Ilya Ilf - The Twelve Chairs

Ilf and Petrov.

The Twelve Chairs

Translated from the Russian by John Richardson

The original Russian title:

OCR: Tuocs

THE LION OF STARGOROD

1 Bezenchuk and the Nymphs

2 Madame Petukhovs Demise

3 The Parable of the Sinner

4 The Muse of Travel

5 The Smooth Operator

6 A Diamond Haze

7 Traces of the Titanic

8 The Bashful Chiseller

9 Where Are Your Curls?

10 The Mechanic, the Parrot, and the Fortune-teller

11 The Mirror-of-Life Index

12 A Passionate Woman Is a Poets Dream

13 Breathe Deeper: Youre Excited!

14 The Alliance of the Sword and Ploughshare

IN MOSCOW

15 A Sea of Chairs

16 The Brother Berthold Schwartz Hostel

17 Have Respect for Mattresses, Citizens!

18 The Furniture Museum

19 Voting the European Way

20 From Seville to Granada

21 Punishment

22 Ellochka the Cannibal

23 Absalom Vladimirovich Iznurenkov

24 The Automobile Club

25 Conversation with a Naked Engineer

26 Two Visits

27 The Marvellous Prison Basket

28 The Hen and the Pacific Rooster

29 The Author of the Gavriliad

30 In the Columbus Theatre

MADAME PETUKHOVS TREASURE

31 A Magic Night on the Volga

32 A Shady Couple

33 Expulsion from Paradise

34 The Interplanetary Chess Tournament

35 Et Alia

36 A View of the Malachite Puddle

37 The Green Cape

38 Up in the Clouds

39 The Earthquake

40 The Treasure

It has long been my considered opinion that strains in Russo-American relations are inevitable as long as the average American persists in picturing the Russian as a gloomy, moody, unpredictable individual, and the average Russian in seeing the American as childish, cheerful and, on the whole, rather primitive. Naturally, we each resent the other sides unjust opinions and ascribe them, respectively, to the malice of capitalist or Communist propaganda. What is to blame for this? Our national literatures; or, more exactly, those portions of them which are read. Since few Americans know people of the Soviet Union from personal experience, and vice versa, we both depend to a great extent on information gathered from the printed page. The Russians know us-let us forget for a moment about Pravda-from the works of Jack London, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain and O. Henry. We know the Russians-let us temporarily disregard the United Nations-as we have seen them depicted in certain novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and in the later dramas of Chekhov.

There are two ways to correct these misconceptions. One would be to import into Russia a considerable number of sober, serious-minded, Russian-speaking American tourists, in exchange for an identical number of cheerful, logical, English-speaking Russians who would visit America. The other, less costly form of cultural exchange would be for the Russians to read more of Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, and for us to become better acquainted with the less solemn-though not at all less profound-Russians. We should do well to read more of Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov (the short stories and the one-act plays) and-among Soviet authors-to read Mikhail Zoshchenko and Ilf and Petrov. Thus, in its modest way, the present volume-though outwardly not very serious should contribute to our better understanding of Russia and the Russians and aid us in facing the perils of peaceful coexistence.

If writers were to be judged not by the reception accorded to them by literary critics but by their popularity with the reading public, there could be no doubt that the late team of Ilf and Petrov would have few peers among Soviet men of letters. Together with another humorist, the recently deceased Mikhail Zoshchenko, for many years they baffled and outraged Soviet editors and delighted Soviet readers. Yet even while their works were officially criticized in the literary journals for a variety of sins (the chief among them being insufficient ideological militancy and, ipso facto, inferior educational value), the available copies of earlier editions were literally read to shreds by millions of Soviet citizens. Russian readers loved Ilf and Petrov because these two writers provided them with a form of catharsis rarely available to the Soviet citizen-the opportunity to laugh at the sad and ridiculous aspects of Soviet existence.

Anyone familiar with Soviet press and literature knows one of their most depressing features-the emphasis on the pompous and the weighty, and the almost total absence of the light touch. The USSR has a single Russian journal of humour and satire, Krokodil, which is seldom amusing. There is a very funny man in the Soviet circus, Oleg Popov, but he is a clown and seldom talks. At the present time, among the 4,801 full-time Soviet writers there is not a single talented humorist. And yet the thirst for humour is so great in Russia that it was recognized as a state problem by Malenkov, who, during his short career as Prime Minister after Stalins death, appealed to Soviet writers to become modern Gogols and Saltykov-Shchedrins. The writers, however, seem to have remembered only too well the risks of producing humour and satire in a totalitarian state (irreverent laughter can easily provoke accusations of political disloyalty, as was the case with Zoschenko in 1946), and the appeal did not bring about desired results. Hence, during the liberal years of 1953-7 the Soviet Government made available, as a concession to its humour-starved subjects, new editions of the old works of Soviet humorists, including 200,000 copies of Ilf and Petrovs The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf.

Muscovites and Leningraders might disagree, but there is strong evidence to indicate that during the first decades of this century the capital of Russian humour was Odessa, a bustling, multilingual, cosmopolitan city on the Black Sea. In his recently published memoirs, the veteran Soviet novelist Konstantin Paustovsky fondly recalls the sophisticated and iconoclastic Odessa of the early post-revolutionary years. Among the famous sons of Odessa were Isaac Babel, the writer of brilliant, sardonic short stories; Yurii Olesha, the creator of modernistic, ironic tales; Valentin Katayev, author of Squaring the Circle, perhaps the best comedy in the Soviet repertory; and both members of the team of Ilf and Petrov.

Ilya Ilf (pseudonym of Fainzilberg) was born in 1897; Yevgeny Petrov (pseudonym of Katayev, a younger brother of Valentin) in 1903. The two men met in Moscow, where they both worked on the railwaymens newspaper, Gudok (Train Whistle). Their speciality was reading letters to the editor, which is a traditional Soviet means for voicing grievances about bureaucracy, injustices and shortages. Such letters would sometimes get published as feuilletons, short humorous stories somewhat reminiscent of Chekhovs early output. In 1927 Ilf and Petrov formed a literary partnership, publishing at first under a variety of names, including some whimsical ones, like Fyodor Tolstoyevsky. In their joint autobiography Ilf and Petrov wrote :

It is very difficult to write together. It was easier for the Goncourts, we suppose. After all, they were brothers, while we are not even related to each other. We are not even of the same age. And even of different nationalities; while one is a Russian (the enigmatic Russian soul), the other is a Jew (the enigmatic Jewish soul).

The literary partnership lasted for ten years, until 1937, when Ilya Ilf died of tuberculosis. Yevgeny Petrov was killed in 1942 during the siege of Sebastopol.

The two writers are famed chiefly for three books-The Twelve Chairs (1928; known in a British translation as Diamonds to Sit On); The Little Golden Calf (1931), a tale of the tribulations of a Soviet millionaire who is afraid to spend any money lest he be discovered by the police; and One-Storey-High America (1936; known in a British translation as Little Golden America), an amusing and, on the whole, friendly account of the two writers adventures in the land of Wall Street, the Empire State Building, cars, and aspiring capitalists.