"Ilf and Petrov. The Twelve Chairs" - читать интересную книгу автора

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