The article examines the progress and results of studying the historical dynamics of the image of the estate and dacha in classical literature, works of the Silver Age, Soviet prose, and literature of the last 35 years written in the post-Soviet space in modern literary criticism. We try to show that modern researchers working within the framework of the estate and dacha direction deeply and accurately formulate the semantics of the “estate topos” and “dacha topos”, showing their differences. The paper examines the representations of the “estate-dacha text” presented by the authors of various articles and the features of its functioning in Russian and foreign literature of the 19th-20th centuries. The constants common to a literary estate, dacha, house-museum or castle are recorded: a sense of freedom and security, certain rules of life in a given place (at the everyday and existential levels) and, most importantly, the perception of the loss of the estate as the loss of “heaven on earth”. The significance and novelty of recent research on the selected topic is demonstrated.