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

30 In the Columbus Theatre

PART III:

MADAME PETUKHOV'S TREASURE

31 A Magic Night on the Volga
32 A Shady Couple
33 Expulsion from Paradise
34 The Interplanetary Chess Tournament
35 Et Alia
36 A View of the Malachite Puddle
37 The Green Cape
38 Up in the Clouds
39 The Earthquake
40 The Treasure

INTRODUCTION


It has long been my considered opinion that strains in Russo-American
relations are inevitable as long as the average American persists in
picturing the Russian as a gloomy, moody, unpredictable individual, and the
average Russian in seeing the American as childish, cheerful and, on the
whole, rather primitive. Naturally, we each resent the other side's unjust
opinions and ascribe them, respectively, to the malice of capitalist or
Communist propaganda. What is to blame for this? Our national literatures;
or, more exactly, those portions of them which are read. Since few Americans
know people of the Soviet Union from personal experience, and vice versa, we
both depend to a great extent on information gathered from the printed page.
The Russians know us-let us forget for a moment about Pravda-from the works
of Jack London, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain and O. Henry. We know the
Russians-let us temporarily disregard the United Nations-as we have seen
them depicted in certain novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and in the later
dramas of Chekhov.
There are two ways to correct these misconceptions. One would be to
import into Russia a considerable number of sober, serious-minded,
Russian-speaking American tourists, in exchange for an identical number of
cheerful, logical, English-speaking Russians who would visit America. The
other, less costly form of cultural exchange would be for the Russians to
read more of Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, and for
us to become better acquainted with the less solemn-though not at all less
profound-Russians. We should do well to read more of Gogol,
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov (the short stories and the one-act plays)
and-among Soviet authors-to read Mikhail Zoshchenko and Ilf and Petrov.
Thus, in its modest way, the present volume-though outwardly not very
"serious" should contribute to our better understanding of Russia and the
Russians and aid us in facing the perils of peaceful coexistence.
If writers were to be judged not by the reception accorded to them by
literary critics but by their popularity with the reading public, there