lapsedmodernist | russian summer homes

i always tell my american friends that a lot of my childhood in russia was spent in summer homes; country houses, dachas as they are called in russian, and was always met with misunderstanding; people always thought of country homes as something really rich people would have, and did not understand how everyone, my family inculded had one in the impoverished soviet union. or they assumed that my family was unique and wealthy. i finally figured out the miscommunication can be thought of in terms of marxist classes, which, i suppose is appropriate since we are talking about the soviet union. the best analogy for the dachas are cars. in america, even the poor people have cars. they have shitty cars, but they have them. it's the same with country houses in russia. only really well-off people have cars, but everyone has a shitty little country house, with no shower and an outdoor toilet that's basically a bucket under a floorboard and there is a bucket with loose earth taht you pour over the bucket when you are done instead of flushing, and then you carry the bucket out to the end of the village where the cows graze and toss it out as fertilizer. but in america there is no such thing as delapidated part-time coutnry houses...there are either farmers who live in the country so they are there year round, or well--off people who have summer houses with all amenities...but no such thing as poor shitty country homes that people stay at during the weekends in the summer, or for a month during vacations...and the rest of the time they get even more delapidated because no one is taking care of the upkeep.
ahhh. perhaps that clarifies a lot of things about russian life and literature.
then my dad and i sang russian karaoke. his idea, but it was fun.