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Praise for Ilf & Petrov
“Ilf & Petrov, two wonderfully gifted writers, decided that if they had a rascal adventurer as protagonist, whatever they wrote about his adventures could not be criticized from a political point of view. . . . Thus Ilf & Petrov . . . managed to publish some absolutely first-rate fiction under that standard of complete independence.”
—Vladimir Nabokov
“Ilf & Petrov are the foremost comic novelists of the early Soviet Union.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Golden Calf is one of the most comic and politically subversive novels written under communism. Smooth operator Ostap Bender—whose sole goal in life was to become a millionaire and move to Rio de Janeiro—is one of the great classic heroes, standing shoulder to shoulder with Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Hašek’s vejk.”
—Dubravka Ugresic
Other Books by Ilf & Petrov
in English Translation
American Road Trip:
The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers
Little Golden America
The Twelve Chairs
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Tekst Publishers Moscow
Copyright © 2003 by Aleksandra Ilf (commentary and arrangement of text)
www.nibbe-wiedling.de
Translation copyright © 2009 by Helen Anderson and Konstantin Gurevich
First edition, 2009
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Control CIP information available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-52-8
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
From the Translators
The Golden Calf was written in 1929-1931 and first serialized in a popular magazine in 1931. It is generally considered a sequel to the authors’ earlier work, The Twelve Chairs (1928), although the two novels share only the chief protagonist, Ostap Bender. He was killed at the end of the first novel (see “From the Authors”) but resurrected in The Golden Calf. The events of the first novel are mentioned in The Golden Calf only in passing (in Chapters 12 and 30).
This is the third translation of the novel into English. The first one, by Charles Malamuth, was published under the title The Little Golden Calf in 1932; the second, by John H. C. Richardson, in 1962. Some say foreign classics need to be translated anew for every new generation of readers. Either way, both previous translations omitted whole passages from the standard Soviet text, for reasons that we can only speculate about. All these gaps have been restored in this translation; we did not leave out a single paragraph.
In full agreement with our editors, we approached the novel as a work of literature first and foremost, and aimed the translation at a broad English-speaking audience. Thus a few of the more obscure Soviet realia and personalities were simplified or partially deciphered in the text, in order to give the reader at least some frame of reference. There also are a few explanatory notes at the end of the book.
A word about the Ilf-Petrovian character names. Some are simply regular Russian names, others are tongue-in-cheek puns, still others are hilarious word games. Most are untranslatable without rendering them artificial and unwieldy, so we did what we could, leaving most of them alone.
We are grateful to all those who published extensive commentaries to the novel (Alexandra Ilf, A. Wentzel, Ye. Sakharova), but especially to Professor Yuri Shcheglov, whose monumental work (Vienna, 1991 and Moscow, 1995) proved invaluable.
—Konstantin Gurevich & Helen Anderson
From the Authors
Usually our communal literary enterprise inspires perfectly legitimate, though rather unoriginal, questions like: “How do you manage to write together?”
At first, we would give detailed responses and even tell the story of our big fight over whether to kill Ostap Bender, the protagonist of the novel The Twelve Chairs, or to let him live. We would painstakingly describe how his fate was decided by drawing lots. We put two pieces of paper in a sugar bowl—one blank, the other with a skull and two chicken bones sketched in a shaky hand. We drew the one with the skull, and in thirty minutes the grand strategist was dead, his throat slashed with a razor.
After a while, our responses grew shorter. First we dropped the story of the skull and chicken bones, then many other details. Finally, our answers lost all vestiges of enthusiasm.
“How do we manage to write together? Well, we just do. Like the Goncourt brothers. Edmond makes the rounds of the publishers, while Jules guards the manuscript, making sure their friends don’t steal it.”
Suddenly this monotonous line of questioning was interrupted.
“Tell me,” asked a stern citizen, one of those who recognized the Soviet government just after England and shortly before Greece, “tell me, why is your writing funny? Why all this giggling during the time of post-revolutionary reconstruction? Have you lost your mind?”
And then he gave us a long and angry lecture, trying to convince us that laughter has no place in these times.
“Laughing is wrong!” he said. “That’s right, no laughing! And no smiling either! When I see this new life, these monumental changes, I don’t feel like laughing, I feel like praying!”
“But we’re not just laughing,” we protested. “What we’re doing is satirizing exactly those people who do not understand the period of reconstruction.”
“Satire should not be funny,” said the stern comrade. He then grabbed some Baptist simpleton, whom he mistook for a dyed-in-the-wool proletarian, and led him off to his place. There, he would craft a boring description of the simpleton and write him into a six-volume novel entitled But Not These Bloody Despots!
We didn’t make this up. If we did, we could have made it funnier.
Cut this sanctimonious toady loose and he would make even men wear the hijab, while he himself would play hymns and psalms on the trumpet from early morning on, convinced that this is the best way to help build socialism.
And so whenever we worked on The Golden Calf, we always felt the presence of this stern citizen hovering over us:
“What if this chapter turns out funny? What will the stern citizen say?”
Finally,
