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

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