In a Dialogue Mode: Ilf and Petrov Explore America and Russia.

           During Ilf and Petrov's trip to America they produced two types of travel narrative: notes and photographs. Both the records made by Ilf in his notebooks and the photos he took were just different kinds of travel diary. Thus the book One-Story America was an integrated narrative based on these materials and on their memory and creativity. Ilf and Petrov came to this project as already established authors; their two previous novels - The 12 Chairs and The Golden Calf - brought them well deserved popularity. There is an important peculiarity that unifies Ilf and Petrov works and gives them a special place in 20th century Russian literature. All their novels and even short stories tend to represent a diversified picture of modern life touching upon a broad range of aspects, from global ones to very specific and detailed. This is what Belinskii, a 19th century famous Russian critic, wrote about Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin labeling it an encyclopedia of Russian life.

           Why did Belinskii call Pushkin's novel in verse an encyclopedia? Not because Pushkin gave an exhaustive depiction of Russian life in the 19th century but rather because this depiction was so diverse and multiform. After the publication of commentaries to The 12 Chairs and to The Golden Calf by Yuri Scheglov it became evident that both novels are A-Z books on Soviet Russia of the 1920 - 1930s. One-Story America, a book that is also waiting for the same type of detailed commentaries, can be named an encyclopedia of American and Russian life of 1930s. The fact that this is an American encyclopedia does not need any proof. Ilf and Petrov wrote in their book about American industry and literature, Salvation Army and cinema, food and home appliances, unemployment and racial segregation, advertisement and politics, big cities and small provincial towns, etc. Why then could it be an encyclopedia of Russian life if it is a book about America? Not only because one can find numerous references to various aspects of life in Russia, but also because Ilf and Petrov's reception of the United States was mediated by the reality of Soviet Russia. Some traces of this comparison may be found on the pages of One-Story America but the entire picture of the American life in the novel is displayed against the background of Russia. Moreover, many American topics can be appreciated in full only through juxtaposition with the mirroring Russian reality.

           Ilf and Petrov came to the US on October 7, 1935 and spent three and a half months traveling across the country. The book was written during the summer of 1936 and published in October and November of the same year. Only two years prior to their trip (November 1933) diplomatic relationships between the Soviet Union and the United States were officially reestablished.

           What country did Ilf and Petrov come from?

           When the duo of Soviet writers traveled and then worked on their travelogue the plans for the Great Terror were already under way and it would be a big mistake to underestimate the pressures on every public figure in the Soviet Union. In November 1934 the so-called OSO (The Special Conference by NKVD) was authorized to issue sentences in the absence of the defendant, without questioning witnesses, without lawyers or a public prosecutor. Very soon OSO was empowered to sentence execution. In December of 1934, S. Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad. His death was used by Stalin as a pretext for mass repressions.

           The changes in political climate directly impacted Ilf and Petrov trip abroad. In March of 1935 a new law was adopted in the Soviet Union according to which the closest relatives of people who left USSR without permission or who didn't come back from their trip abroad were subject to being exiled to remote regions of the country. In August-September of 1934 the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers announced Socialist Realism adopted as the leading method of literary work. In reality, this became the only enforced method. As writers Ilf and Petrov did not entirely fit within this category. We may say that their untimely death saved them from the Great Purges. This new atmosphere in the artistic circles was aphoristically depicted by Ilf in his notebooks: "The composers didn't do anything but write denunciations of each other on music paper."

           The industrial boom in the Soviet Union also falls in the 1930s. Industrial achievements includes gigantic new plants such as car factories in Gorkii and Moscow, tractor plants in Charkiv and Stalingrad, metallurgical works in Kuznetsk and Zaporizh'e, electric power station on Dnepr, Turksib, a railroad that connected Turkestan and Siberia, the Moscow Metro and many other projects. In 1930 the last labor registry office was closed and unemployment was liquidated. At the same time the everyday life of ordinary people did not become much easier. The products of industrialization didn't have any immediate impact on their life. Such goods as automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators, cameras and many others were not available to the ordinary customers. Sheila Fitzpatrick in her book Everyday Stalinism quotes a customer who visited an exhibition where these goods were displayed: "That's all very well, but they aren't in the stores and you won't find them." The attention that Ilf and Petrov pay to American consumers enjoying the products of American industry was undoubtedly provoked by the Soviet reality. Even their interest in the American system of advertising as well as their critique of its excesses unfolds against the background of a strong tendency started in the late 1920s to curtail commercial advertisements or as S. Fitzpatrick suggests the limited number of advertisements "were not so much to sell goods - generally the products they touted were unavailable in the stores - as to educate the public." maybe break up this long sentence into 2?

           Among other everyday realia, Ilf and Petrov describe in particular detail American food and American catering, dwelling on and praising the high level of service in restaurants and cafeterias but criticizing some food for the lack of taste. The time when Ilf and Petrov planned, put into practice, and described their tour was the time of many transitions in the history of the Soviet Union. For instance, in 1935, at the First All-Union meeting of Stakhanovites Stalin pronounced his famous phrase that immediately became a slogan endlessly repeated by Soviet propaganda: Life has become better, comrades; life has become more cheerful. On January 1 of the same year the bread and flour rationing was lifted, and nine months later the rationing of such products as meet, fish, sugar and potato was also terminated. One of the Moscow newspapers of this time published a description of the newly opened food store. In the grocery department, there are 38 types of sausage, including 20 new types that have not been sold anywhere before. This department will also sell three types of cheese - Camembert, Brie and Limburg - made for the store by special order. In the confectionary department there are 200 types of candies and pastries. [...] The bread department has up to 50 kinds of bread [...] Meat is kept in refrigerated glass cases. In the fish department, there are tanks with live carp, mirror carp, bream, and pike. When the customers choose their fish, they are scooped out of the tank with the aid of nets.

           This picture of luxurious abundance needs only one qualification. The store described here according to Sheila Fitzpatrick was in Moscow, on Gorky Street; it was the former Eliseev's store, renamed Torgsin (you can find another description of this magic place in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita). In other words this was a so called commercial store that did not accept domestic currency. People who had no hard currency could barter gold coins or jewelry for ham, bread and wine. One can find evidence of such purchases in memoirs by N. Mandelshtam, V. Kataev and many more. Most people still remember the unprecedented famine of 1932-1933 that struck many regions and caused the deaths of several million people. To a great extent this famine was been provoked by mass requisitions in rural areas especially in Ukraine.

           Besides the dense layers of realia that are a part of our bigger project, the language of the book represents a special interest especially in terms of performing its English translation. Actually the language of the book is Russian plus sort of Russian English. For describing American realia Ilf and Petrov use English words in transliteration which puts an English translator in front of the dilemma: Either to make everything English which is correct but will deprive the text of its authentic flavor and style or to look for possible stylistic equivalents which seem more reasonable but are quite challenging in some instances? Personally I do not think that Ilf and Petrov consciously used this bi-lingual narrative as a stylistic tool (it was already used by Pil'niak) it was merely a natural way to adopt this new reality and new language environment but at any rate this linguistic blend or medley became a powerful tool that should be taken into account.

           In contrast to the majority of preceding Russian travelogues about America the One-Story America is not only a ideological fight between two different social systems (although it is not a sugary book, there is a lot of criticism of America both reasonable and unreasonable) but this is a dialogue of two countries, two nations and two cultures, the dialogue very human in its own nature and well grounded on understanding of similarities that are much more important than differences. We should be thankful them for initiating this dialogue and we should keep it going.

Vadim Besprozvany, 2005
University of Michigan