Ilf and Petrov are Soviet writers-co-authors Ilya Ilf (real name — Yehiel-Leib ben Aryeh Fainzilberg; 1897-1937) and Evgeny Petrov (real name — Evgeny Petrovich Kataev; 1902-1942). Natives of the city of Odessa. Together they wrote the famous novels “The Twelve Chairs” (1928) and “The Golden Calf” (1931). The dilogy about the adventures of the great schemer Ostap Bender has gone through many reprints, not only in Russian.
In 1925, the future co-authors met, and in 1926 their joint work began, which at first consisted of composing themes for drawings and feuilletons in the magazine “Smekhach” and processing materials for the newspaper “Gudok”. The first significant collaboration between Ilf and Petrov was the novel “The Twelve Chairs,” published in 1928 in the magazine “30 Days” and published as a separate book in the same year. The novel was a great success. It is notable for its many brilliantly executed satirical episodes, characterizations and details, which were the result of topical life observations.
The novel was followed by several short stories and novellas (“Bright Personality”, 1928, “1001 Days, or New Scheherazade”, 1929); At the same time, systematic work by writers began on feuilletons for Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta. In 1931, the second novel by Ilf and Petrov was published — “The Golden Calf”, the story of the further adventures of the hero of “The Twelve Chairs” Ostap Bender. The novel presents a whole gallery of small people, overwhelmed by acquisitive impulses and passions and existing “parallel to the big world in which big people and big things live.”
In 1935-1936, the writers traveled around the United States, which resulted in the book “One-Storey America” (1936). In 1937, Ilf died, and the Notebooks published after his death were unanimously praised by critics as an outstanding literary work. After the death of his co-author, Petrov wrote a number of film scripts (together with Georgy Moonblit), the play “Island of Peace” (published in 1947), “Front-line Diary” (1942). In 1940 he joined the Communist Party and from the first days of the war became a war correspondent for Pravda and Informburo.
Essays
novel “The Twelve Chairs” (1928);
novel “The Golden Calf” (1931);
short stories “Extraordinary stories from the life of the city of Kolokolamsk” (1928);
fantastic story “Bright Personality” (1928);
short story “A Thousand and One Days, or New Scheherazade” (1929);
script for the film “Once Upon a Summer” (1936);
fictional and documentary story “One-Storey America” (1937).
In 1932-1937, Ilf and Petrov wrote feuilletons for the newspapers Pravda, Literaturnaya Gazeta and the Krokodil magazine. In 1935-1936, they traveled around the United States, which resulted in the book “One-Storey America” (1937). The creative collaboration of the writers was interrupted by the death of Ilf in Moscow on April 13, 1937.
The collected works of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov in five volumes were re-published (after 1939) in 1961 by the State Publishing House of Fiction. In the introductory article to this collection of works, D.I. Zaslavsky wrote: “The fate of the literary community of Ilf and Petrov is unusual. She touches and excites. They did not work together for long, only ten years, but they left a deep, indelible mark on the history of Soviet literature. The memory of them does not fade, and the love of readers for their books does not weaken. The novels “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf” are widely known.”
Novels
The history of the creation of the first novel written by prose writers, “The Twelve Chairs,” has become so overgrown with legends over the decades that, as literary scholars Mikhail Odessky and David Feldman noted, at a certain point it became difficult to separate truth from fiction. At the origins of the possible hoax was Evgeniy Petrov, who published memoirs in 1939, according to which Kataev Sr. suggested that he and Ilf prepare a manuscript according to which the master, playing Dumas the Father, could subsequently “walk through the hand of a master.” The plan seemed interesting to the co-authors, and in August (or early September) 1927 they began work. The first part was written within a month; by January 1928, the entire novel was completed: “It was snowing. Sitting decorously on a sled, we took the manuscript home… Will our novel be published? Almost immediately its publication began on the pages of the Thirty Days magazine; the work was published and continued until July.
Almost the same version was presented in “My Diamond Crown” by Valentin Kataev, who supplemented the story of “The Twelve Chairs” with memories of how he, having set a creative task for his “literary blacks”, left for Cape Verde. The co-authors periodically sent telegrams there, asking for advice on various issues, but in response they received short dispatches with the words: “Think for yourself.” Returning to Moscow in the fall, Kataev became acquainted with the first part, refused the role of Dumas the Father, predicted “a long life and world fame” for the still unfinished work, and as payment for the idea asked to dedicate the novel to him and to present him with a gift in the form of a gold piece from the first fee. cigarette case. Both of these conditions were met.
According to Odessky and Feldman, the history created by Petrov and Kataev is very contradictory, especially if we take into account the editorial and printing capabilities of the 1920s. From the moment any manuscript was received by the editor until it was signed for publication — taking into account mandatory censorship verdicts — many weeks usually passed; Typographic work took just as long. As literary scholars suggest, the publication of the novel in the January issue of Thirty Days could have taken place provided that the co-authors began submitting manuscripts to the magazine in parts in the fall. It is possible that the head of the editorial office, Vasily Reginin, who had known Kataev since Odessa times, as well as the executive editor Vladimir Narbut, agreed to publish the work of novice authors without prior acquaintance with the text; Valentin Petrovich himself acted as the guarantor in this case.
Evgeny Petrov, who prepared memoirs about their joint work after Ilf’s death, probably knew the details of the true history of “The Twelve Chairs,” but could not present them, because the founder of the Thirty Days magazine, Vladimir Narbut, who gave a “start in life” to young writers, In 1936 he was declared an “enemy of the people” and arrested; his name was included in the list of “unmentioned” persons. Ten years before his death, in 1928, Narbut was removed from all positions. Perhaps this circumstance influenced the situation associated with the publication of the next novel by Ilf and Petrov: the magazine publication of “The Golden Calf” was interrupted in 1931, censorship called the second part of the dilogy about Ostap Bender “a libel against the Soviet Union”, the release of a separate book was delayed for three years.
Explaining the long-term success of both novels, literary critic Yuri Shcheglov noted that the dilogy of Ilf and Petrov, thanks to the breadth of coverage of pictures of the Soviet world, is a kind of “encyclopedia of Russian life” of the 1920-1930s, and the multi-layered panorama created by the co-authors, assembled from hundreds of fragments, forms canvas under the code name “The Whole Union”. Supporting this thesis, Igor Sukhikh wrote: “It seems that there is no other such a detailed, colorful picture of Soviet reality… in our literature.” At the same time, both works underwent multiple literary interpretations at different times: they were called “classics of Soviet satire,” a reference book for the sixties, an anti-intellectual pamphlet for the new Rastignacs, and a “literary digest.”
Stories, cycles of short stories.
Many ideas that were born while the co-authors were working on “The Twelve Chairs” were not realized in their first novel. At the same time, the creative energy of young writers required an outlet. Therefore, in the summer of 1928, Ilf and Petrov began writing the satirical story “Bright Personality.” It was created in an extremely short time — in just six days — and was a story about the transformation of Yegor Karlovich Filyurin, a clerk for the municipal service of the city of Pischeslav, into an invisible man. If in the first work of the co-authors the general picture of the world was generally close to reality, then in the second the author’s irony was complemented by fantastic grotesquery. As a result, a fictional city arose, life in which was organized absurdly: the local dumpling machine produced three million dumplings per hour, the Pischeslavl club was “overgrown” with columns like scaffolding, and in the center stood an equestrian statue of the naturalist Timiryazev.
Despite the abundance of comic situations and the popularity of the topic (the story contains a parodic reference to “The Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells, who was well known in the USSR in the 1920s, after a visit to Moscow), “Bright Personality” did not arouse much interest from critics and readers. The co-authors themselves felt that the story “turned out to be paler than their first novel”; it was not even included in the four-volume collected works of Ilf and Petrov, published in 1938-1939. The re-publication of “Bright Personality” took place only in 1961.
In 1929, Ilf and Petrov began a series of short stories, “Extraordinary Stories from the Life of the City of Kolokolamsk.” The fantastic grotesque, which appeared in “The Bright Personality” as one of the sides of their creative style, here thickened “to the point of blackness.” Among the inhabitants of the city they invented, Vasisualiy Lokhankin was first mentioned, an undertaker who sowed panic among the Kolokolamites about the coming end of the world, the flood and the “heavenly abyss.” The atmosphere of communal life reproduced by the writers was reminiscent of the situation in “Voronya Slobodka” — this name, along with the surname and name of the undertaker, later appeared in “The Golden Calf”. Probably, when starting the “Kolokolamsk project”, the co-authors planned to create a Soviet version of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s “The History of a City”. However, according to literary critic Lidia Yanovskaya, “Shchedrin’s satire did not work.” Ilf and Petrov realized this earlier than the critics, so they not only interrupted work on the cycle, but did not even submit all the short stories they wrote to print.
Ilf and Petrov on Gogolevsky Boulevard.
The appearance of another cycle of short stories — “A Thousand and One Days, or the New Scheherazade”, published in “Eccentric” (1929, No. 12-22) — was preceded by advertising: readers were informed about the upcoming release of “a fairy tale of the Soviet Scheherazade, the work of F. Tolstoevsky” . The role of the storyteller was assigned to the clerk of the office for the procurement of claws and tails, Scheherazade Fedorovna Shaitanov, who, imitating her “predecessor” from “The Arabian Nights,” tells the story of bureaucrats, boors and opportunists. However, the advertisement in “Eccentric” promised a much larger number of short stories than what eventually turned out to be. During the process of work, the co-authors themselves lost interest in their idea, and “The New Scheherazade” became a “transitional work.” Later, talking about the stories and cycles of short stories created in the late 1920s, Evgeny Petrov recalled: “We are writing the history of Kolokolamsk. Scheherazade. Creative torment. We felt we needed to write something different. But what?» The result of their search was the second part of the dilogy about Ostap Bender — the novel “The Golden Calf”, where some of the characters from “A Thousand and One Days” also moved.
Film scripts and vaudeville.
Ilf and Petrov began to turn to stage genres in the 1930s, but their co-authors showed interest in them much earlier. According to literary critic Abram Vulis, the immediate predecessors of their vaudevilles and scripts were Petrov’s early stories, full of funny dialogues and in form reminiscent of short comedy plays. Later, writers’ inclination toward “visible episodes” manifested itself in the novel “The Twelve Chairs,” many of the chapters of which turned out to be truly “cinematic.” The first work of the co-authors in cinema was associated with Yakov Protazanov’s silent film “The Feast of St. Jorgen,” for which Ilya Arnoldovich and Evgeniy Petrovich wrote intertitles. Then they composed the script “Barak,” which tells how the leading builder Bityugov decided to take the lagging brigade “in tow.” The film, directed by Nikolai Gorchakov and Mikhail Yanshin, was released in 1933 under the title “Black Barracks”, but did not gain much success with viewers; according to critics, the filmmakers took a «somewhat schematic approach to people and events.»
In 1933, while traveling around Europe, Ilf and Petrov received an application from the French film company Sofar to write a script for sound cinema. The work, completed within ten days, was well appreciated by the customer; Ilf said in a letter to his wife that “the script was handed in yesterday. They liked him, they laughed a lot, they fell off their chairs.” However, the film, based on a script created in the traditions of French comedy, was never made, and the manuscript handed over to Sofar disappeared. Almost thirty years later, a typewritten copy, apparently a rough copy, was discovered in the home archive of one of the co-authors. This text was restored and first published in the magazine “Iskusstvo Kino” (1961, No. 2) under the title “Sound Film Script”.
The biased attitude of Ilf and Petrov towards parody as an element of literary play was manifested in the one-act vaudeville “Strong Feeling”, published in the magazine “Thirty Days” (1933, No. 5). The story, written by the co-authors, is, on the one hand, a unique variation of Chekhov’s “Wedding,” and, on the other, a mocking repetition of its own themes and motifs. So, in it the character of “The Twelve Chairs”, Ellochka the cannibal, who this time goes by the name Rita and strives to become the wife of a successful foreigner, is developed: “To go abroad with him! I really want… to live in bourgeois society, in a cottage, on the shore of the bay.”
Certain self-repetitions were also noticed in the script for the film “Once Upon a Summer,” released in 1936 (directed by Hanan Shmain and Igor Ilyinsky). The plot, which is based on the journey of Zhora and Telescope in a car they assembled with their own hands, is reminiscent of the plot of The Golden Calf, the characters of which set off on adventures on the Wildebeest. At the same time, despite the many funny situations in which the heroes find themselves, as well as good acting (Ilyinsky played two roles), the film “Once Upon a Summer” was not included in the list of creative successes of the co-authors. Critics noted that outdated technologies were used during filming, and therefore the film “takes us back to the times when cinematography took its first steps.”
In the mid-1930s, Ilf, Petrov and Kataev received an application from the music hall, which was in dire need of updating its repertoire, to create a modern comedy. This is how the play “Under the Circus Dome” appeared, which was later transferred almost unchanged to the script of Grigory Alexandrov’s film “Circus”. During the work, disagreements arose between Alexandrov and his co-authors. In a letter addressed to the management of Mosfilm, they indicated that due to the director’s intervention in the script, “elements of comedy have significantly decreased, elements of melodrama have significantly increased.” After negotiations with the studio management, Ilf and Petrov, who considered that their original plan was distorted, asked to remove their names from the credits.
Ilf and Petrov
Ilf and Petrov
(1897–1937s, 1902–1942s)
