The Place Exchange

Dacha Sergei Zinchuk My nephew is interested in improving our dacha . It is strange to encounter someone’s claim on the place, I realise with surprise, a sudden invasion, like a sharply pulled dust sheet.

Swarming, scattling, blindly blinking memories rise, masking a faint sense of new male’s teritorial challenge, a primal threat and validated legacy at once.

There isn’t an adequate English translation. Second home sounds too grand, allotment inferior. Even in my native’s mind the idea is not straightforward: there’s the dacha of movies and novels, a symbol of political status or cultural success, a distorted pretence at a landed gentry’s bygone lifestyle, as imagined and sanctioned by the ostensibly proletariat’s state.

But there’s an even farther ripple of the idea - the dacha of the 80s, an allotment in gridded patches of flat landscape outside cities: woodlands cleared, marches drained, exhausted sandy soil divided into uniform rectangles. Here, the highly educated, professional workers would affect recreation, while growing their own food to survive in a failed economic project. *** Perhaps the ultimate creation is one conjured out of nothing. It is a forced - or inspired 17