Ilf and Petrov

Ilf and Petrov were two Soviet prose authors of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilya Ilf ( Ilya Arnoldovich Fainsilberg, Илья Арнольдович Файнзильберг, 1897-1937 ) and Yevgeny Petrov ( Yevgeniy Petrovich Katayev, Евгений Петрович Катаев, 1903-1942 ). The largest part of their work they wrote together, and almost always by the name " Ilf and Petrov ". Her two satirical novels Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf they made very popular. The two texts are connected by the fate of its main character, the con man Ostap Bender on the pursuit of wealth.

Both books describe the way Bender and his associates looking for treasure in the midst of contemporary Soviet reality. They originated in the relatively liberal era of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s. Avoid the protagonists usually the contact with the obviously lax law enforcement. Your position is outside of organized, plan-led Soviet society. The work of the authors served as a platform for a glimpse of the dark side of the socialist society. The books are among the most widely read and cited works of Russian culture.

Twelve Chairs was filmed both in the USSR and in the USA ( by Mel Brooks); see The Twelve Chairs.

Both writers visited during the global economic crisis, the United States. With ILFS made ​​on the trip images, the authors wrote a photo essay titled American photographs, published in the journal Ogonek. Shortly thereafter, she published the book One-storey America ( Одноэтажная Америка ). The photo essay and the book documenting their adventures with them their own playful humor. Ilf and Petrov did not hesitate to portray certain aspects of the American way of life in these works positively.

Ilf died shortly after his trip to America from tuberculosis; Petrov died in 1942 in a plane crash during the German - Soviet war.

A discovered in 1982 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karatschkina the minor planet was named after them: 3668 IlfPetrow.

Works

  • The Twelve Chairs (1928, Двенадцать стульев )
  • The Golden Calf (1931, Золотой теленок )
  • One-storey America (1937, Одноэтажная Америка ) This single storey America: A journey narrative. German -language translation of Helmut Ettinger. Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3821862392
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