region.

In the mid-1880s, Chekhov published short humorous stories from country life: "Dachnitsa", "Dacha Pleasure", "Dacha Rules" (1874); "Summer Residents" (1885); "One of many" (1887); remade in 1889 as a joke in one act " The reluctant Tragedian (From country life)". In them you can find: country life, country scum, summer resident, country husband, country father of the family. There are also amateur performances, a dance circle, and a swimming pool on the river bank. In the play" The Seagull " (1896), Treplev says about Nina Zarechnaya:"She made her debut near Moscow, in a country theater...".

The writer himself was looking for a landowner's estate for the summer to escape from the bustle of the country. And even in 1892 he bought a house in the village of Melikhovo near Moscow. But the village environment oppressed him, and on June 21, 1897, Chekhov wrote from Melikhov to A. S. Suvorin about the peasants: "They crack vodka desperately, and there is also a desperate amount of moral and physical impurity. I am coming more and more to the conclusion that a decent and non-drunken person can live in the country only reluctantly, and blessed is the Russian intellectual who lives not in the country, but in the country." This was one of the reasons for the sale of the estate in Melekhov in 1899.

Wooden two-story cottages around the big cities of Russia after the 1917 revolution turned into communal apartments. Then, when Moscow and Leningrad were built up further and further from the center, eating up country villages, only accidentally surviving buildings remained of the former wooden architecture.

Already at the end of the XIX century, the construction of other dachas was outlined-rich, luxurious stone buildings, in a beautiful area, at a distance from the city and the village people. Such" new dachas " could afford large industrialists who built palaces and mansions along the banks of the Moskva River, along the Brest (Belarusian) railway. These palaces are still intact and have served for decades as state dachas and sanatoriums for the highest ranks in our country.

To understand what changes the meaning of the word dacha has undergone during this time, let's first turn to Chekhov's description:"...she began to ask her husband to buy a small plot of land and build a dacha here. My husband obeyed. They bought twenty acres of land and built a beautiful two-story house with a terrace and a balcony on the high bank, in a clearing where the Obrozhanov cows used to roam.-

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the first one, with a tower and a spire on which the flag flew on Sundays, was built in just three months, and then they planted big trees all winter, and when spring came and everything was green all around, the new estate had alleys ... and a fountain was gushing... And there was already a name for this estate: - New dacha (...)

In the new estate, he [the coachman] said, they will neither plow nor sow, but will only live at their own pleasure, live only to breathe clean air"; "... an engineer was sitting on the terrace with his family and drinking tea"; " The new dacha has long been sold; now it belongs to some one"then to the official who comes here from the city on holidays with his family, drinks tea on the terrace and then goes back to the city "(Chekhov. New dacha).

From the above excerpts, we will try to establish what was called a dacha in Chekhov's times. The first thing that catches your eye is the synonymous use of the words manor, estate, dacha. Let us turn to the Dictionary of S. I. Ozhegov and N. Yu.Shvedova for an interpretation of the meanings of these words: "Manor, 1. A separate house with adjacent buildings, land. Peasant village. Landowner's u. (...) 3. In rural areas: a plot of land attached to a house. In the village, he has a house and u. / / umenyi. usadebka (to the 1st and 3rd digits) / / adj. manor"; " Estate, 1. Estate, land ownership. Landowner and. State and. (in tsarist Russia)"; "Dacha, 1. Country house, usually for summer holidays. Rent a dacha (...) II adj. dachny, -th, -th. Country furniture. Dachnaya locality" (Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language, Moscow, 1992).

In A. P. Chekhov's short story "Novaya Dacha", the word dacha "absorbs" all the meanings specified in the Dictionary of Ozhegov and Shvedova: this is both land and home.

The second paragraph is noteworthy. It defines the main purpose of the dacha as "a place for summer recreation", which for Chekhov's contemporaries, especially, judging by the rather emotional and lengthy story of the coachman, was a rarity.

However, it is worth noting that in Chekhov's time the word dacha was filled with different meanings. It is often found in the writer's correspondence from September 1898, when he arrived in Yalta. This whole resort town, built up with beautiful, original architecture of houses in which apartments were rented out either to vacationers or to tuberculosis patients who came for treatment, attracted people more for treatment than for idle pastime. At the same time, in Yalta, some buildings were called houses, others-dachas. For example, the artist R. F. Yartsev rented out apartments in his house (M. Gorky lived with him), and in the addresses his house was called home. This house, a multi-storey structure, still exists today.

Chekhov in September 1898 settled at the address": Yalta, Bushev's dacha, around which there was a "big garden". In one of the letters, he calls-

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make this cottage your home. Then he moved to Ivanov's dacha, which did not suit him. At the same time, the doctor and writer S. Ya.Elpatyevsky builds himself a three-story house. Then Chekhov moved to the dacha of K. M. Ilovaiskaya "Omyur". This building still exists today and is called a dacha, although it has two floors. At the end of October 1899, Chekhov was already settled in his house, as he calls it in his letters. Obviously, there were no strict rules on how to name buildings in Yalta, according to what signs. Already in 1901, Chekhov's testamentary letter dated August 3 addressed to his sister said that he bequeathed her a dacha in Yalta, and Olga Leonardovna - a dacha in Gurzuf. The house in Gurzuf is really very small, it consists of only two rooms. It is now often called Olga Leonardovna's house, and Chekhov's multi-room house in Yalta is called a house or dacha.

After Chekhov's death, many memoirs appeared in print; in them, Chekhov's house was often called the White Dacha. In the memoirs of A. I. Kuprin " In Memory of Chekhov "(1905), Chekhov's dacha is described in detail - "all white, clean, light". In April 1999, the House-Museum of A. P. Chekhov in Yalta hosted a scientific conference on the theme: "To the 100th anniversary of the White Dacha". Now the phrase Belaya Dacha and the official name of the Chekhov House-Museum in Yalta are synonymous.

So, in the time of Chekhov, the dacha becomes a place of summer recreation for urban residents. Interesting information on this subject can be found in the Russian Historical and Everyday Dictionary: there, one of the meanings of this word is interpreted as " a well-equipped suburban vacation spot in the summer." At the same time, it is noted that in this sense, the dacha is a later phenomenon, not fixed in old dictionaries. The time of the appearance of dachas falls mainly on the 2nd half of the XIX century, when, on the one hand, cities grew rapidly and industry developed in them, on the other - the nobility was ruined and estates were sold, leaving only the estate for summer recreation. They had a special country lifestyle: young people cultivated outdoor sports (croquet, cricket, lawn tennis, etc.), rode boats and horses, and indulged in light flirting. They also had fun at the dacha with live paintings, amateur performances and concerts (Russian Historical and Everyday Dictionary, Moscow, 1999). The same meaning is recorded in modern explanatory dictionaries, in particular, in the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language" by S. I. Ozhegov, N. Yu. Shvedova.

Meanwhile, the modern content of the concept of "dacha" is not limited to "a place for a summer vacation". It is also: 1) an indicator of the social status of a person, family, and level of well-being; 2) the place where vegetables and fruits are grown, which make up a significant part of the diet both in summer (fresh vegetables, berries, and fruits) and in winter (canned). This is especially clearly represented in the editorial interpretation of the word incentive summer resident by an ordinary native speaker-

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ka: "a man who works in the country." For Chekhov's "summer residents", the very combination of the words dacha and work seemed, most likely, incompatible.

This is how the" circle " of meanings of the words estate, manor, manor, dacha,"closed". Although it is possible that future generations of Russians will still return the word dacha to its former, "Chekhov" meaning.

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