Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Russian prose writers more often than not depict members of the gentry in private spaces. Gatherings tend to take place in the salons and sitting rooms of urban homes and country estates. Young lovers court while strolling and sitting on benches in landscaped private gardens. Men defend their honor by fighting duels on estates outside of cities. Altogether, these gentry settings present a vision of decorum and control, and physically corroborate the idea of a yawning rift between the gentry and the narod. A limited number of scenes take place in public spaces. Theaters and balls may be regarded as an intermediary realm between public and private, because each have developed behavioral norms and protocols, and because they are frequented by a relatively homogenous social group.
Parks are a different matter. In parks, upper-class Russians run
the risk of rubbing shoulders with a broader range of
society. Moreover, the very fact of going to a park indicates that
one's own real estate holdings afford one insufficient opportunities
for leisure. Recourse to public space, in short, intimates class
decline: parks are degraded private gardens. Therefore it comes as no
surprise that parks become loci of a variety of solecisms and
irruptions in the social fabric. Romantic liaisons in parks, for
example, are invariably somewhat illicit. In Odoevskij's
But the paradigmatic park scene takes place halfway through
Turgenev's
In short, novelistic scenes set in parks invariably display fissures in the social order. These scenes are always cast against predecessor genre scenes which were set on private estates, and they always violate the norms established in those more controlled settings.