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 -

refusal to accept a given system: that which is classified as nothing becomes a stash of building blocks. But in this rebellion - a subjugation too: the newly produced something still mimics the existing order. Unless of course, a new mythology is forged in that process, and with it a new world - real, magical, fertile - if you can see it.

Everyone around was suddenly a pioneer, breaking up virgin lands and erecting dwellings a curious fight of ability, ambition, sleepy imagination and fading inherited knowledge. The resulting fairground of individualism was both striking and underwhelming. A cacophony of pseudo styles and adapted materials, not yet softened by the newly planted fruit trees, it jarred and agitated. Group consciousness, deprived of homogenised resource or continuous tradition, leaked, fragmented and broke into multitude of nostalgic microcosms, rendering the whole settlement a strange graveyard of pre-collective memory.

A particular brand of organised clutter ruled inside. Old furniture, outdated equipment, obsolescent books and records where arranged to resemble a functional home, like a poorly conceived stage set. Devoid of all those subtle but unmistakable traces of habitual life, this lowly grumbling inorganic world of disparate memories and clashing stories was waiting for a generation by which it could be seen, imagined, born.

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I was not aware of my own myth-making at the time. There was no one to tell my stories to. Their possible significance and budding symbology was all but lost by our return to the city apartment, erased by the last minute fruit picking, finding things, arguing, packing the car, the journey back. They weren’t even stories yet, just little scarrings of sensed experiences, primal, free of language, vaguely outlined by absorbed societal judgements and indirect cultural narratives.

Can words be found now and in what language, who could they be addressed to, told by. Can all those fraying patches of selfhood - bored, erotic, naive, obsessive, frightened, learning - transcend their redundant context, become useful beyond the looming nostalgia. A new myth is due, I am now certain, the next act of creation in the void of grief, a cautious take on bygone masculinity perhaps, a lyrical trace of paternal presence and its belatedly realised sublime humanity - all so suddenly evident in the hushed peculiarity of our dacha .

And so I want to go back before it loses what only I can decode, a meaning I can try to pass on, but not fully. It is a fragile refraction of unsung history, a hopeful

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apparition on overlooked land, a hologram of identity that only I can see.

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With thanks to the AcrossRCA team for allowing me to realise this project from the 22nd to 26th February 2021.

With special thanks to Sarabeth Domal, Sonya Battla, Maya Guileva and Sergei Zinchuk for kindly sharing their writing beyond those they connected with during the project and further thanks to all of the people involved, in total fourteen of us shared our writing and the places we miss. What we did together and what you all contributed is truly special. I hope our paths will cross again in the future.