Authors

Discussion

This paper aims at analysing the relation between orality and literacy in some of the expressive forms linked to the suburban leisure during Saint Petersburg Belle Époque. In particular, it will be presented a corpus of marginal texts and practices – Boulevard press fiction and literary attempts by summer dwellers, oral short forms, amateur theatre and plays – that mirrored and filled free time in dacha settlements, allowing the encounter between different socio-cultural realities (dachniki and ‘natives’) and contributing in many ways to the weakening of the boundaries between the elitist and the popular, production and consumption in the culture of that time. The analysis of these materials, especially if based on the dynamic model of interpretation of popular culture provided by the neo-Gramscian framework, allows us to take a look from below into pre-revolutionary dacha society: a rapidly changing landscape in which still fluid social bodies meet and fight in order to obtain their «right to the city».