Eugene Petrov - The Twelve Chairs

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

hardworking engineer, become extinct. And there are still multitudes of

Muscovites who flock to museums to see how prosperously the bourgeoisie

lived before the Revolution-Muscovites who are mistaken for art lovers by

unsuspecting Western tourists who then report at home a tremendous Soviet

interest in the fine arts. Why, even the ZAGS remains unchanged; only a few

months ago Komsomolskaya Pravda, a youth newspaper, demanded that something

be done about it, because brides and grooms are embarrassed when the

indifferent clerk inquires whether they came to register a birth, a death,

or wish to get married-just as Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov did over

thirty years ago in the little Soviet town deep in the provinces.

Similarly, the "poet" Lapis who peddled nearly identical verse to

various trade publications-providing his hero Gavrila with different

professions such as chemist, postman, hunter, etc., to give the poem a

couleur local suitable for each of the journals- enjoys excellent health to

this day. There are hundreds of recent Soviet novels, poems and dramas

written by as many Soviet writers which differ only in the professions of

their protagonists; in their character delineations and conflicts they are

all very much alike. And, finally, the custom of delivering formal political

speeches, all of them long, boring, and terribly repetitious, persists to

our times. These speeches are still a regular feature at all public events

in the USSR.

Thus the Western reader, in addition to being entertained, is likely to

profit from the reading of The Twelve Chairs by getting a glimpse of certain

aspects of daily life in the Soviet Union which are not normally included in

Intourist itineraries.

The hero of The Twelve Chairs (and also, it might be added, of The

Little Golden Calf) is Ostap Bender, "the smooth operator", a resourceful

rogue and confidence man. Unlike the nobleman Vorobyaninov and the priest

Vostrikov, Bender is not a representative of the ancient regime. Only

twenty-odd years old, he does not even remember pre-revolutionary Russia: at

the first meeting of the "Alliance of the Sword and Ploughshare" Bender has

some difficulty playing the role of a tsarist officer. Ostap Bender is a

Soviet crook, born of Soviet conditions and quite willing to co-exist with

the Soviet system to which he has no ideological or even economic

objections. Ostap Bender's inimitable slangy Russian is heavily spiced with

cliches of the Communist jargon. Bender knows the vulnerabilities of Soviet

state functionaries and exploits them for his own purposes. He also knows

that the Soviet Man is not very different from the Capitalist Man-that he is

just as greedy, lazy, snobbish, cowardly and gullible-and uses these

weaknesses to his, Ostap Bender's, advantage. And yet, in spite of Ostap

Bender's dishonesty and lack of scruples, we somehow get to like him. Bender

is gay, carefree and clever, and when we see him matching his wits with

those of Soviet bureaucrats, we hope that he wins.

In the end Ostap Bender and his accomplices lose; yet, strangely

enough, the end of the novel seems forced, much like the cliche happy ending

of a mediocre Hollywood film. One must understand, however, that even in the

comparatively "liberal" 1920s it was difficult for a Soviet author not to

supply a happy Soviet ending to a book otherwise as aloof from Soviet

ideology as The Twelve Chairs. And so, at the end of the novel, one of the

greedy fortune-hunters is killed by his partner, while the other two end up

in a psychiatric ward. But at least Ilf and Petrov have spared us from

seeing Ostap Bender contrasted with a virtuous upright Soviet hero, and for

this we must be grateful. Much as in Gogol's Inspector General and Dead

Souls and in the satires of Saltykov-Shchedrin, we observe with fascination

a Russia of embezzlers, knaves and stupid government officials. We

understand their weaknesses and vices, for they are common to all men.

Indeed, we can even get to like these people, as we could not like the

stuffy embodiments of Communist virtues who inhabit the great majority of