Book//mark – The Twelve Chairs | Ilya Ilf – Yevgeny Petrov, 1928
Ilya Ilf – Yevgeny Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 1928
“Now tell me the truth, Lapsus, why do you write about things you’ve never seen before in your life? Things you don’t have the slightest idea about? Why is ‘peignoir’ a ball gown in your poem ‘Canton’? Why?”
“Clotilde stammered. “Why didn’t you hang yourself? You were just saying that art is eternal. I destroyed your eternal art. Why are you still alive, man?”
“What’s eternal is eternal, but I still have to get my commissions done on time,” said Vasya. “What did you think?”
Vasya was just an everyday hack sculptor of average talent. And Clothilde was reading too much Schiller.”
“both options had their downsides. It was impossible to begin a career as a polygamist without a wondrous, dapple-gray suit. In addition, he needed at least ten rubles for hospitality expenses and seduction. Of course, he could get married in his green campaign uniform as well, because Bender’s masculine power and attraction were absolutely irresistible to provincial, marriage-ready Margaritas; but that would be, as Bender liked to say, “Poor-quality goods. Not clean work.” It wasn’t all smooth sailing for the painting, either. Purely technical difficulties could arise. Would it be proper to paint Comrade Kalinin in a papakha and a white burka, or Comrade Chicherin naked to the waist?”
“She was, after all, a mattress owner and understood the subtleties of life.”
“A week ago, the Water Rescue Society had held an evening there, as evidenced by the slogan hanging on the wall: THE CAUSE OF HELPING THE DROWNING IS IN THE HANDS OF THE DROWNING THEMSELVES.”
“Podkolyosin asked tragically, “Why are you keeping quiet, like the League of Nations?”
“Most importantly, we have our assets: an émigré who has returned to his native town. And we have our liabilities: he is afraid the GPU will take him away.”
“The gold-seekers began to work out what the main characters were like. They sketched out dramatis personae such as:
Ugolin : A grand master of the Fascist Order (bass)
Alfonsina : His daughter (coloratura soprano)
Comrade Mitin : A Soviet inventor (baritone)
Sforza : A fascist prince (tenor)
Gavrila : A Soviet Young Communist (mezzo-soprano dressed as a man)
Nina : A Young Communist and daughter of a priest (lyric soprano)”
“Maybe we could make it to Stalingrad on twenty rubles. But how would we eat? Vitamins, my dear comrade marshal, don’t get handed out for free.”
“Just think what will happen when the tournament is over and all the visitors have gone. The residents of Moscow, crowded by the housing crisis, will flee to your magnificent city. The capital will be transferred automatically to Vasyuki. The government will move here. Vasyuki will be renamed New Moscow, and Moscow will be Old Vasyuki. Leningraders and Kharkovians will grind their teeth, but they won’t be able to do a thing about it. New Moscow will become the elegant cultural center of Europe, and soon, of the whole world.”
Ilya Ilf, Yevgeny Petrov – The Twelve Chairs, 1928
Ilya Ilf (1897–1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (1902–1942) were two Soviet prose authors of the 1920s and 1930s. They did much of their writing together, and are almost always referred to as “Ilf and Petrov“. They were natives of Odessa.
