Eugene Petrov - The Twelve Chairs

The Twelve Chairs

by Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov

Translated from the Russian by John Richardson

Introduction

PART I:

THE LION OF STARGOROD

1 Bezenchuk and the Nymphs

2 Madame Petukhov's 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 Poet's Dream

13 Breathe Deeper: You're Excited!

14 The Alliance of the Sword and Ploughshare

PART II:

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

PART III:

MADAME PETUKHOV'S 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

INTRODUCTION

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 side's 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 Stalin's 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 Petrov's 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 railwaymen's 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 Chekhov's 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