Article from Moscow News

Sara Buzadzhi
Special to The Moscow News

When it comes to all the fun (and hassle) of life at the dacha, it's good to know the birch wood from the trees.
With the weather getting warmer, many Russians turn their thoughts to an essential part of summer life. I refer, of course, to the дача. This is, of course, the house outside the city on a plot of land (участок) where everyone who can repairs to on the weekends and for weeks of vacation. This word is sometimes translated as 'country house'. To me, however, 'country house' implies a fancy second home for rich people, while dachas are often much more modest affairs, many not insulated or equipped for winter living.

If yon know anyone with a dacha, it's likely that their parents or grandparents received this land from the Soviet government, as part of an allotment to workers of a certain organisation, say. And this quality of the land being given goes way back -the word originally relates back to the verb дать (to give), as in land given by the prince or tsar at the time.

So, the traditional time to start visiting your dacha is the weekend of May 1 - открытие дачного сезона (the opening of dacha season). One spring headline reads: В регионе открылся дачный сезон — С наступлением теплой погоды курские дачники и садоводы ринулись на свои участки. (Dacha season is open in the region - With the onset of warm weather, Kursk vacationers/dacha owners and gardeners have rushed off to their plots of land.)

This is the time-when people bring their seedlings from the apartment windowsill to plant: in the garden (высаживать рассаду в саду, for a tongue-twister), and do all the necessary repairs around the house and yard. These many tasks can make for a trying time - just observe the laments of a man with a dacha and a wife in a short Chekhov play: «Помни, что ты дачник, то есть раб, дрянь, мочалка, и изволь... сейчас же бежать исполнить поручения.» (Remember that you live at the dacha, that is, you're a worthless slave, a nothing -now go run along to do what you're told.)

But it's not all doom and gloom -the dacha is the source of many wonderful things to eat, for one thing. A lot of these come from your garden, which in Russian is split up into two different areas - огород for vegetables, and сад for everything else (fruits, flowers, etc.)

When the first cucumbers appear, people often make малосольные огурцы (literally, lightly-salted cucumbers - they spend just a couple days in salted water with various herbs). Then there are the salted and pickled varieties - солёные and маринованные.

When the berries start to ripen, that's when everybody really goes to town, making варенье and джем in huge quantities. The former consists of just berries and sugar, while the latter has the pectin that makes it more jelly-like; I'm not sure if these correspond exactly to the English preserves and jam.

The other great thing to come from the berries is настойка, ahome-made liqueur. The word comes from the verb настаивать, which, when we're talking about tea, means 'to steep'. So, if you're making малиновая настойка, you place a bunch of raspberries at the bottom of a bottle of vodka and wait six to eight weeks for the alcohol to take on their sweet flavour.

But the main dish of the summer is the delicious and omnipresent шашлыки, meat cooked on skewers over a grill outside (shish kebabs to Americans). If you are travelling somewhere for a picnic, you can use the phrase ехать на шашлыки: Ну что, едем завтра на шашлыки? (So, are we going for a barbecue tomorrow?)

Wherever you have it, you will be cooking meat on шампуры (skewers) over а мангал (the grill), and you should be using берёзовые дрова (birch wood) for the scent.

The only bizarre dacha dish that I have to take issue with is the popular окрошка. For a good reason, there is no word for this in English. If you haven't had it, it's cold soup with квас, the fermented drink made from bread. Basically, the 'soup' is just soggy meat and vegetables soaking in a cold, soda-like drink. Russians, bless their hearts, insist that this will refresh you (Освежает!).

Aside from that last one, all the good food can help us ignore the irritation of chores and the other minor downsides of country living. There's an oft-repeated Pushkin quote about the latter: Ax, лето красное, любил бы я тебя, когда б не зной, не комары да мухи... (One translation goes: О, summer fair! I would have loved you I But for the heat and dust and gnats and flies.)

Sara Buzadzhi is a Moscow-based translator and English teacher.