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

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.
The plot of The Twelve Chairs is very simple. The mother-in-law of a
former nobleman named Vorobyaninov discloses on her deathbed a secret: she
hid her diamonds in one of the family's chairs that subsequently was
appropriated by the Soviet authorities. Vorobyaninov is joined by a young
crook named Ostap Bender with whom he forms a partnership, and together they
proceed to locate these chairs. The partners have a competitor in the priest
Vostrikov, who has also learned of the secret from his dying parishioner.
The competing treasure-hunters travel throughout Russia, which enables the
authors to show us glimpses of little towns, Moscow, and Caucasian resorts,
and also have the three central characters meet a wide variety of people
-Soviet bureaucrats, newspapermen, survivors of the pre-revolutionary
propertied classes, provincials, and Muscovites.
The events described in the novel are set in 1927, that is, toward the
end of the period of the New Economic Policy, which was characterized by a
temporary truce between the Soviet regime's Communist ideology and limited
private enterprise in commerce, industry and agriculture. The coffin-making
and bagel-making businesses referred to in the novel have long since been
nationalized; the former noblemen masquerading as petty Soviet employees and
many of the colleagues of the priest described by Ilf and Petrov are no
longer alive; and it is impossible to imagine the existence today of an
anti-Soviet "conspiracy" similar to the humorists' "Alliance of the Sword
and Ploughshare".
Other than that, however, the Soviet Union described in the novel is
very much like the Soviet Union of 1960, industrial progress and the
Sputniks notwithstanding. The standard of living in 1927 was relatively
high; it subsequently declined. Now it is just slightly higher than it was
thirty years ago. The present grotesquely overcrowded and poor-quality
housing (there is not even a Russian word for "privacy" I) is not much
different from the conditions Ilf and Petrov knew. There are now, as there
were then, people to whom sausage is a luxury, as it was to the newlyweds in
The Twelve Chairs. Embezzlers of state property, though denounced as
"survivals of the capitalist past", are found by thousands among young men
in their thirties and forties. The ominous door signs protecting Communist
bureaucrats, from unwanted visitors still adorn Soviet offices. Nor has the
species of Ellochka the Cannibal, the vulgar and greedy wife of a