YeBeZhe, or Next Year in Yalta

YeBeZhe.

Chekhov's "White Dacha" in Yalta

About seven years ago I was at a conference in Yalta on the Crimean peninsula, on the shores of the Black Sea. Traditionally in April Chekhov scholars from all over the Soviet Union, and then from the former Soviet Union, would make a pilgrimage to the “White Dacha,” the house-museum of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, to share their scholarly work. Every year they greeted the spring in Chekhov’s garden, walked the promenade featured in his classic 1899 story “The Lady with the Little Dog,” drank Crimean wines and cognacs, and took quick dips in the cold waters of the Black Sea. My friend from Moscow, a Chekhov scholar, had been inviting me to join them at the conference for a number of years, and in 2008 for the first time I was able to make it. 

Spring break in Yalta has to include a
 walk on the seaside promenade.

For years these scholars had been taking their week-long spring break in Yalta together, and had of course developed their routines and habits – certain restaurants they frequented, one colleague’s birthday they always celebrated together, anecdotes they told each other year after year. They had developed their own routes through the city and into the hills surrounding, and their own shorthand, a language they spoked almost ritually. 

I generally pride myself on knowing or intuiting many phrases and sayings in Russian, but these Chekhov scholars, in speaking of the future, would often say “YeBeZhe” or sometimes “YeBeZheYeBeZeh.” I couldn’t imagine what they meant, until one of them finally translated for me: “Esli budem zhivy, esli budem zdorovy.” “If we are alive, if we are healthy.” Abbreviating by using the first letters of this phrase, this little scholarly community found a language to offset their instinctual Russian superstitions and to help them handle the uncertain post-Soviet years – economically unstable, socially unclear, ethnically and nationally confusing. “Next year in Yalta … yebezhe.”

That tentative attitude toward the future seems to me more than just a careful superstition, another version of "knock wood." Instead, it is a hallmark of twentieth and twenty-first century intellectuals in Russia. No one can guarantee that the knocks on the door and the nighttime arrests won’t start again, or that the Germans won’t invade again, with their nocturnal bombing and the accompanying devastation. No one can even guarantee that the geographic contours of the country will remain the same from year to year. Who would have guessed in 2008 that Crimea would return (or be forcibly reincorporated, depending on your point of view) to become part of the Russian empire again?

Chekhov's writing dacha in Gurzuf

In April 2015, will Russian scholars travel to Chekhov’s home, now that Crimea belongs to Russia? Even if they can and choose to, will they be able to afford it? Given, after all, that there is no longer a traversable land route from Russia to Crimea, and thus any trip will be via plane rather than train. And will Ukrainian scholars even be able to go to Crimea from places like Kiev or Odessa, or are they now the enemy? What about Chekhov scholars from Donetsk? 

The last time I was in Crimea I spent some time searching for the grave of Boris Tomashevsky, a wonderful and important Pushkin scholar who spent the last years of his life living next to Chekhov's other dacha in Gurzuf, and who drowned in the Black Sea just below these two houses, perhaps the victim of a heart attack. When I study Pushkin, or Pushkin's biography, I am drawn to biographers of Pushkin such as Tomashevsky, and find myself wanting to know more about their lives, to understand not just how they wrote and researched, but how they lived, and died. My companions in that graveyard expedition were two other wonderful scholars, Russian emigres to the United States, each of whom has a biography worth exploring, a story to tell, not just of the books they've read and the articles and monographs they've published, but of mentors and friends and colleagues, of interviews and interrogations and escapes, of journeys taken and arrests avoided.

As I begin a new blog which I am launching this semester, a new blog alongside my graduate students – each of whom will be blogging their experiences and thoughts as they listen to lectures by biographers and about the genre of biography, as they read and think about biography, mostly in the Russian context, as they perhaps plan biographies of their own – I am calling it “YeBeZhe.” “If we are alive [if we are healthy].” A way to think and talk about the future, and to conceive of the past. A way to consider the role of the individual in history, in society, in his or her own community and family. A way to face 2015 and walk bravely into that future, aware that much of the knowledge and many of the tools I need can be found in the remarkable individuals who populate the past.

Here's a link to the new blog. (My students and I are trying various things, including a straight Word Press blog. We'll see if we like it better.)