Table of Contents

Historical essay of the dacha. Photographs of dachas and their interiors.

Promotional Information

Dachas - countryside houses, built from wood - are largely unknown outside the post-Soviet states. Photographer Fyodor Savintsev has documented these important architectural forms, creating a unique record of a vanishing world.

About the Author

Fyodor Savintsev was born in 1982 in Moscow. After becoming a professional photographer in 1999, he worked with news agencies such as the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. He became chief photographer for the ITAR-TASS agency in 2003 until 2006, when he began working on personal photographic projects.

As a photographer and documentarian, his projects have been reproduced in some of the world's biggest publications including: GEO, The Times, The Guardian and Le Monde. Since 2015, he has worked exclusively with galleries, developing his personal projects in a genre he calls 'documentary art'. He lives in Moscow.

Anna Benn is an author, Russophile and horticulturalist who first travelled to Russia in 1982 as a student at Leningrad university. She is the author of several guide books and co-author with Rosamund Bartlett of Literary Russia, A Guide. Her lifelong interest in literature, gardens and Russia are brought together in the subject of the dacha and its garden which inspired her prize-winning 'Chekhov's Garden' with Hannah Gardner at the Hampton Court Flower Show in 2018.

EDITORS: Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell have been publishing critically acclaimed books on Soviet culture since 2004 with their Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. More recent titles include Chernobyl; A Stalkers' Guide, Spomenik Monument Database and Soviet Bus Stops.