Il'f and Petrov's One-Story America:
Context and Reception History

           In 1989 Tomas Kolesnichenko, a Soviet journalist who had spent the last thirty years working for Pravda and representing Soviet journalism in English-speaking countries, wrote an afterword to Pravda's new edition of One-Story America. Kolesnichenko was a senior Soviet journalist with extensive American experience musing on the American experience of other senior Soviet journalists; the similarity of his position to Il'f and Petrov's made him the perfect authoritative commentator for a new edition. Fifty-odd years after the coauthors' American travelogue One-Story America was first published in 1937 Kolesnichenko asks rhetorically, "Why is it time to reissue One-Story America?"¹ He gives two reasons: Il'f and Petrov's excellent writing (which he characterizes as full of the same humor which so entertained readers of the coauthors' most famous works, the two novels about the con man Ostap Bender) and Il'f and Petrov's continuing relevance:

"the authors didn't miss a single one of what later became the traditional, and even stereotypical, clichйs of the journalistic vision of America: the power of money, the disenfranchised, bitter fate of Blacks and Indians. The spiritual emptiness, the eternal chase after success, and the stultifying opium of the masses, the "dream factory," Hollywood - all are discussed impartially." ²

           This obligatory list of American sore points had already been established by the aggressively negative portraits of America painted by other famous Soviet citizens who traveled there in the early part of the twentieth century, including Maxim Gor'ky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, and Boris Pil'niak. Il'f and Petrov were well aware of their predecessors' opinions, and even referred to them occasionally in the text of One-Story America. Il'f and Petrov's success, writes Kolesnichenko, is that "the intonation of [their] book, its lyrical internal construction, doesn't have anything in common with the brand of the "yellow devil," which later [...] inevitably accompanied every essay and book about America." ³ How did Il'f and Petrov manage to transform the tone and thrust of the American travelogue while remaining grounded in the same set of recurring concerns?

           Mark Teeter points out that the most immediate, and most emphatic, contrast to Il'f and Petrov's travelogue was Pil'niak's vituperative rant Okay, published in 1933, just two years before Il'f and Petrov began their trip in the fall of 1935. Il'f and Petrov's and Pil'niak's two visions of America are fundamentally at odds; Teeter identifies the source of this difference in the fact that "the underlying feeling in [Il'f and Petrov's] works is one of warmth, even toward the negative characters," so that they "could no more abandon their basic zhizneradostnost ["life-affirming joy"] in beholding the New World than Pil'niak could turn Happy Wanderer after a career of darkly ornamental prose and a history of ominous public attacks against him." ⁴ In general, Teeter identifies the appeal of the coauthors' narrative as the "irresistible tone of comedic irony, with the authors either gently mocking their subjects or, perhaps even more frequently, gently mocking themselves," in comparison to other travel memoirists' insistence on "taking both themselves and their observations, for the most part, dreadfully seriously." ⁵

           As Teeter points out, Il'f and Petrov differed from their predecessors in being defined as humorists.⁶ But their comedic irony and distancing are not the only ways in which the coauthors diverge from their predecessors. Other differences Teeter identifies are the narrative's "structural accessibility" and the inspired use of comic relief in the form of the Trone couple, called the Adamses in the book.⁷ Another important difference is the tone of Il'f and Petrov's critiques, which seem to be issued from a more confident, and therefore less aggressive, standpoint than the critiques of earlier Soviet writers.

           Witness, for example, Il'f and Petrov's comments on the American love of electricity in comparison to remarks made on the same theme by their predecessors. In his infamous "City of the Yellow Devil," Gor'ky (writing in 1906 and therefore referring to gas lighting, not electricity) describes lit-up windows in New York skyscrapers as "the yellow eyes of terrible animals who have to guard the dead riches of those tombs all night."⁸ Gor'ky declares that "in this city when you look at lights locked away in transparent prisons of glass, you understand that here light, like everything else, is enslaved. It serves Gold [...]." "Trembling, the light goes out, having performed its pitiful job of being a provocateur, a lackey of advertising."⁹ Seventeen years later, in 1923, Esenin draws a contrast between the recently electrified Soviet street and the quintessential electrified American one: "It's too dark on our streets to understand what the electric lights of Broadway are. We are used to living by the light of the moon, to lighting candles for icons, not for people."¹⁰ He describes the "sea of electrical advertising billboards" and concludes "when you see [...] all this, you are involuntarily impressed by man's potential and it's embarrassing that even now in Russia people still believe in an old man with a beard and trust in his mercy."¹¹ In 1926 a more aggressive Mayakovsky points out that Americans take electric light for granted. He calls it "daytime advertising electricity, unconcerned and unconserved."¹² He observes dryly that there is so much light that even at night "you can read a newspaper, moreover, of someone sitting next to you, moreover, in a foreign language" and contemplates why, in an atmosphere of such cheap electric tricks, the rich choose to eat by candlelight:

"These candles make me laugh.
All electricity belongs to the bourgeois, but it eats surrounded by candle stubs.
It is unconsciously afraid of its electricity.
It is troubled by the wizard who has called up spirits but doesn't know how to control them.
This is the majority opinion about the rest of technology too."¹³

           In 1937, however, neither Gor'ky's righteous anger, Esenin's inferiority complex, nor Mayakovsky's sneering class consciousness are visible in Il'f and Petrov's attitude towards American electricity. Rather, they regretfully confirm that the American tendency to excess is a poor use to which to put American technological know-how:

"[On Broadway] electricity is lowered (or raised, if you like) to the level of a trained circus animal. Here it has been forced to make funny faces, jump through hoops, wink, and dance. They've turned Edison's calm electricity into [Soviet animal trainer] Durov's sea lion. It catches a ball on its nose, juggles, dies, comes back to life, and does everything on command. The electric parade never ends. The lights of advertisements blink on, rotate, and go out, only to come right back on again; letters large and small, white, red, and green, run eternally away somewhere, only to return the next moment and renew their furious race." ¹⁴

           Even more than tone and style, however, the main difference between Il'f and Petrov and their predecessors is content: the coauthors have more praise for America than anyone else does. They were genuinely impressed by some aspects of the American way of life, such as service, cleanliness, work ethic, and democratic relations between employer and employed. They were so positive about these things that even their negative observations don't fully negate the overall tone of approval. In fact, Teeter wonders whether the real goal of Il'f and Petrov's occasional dogmatisms wasn't simply to get the book past the censor: their effect is "to balance (one is tempted to say "insure the publication of") the explicit and implicit forms of praise for the "forms" of American democracy which follow."¹⁵ Teeter describes One-Story America as "almost a miracle of accommodation," since it is a substantial, positive account of the US that was both printed and reprinted by both Soviet and American publishing concerns.¹⁶

           Teeter is correct in identifying Il'f and Petrov's ideological balancing act as a "miracle of accommodation." However, I would suggest that the miracle is less its bilateral success than the fact that it was published in the Soviet Union at all. Il'f and Petrov were taking a risk by asserting in the penultimate (forty-sixth) chapter of One-Story America that "we can learn a lot from America," even though this assertion was followed immediately by a caveat: "We are doing that, but the lessons we are learning from America are episodic and too specialized."¹⁷ Il'f and Petrov also explained that they "always talked about the Soviet Union, drew parallels, made comparisons. [...] There wasn't a conversation that didn't sooner or later turn to mentioning the Union: 'We have this,' 'We have that,' 'It'd be good to have this,' 'We do that better,' 'We still don't know how to do this,' 'We already know how to do that.'"¹⁸ Apparently mentioning that there were things that the USSR could learn from the USA was too much, even in the midst of a chapter larded with comments that signal the coauthors' loyalty, such as "We want to catch up to and overtake technological America" or "[America] is interesting to observe, but we wouldn't want to live there."¹⁹ Both of them felt the extent of the risk they took by treating America they way they did: the months between the serialization of One-Story America in Znamia at the end of 1936 and the first book edition in April 1937 were hard for both coauthors as they waited for reviews of the Znamia serialization. According to Petrov, Il'f described this period of nervous waiting as a time when "the brick was flying" (letit kirpich), meaning that he was nervously waiting for the other (political) shoe to drop.²⁰

           On March 21st, 1937, it did: the first official newspaper review in Izvestiia, titled "Branching Skyscrapers" ("Razvesistye neboskreby") was published.²¹ It was a harsh attack. Il'f's colleague Vulis recalled in 1989 that Il'f, upset, telephoned him up the day the review was published to share the bad news. What might have made the attack especially bitter for the coauthors was a circumstance Vulis doesn't mention: on March 20^th, the day before the negative review, Izvestiia published a speech by the Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy in which he praised One-Story America.²² Clearly, the next day's negative review signaled official disagreement with Tolstoy's inappropriate enthusiasm.

           Reactions continued to vary as the text evolved from serialization to book form. Lidiia Ianovskaia has pointed out that a phrase which irritated editors when One-Story America was serialized was taken out for the first book edition. This phrase was: "it would really help us to study American forms of interaction between directors and subordinate employees."²³ Even readers who were personally well-disposed toward the coauthors and who retained a high opinion of the book were sometimes nonplussed by the intensity of Il'f and Petrov's crush on America. Lev Nikulin, for example, tempered his positive response by saying that the book's main flaw was that it was too taken with American service.²⁴

           Despite the prevalence of negative reviews, One-Story America was published in at least seven different publishing houses in 1937.²⁵ It was published again in 1939 in the fourth and final volume of the coauthors' first Collected Works. A ten-year hiatus in publishing followed, and the book was released again in 1949, in the only Soviet edition to contain photographs. The year 1949, however, was also the year that Il'f and Petrov's Ostap Bender novels were attacked in Literaturnaia gazeta and marked the beginning of a seven year period when I'lf and Petrov were personae non grata in Soviet literature. Their unofficial silencing ended in 1956 when the Bender novels were published again though the sponsorship of Konstantin Simonov, a gesture which prepared the way for the 1961 publication of the authoritative five-volume Collected Works, containing, of course, One-Story America.

           Since this 1961 edition was precisely a canonizing one, meant to affirm the coauthors' status as Soviet classics, it required close editorial work to make sure that each text appeared in what the editorial committee considered its best, most correct form. In the case of One-Story America, edition editor Irina Izrail'skaia wrote to Mitrofan Fedorin in the Press Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking someone to review the book. Specifically, Izrail'skaia wanted to know whether individual people named in the text still felt as positively about the USSR as they did when Il'f and Petrov met them, and if not, what she should do about it.²⁶ Izrail'skaia's request is not dated, but the reply is dated September 13^th, 1961, not long after the famous 1959 kitchen debate between Khrushchev and Nixon and only a few months after the Bay of Pigs debacle that set the stage for the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Given the tenor of contemporary political relations between the two superpowers, Izrail'skaia had reason to want permission from a higher authority to publish a largely positive portrayal of America.²⁷

           The reply to Izrail'skaia's request was a letter from one A. Iakovlev with a litany of twenty-three corrections.²⁸ Four are corrections of spelling and transliteration, four comments point out demographic changes since 1935 (such as the death of Hemingway or the doubled population of Washington, D.C.), and eight comments have to do with assertions about American life or the American character Iakovlev doesn't agree with. Most of these are offered in the spirit of the Cold War, for example, his insistent niggling about Il'f and Petrov's enthusiasm for America. He'd like the editors to remove the words "not very expensive" in reference to American hotels, since hotels in the United States are "immensely expensive;" he quotes the coauthors' phrase "noble technical style" and asks petulantly "why 'noble?'" He also selects the phrase "it gives technical America an unusually attractive appearance" for rebuke, scolding "unfounded rapture! Better to take this out."

           He also wants to correct Il'f and Petrov's overly optimistic view of much-vaunted American qualities like service and character: "The assertion that 'linens and laundry are delivered mended, and the socks darned' is not wholly true. That's just in good hotels, and anyway, nobody darns socks anymore. It's more expensive than buying new ones." This correction is true, but it also shows how, to Iakovlev at least, their characterization of that bygone America needed to be edited to conform to the political objectives of the present. Other objections by Iakovlev border on the nationalistic: "Americans aren't 'always smiling' - they're very worried and gloomy people." When Il'f and Petrov assert that an American giving directions "doesn't beat around the bush or lie. If he says he knows, it means he knows," Iakovlev retorts, "He does, too, and how!" The reviewer also gets his dander up when Il'f and Petrov encroach upon a hallowed Russian belief about Russianness by claiming that American hospitality eclipses its Russian, Siberian, and Georgian counterparts. Iakovlev contends: "it doesn't correspond to reality. Take out the two paragraphs about this, since the majority of Americans are indifferent and, of course, it makes no sense to even talk about a comparison." Five of Iakovlev's comments argue over word choice: he criticizes the phrase "the paperboys roared hoarsely," since "that's a very big exaggeration," and asks "Why bearling [medvedik, a nonexistent diminutive] instead of little bear [medvezhonok]?"

           Only two comments are explicitly political. Both are recommendations to take out the reference to Louis Fischer, an American journalist living in the Soviet Union who returned to America soon after Il'f and Petrov's trip. After his return, Fischer became quite anti-Soviet, an embarrassing fact Iakovlev evidently wished to disguise by excising the offender's name, a typical Soviet strategy for bringing an incriminating past to heel. Only one comment of the twenty-three corrects Il'f and Petrov's narrative to make it more, not less, complimentary to America: when Il'f and Petrov comment with distaste that "Americans are a chewing people [zhuiushchii narod]," he replies primly, "Not true. Athletes, boys, and cowboys in the movies chew. In many universities and even cities it's considered bad-mannered and is forbidden."

           In the end, most of Iakovlev's hypersensitive commentary went unused. Konstantin Simonov, ever the pragmatist, suggested that the editors simply mention in the volume notes where an individual's (i.e. Fischer's) political views towards the USSR had changed, but leave everything else as it was.²⁹ This is more or less what happened: of Iakovlev's twenty-three suggestions, only five were observed by the edition editors. Of those five, three were stylistic: changing a line to read on Park Avenue [na Park-aveniu], not in [v], "since it's a street, not a park," and correcting the transliterations of the words "Oklahoma" and "Trust." The two comments about Louis Fischer did result in the removal of the phrase describing Fischer as "well-known in leftist American circles," but his name stayed in the text. In Galanov's notes to One-Story America in the back of Volume IV of Il'f and Petrov's 1961 Collected Works, he didn't even bother to warn readers of Fischer's political untrustworthiness, much less raise the issues of "bearling," "a chewing people," and the darning of socks.

           The most interesting part of this process is the way Iakovlev misreads his assigned task: instead of simply vetting the text for references to political undesirables, he takes it on himself to critique Il'f and Petrov's critique of America. Yet he assiduously avoids mentioning the text's many assertions of America's strong points, which might have been worth removing had he really been interested in making the book more anti-American; he focuses instead on small points of emphasis or diction. Ianovskaia and Simonov, in turn, perform the rituals of textual censorship, but this public performance is perfunctory, producing three grammatical corrections and one political one in a 450-page text. This striking example of a censorship robust in intent but flaccid in practice may be one we should take at face value, proof that individuals in high places could do much to circumvent the official demands of the system. However, it is equally plausible that changes other than the ones Iakovlev suggested were made to the text, but weren't recorded in the edition file. Although Soviet textological theory emphasized transparency and taught that all changes to a text must be recorded in that text's "passport" or protocol, in practice the (understandable) Soviet reluctance to leave a paper trail means that more censorship probably happened off the record than on it.³⁰

           Il'f and Petrov's American trip continued to exert an influence on Soviet journalists traveling to and through America. From the 1950s to the 1970s many Soviet writers referred to One-Story America in their own travelogues, and in 1970 journalists Boris Strel'nikov and Il'ia Shatunovskii set out specifically to recreate Il'f and Petrov's trip.³¹ The new coauthors made a pact "not to try to act like Il'f and Petrov under any circumstances; not to try to write like them, and not to pretend that we're as famous as them."³² Perhaps to the detriment of their project, Strel'nikov and Shatunovskii kept the terms f their pact: in comparison to One-Story America, their narrative America from Both Sides turned out to be more supercilious and less willing to give America her due.

           In the end, that willingness is what sets Il'f and Petrov apart from their past, present, and future colleagues. By balancing a cutting assessment of America's vices with enthusiastic praise for her virtues, the coauthors establish the grounds for credibility; as a result, One-Story America has a critical economy to which readers can subscribe regardless of political orientation.³³ Kolesnichenko points out - twice - the significant conjunction of timing and content: Il'f and Petrov bravely wrote a narrative with more positive comments about America, and less political posturing, than usual for the fatal year of 1937.³⁴ As the Cold War progressed, the coauthors' measured American observations stood out in ever sharper relief against the backdrop of increasingly bombastic rhetoric. Still, since its publication One-Story America provoked both praise and criticism from both professional and non-professional readers on both the left and right in both the USA and the USSR. Diametrically opposed readings are equally supportable as long as readers select textual proof judiciously. More than their irony, comic touch, optimism, or positive reading of America, perhaps it is this fundamental political unfinalizability which has kept this text in demand with Soviet and post-Soviet readers.

Anne O. Fisher, 2005
University of Michigan

NOTES

1. Tomas Kolesnichenko, "Naedine s Amerikoi." Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, Tonia (Moskva, 1989), 479. Here and throughout, all translations are my own.
2. Ibid., 481.
3. Ibid., 482.
4. Mark Teeter, The Early Soviet De Tocquevilles: Method, Voice, and Social Commentary in the First Generation of Soviet Travel Publitsistika from America (1925-1936), Georgetown University dissertation, (Washington, D.C., 1987). 267.
5. Ibid., 279-80, 279. Compare, however, similar moments of self-directed comedic irony present in Mayakovsky's narrative, for example when he describes how his pockets were emptied by a Coney Island swindler (in the chapter "N'iu-Iork," in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moe otkrytie Ameriki, excerpted in Mirsaid Saparov, ed., Ocherki sovetskikh pisatelei ob Amerike [Leningrad, 1983], 81).
6. Ibid., 266.
7. Ibid., 277, 278-9.
8. Maksim Gor'ky, "Gorod Zheltogo D'iavola," excerpted in Mirsaid Saparov, ed., Ocherki sovetskikh pisatelei ob Amerike [Leningrad, 1983], 12.
9. Ibid., 13, 14.
10. This quote begins the second chapter, "Brodvei," of Sergei Esenin's Zheleznyi mirgorod, excerpted in Saparov, Ocherki sovetskikh pisatelei, 116.
11. Ibid., 118.
12. As usual with Mayakovsky, this translation is approximate in an attempt to convey the feel of the original: "dnevnoe reklamnoe nezhaleemoe, neekonomimoe elektrichestvo." From the chapter "N'iu-Iork" in his Moe otkrytie Ameriki, excerpted in Saparov, Ocherki sovetskikh pisatelei, 68.
13. Ibid., 74, 79.
14. Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, in Il'ia Il'f i Evgenii Petrov. Sobranie sochinenii. Tom IV: Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, Tonia, Ocherki (1935-1936) (Moskva, 1961), 20.
15. Teeter, Soviet De Tocquevilles, 312.
16. Ibid., 263.
17. Il'f and Petrov, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, 440.
18. Ibid., 434.
19. Ibid., 440, 442.
20. Petrov's recollection (in "Zhurnalist" No. 6 [1967], 63) is cited in A. A. Kurdiumov [Iakov Lur'e]. V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov. Kniga ob Il'fe i Petrove (Paris, 1983), 205. Later Lur'e comments that "this was [Il'f's] general mood for the last year of his life" (207).
21. Abram Vulis. "Iubilei poloviny Tolstoevskogo." Krokodil, No. 29 ([October] 1987), quoted in Evgenii Petrov. Moi drug Il'f. Sostavlenie i kommentarii A. I. Il'f (Moskva, 2001), 208.
22. Tolstoy's speech was printed in Izvestiia, No. 68 (1937), March 20. The citation is given by Galanov in his volume notes to One-Story America (Boris Galanov. "Odnoetazhnaia Amerika," in Il'ia Il'f i Evgenii Petrov. Sobranie sochinenii. Tom IV: Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, Tonia, Ocherki [1935-1936], [Moskva, 1961], 589).
23. Lidiia Ianovskaia. Pochemu vy pishete smeshno? (Moskva, 1963), 201-2. Quoted in Kurdiumov, V kraiu, 194.
24. Lev Nikulin. Letter in Kniga i proletarskaia revoliutsiia. No. 2 (1937), 121-22. Quoted in Lure, V kraiu, 205. While the volume notes to the 1961 edition do mention Nikulin's positive review, they don't mention his criticism (Galanov, "Odnoetazhnaia Amerika," 589).
25. To the list provided by Galanov at the beginning of his volume notes I can add an edition published in Stalingrad (Galanov, "Odnoetazhnaia Amerika," 579). Unsurprisingly, the notes give the impression that the reaction to One-Story America by Soviet critics was more positive than negative. Only one example of a negative review is provided, from a critic whose fault was to exaggerate the attention the coauthors paid to service; Prosin's much more negative review, which so troubled Il'f, is not mentioned (Op. cit., 590).
26. RGALI, 613.10.1394.12.
27. The peritext (that part of the paratext which is published in a book edition next to its "primary" text) included in successive editions of One-Story America provides a glimpse of changing Soviet attitudes about the clash between the USSR and the USA. In Soviet books, peritextual packaging is the preferred location for shoring up the book's authority by showing that the book echoes a statement or opinion of an approved political leader. In 1959-61, when the 1961 Collected Works was under construction, this leader was Nikita Khrushchev. Accordingly, Boris Galanov's volume notes make sure to point out the similarity of Il'f and Petrov's commentary on America to not one but two speeches by Khrushchev: the "right to be homeless" comment Khrushchev made during one of the "kitchen debates" in 1959 and the reference to the power of the dollar in the land of the Yellow Devil Khrushchev made in a speech at the United Nations in 1960 (Galanov, "Odnoetazhnaia Amerika," 585-6). However, Kolesnichenko in his 1989 afterword interprets One-Story America as an alternative to the "Yellow Devil" journalistic model, one which allows a constructive Soviet conceptualization of America. He contrasts Il'f and Petrov's praise of American technological accomplishments to the USSR's general Cold-War-era inability to say anything good about America without immediately compromising the praise. As an example of this kind of rhetoric Kolesnichenko quotes the same "right to be homeless" passage from Khrushchev's speech that Galanov used in 1961 - surely not a coincidence - and speculates hopefully, "it seems that now we aren't doing that anymore" (Kolesnichenko, Naedine, 483).
28. RGALI, 613.10.1394.5-11. All quotations from Iakovlev's letter are taken from this source and will not be quoted separately.
29. RGALI, 613.10.1394.34.
30. For example, the "passport" to the rehabilitating 1956 edition of the dilogy does not record some of the changes which Lur'e notices in his review of the 1961 edition (Iakov S. Lur'e, "K vykhodu v svet sobraniia sochinenii I. Il'fa I E. Petrova. [Tekstologicheskie zametki]," in "Russkaia literatura," No. 3, 1962, 236-240).
31. Galanov mentions some American trips by Soviet writers in the volume notes (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, 586-87); Abram Vulis also lists some in his monograph Il'ia Il'f i Evgenij Petrov. Ocherk tvorchestva (Moskva, 1960), 368-69.
32. Boris Strel'nikov, Il'ia Shatunovsky. Amerika - sprava i sleva (Moskva, 1971), 7-8.
33. For other treatments of how Il'f and Petrov's narrative builds readers' trust, see Ianovskaia (Pochemu, 157) and Teeter (Early De Tocquevilles, 282-83).
34. Kolesnichenko, Naedine, 484, 488.