In 1913, he worked at an architect's office, aviation plant, and hand Despite the pressure of his father, Ilfĭid not pursue career in business. His father, Arnoldįainzilberg, was a bank clerk. Ilya Ilf (pseudonym of Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg),īorn into a Jewish family in Odessa. Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and ‎Yevgeny Petrov, translated from the Russian by John Richardson) It was no joke being fifty-two, and that the weather was damp at the On awakening, it usually meant that his liver was playing tricks, that ' Bon jour ' showed that he had woken up in a good humor.

Jour! ' sang Ippolit Matveyevich to himself as Their cooperation until they met in Moscow. Both were born in Odessa, but Ilf and Petrov did not start On the collaborative work – other books have not stood the test of Number of stories and sketches under the pseudonym 'Tolstoyevsky' in The Soviet Russia of 1927 hidden jewelry with Ippolit Matveyevich In the story Ostap Bender, a clever scoundrel, tries to find in Russian writers and journalists, whose best known work is the They were like a breath of fresh air in the stuffy communal flat of Soviet reality, replete with stale smells of cabbage soup and rotten political dogma.A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Hilarious, vitriolic and deeply anti-Soviet, the novels became cult reading for the embattled Soviet intelligentsia. The Twelve Chairs and its sequel The Little Golden Calf were both penned by the brilliant Odessa-born tandem of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

I find it both reassuring and calming – like looking at the quiet sea. Re-reading my favourite Russian books in my second mother tongue has become an addiction: it adds some coveted balance and symmetry to my otherwise rather chaotic life. I re-read it several times a year – now mostly in English translations.

The spring evenings were delightful, the mud glistened like coal in the light of the moon, and all the young men of the town were so much in love with the secretary of the communal-service workers' committee that she found difficulty in collecting their subscriptions.' This is the opening paragraph of The Twelve Chairs, my favourite book of all time. In actual fact, people came into the world, shaved, and died rather rarely in the regional centre of N. that the inhabitants seemed to be born merely in order to have a shave, get their hair cut, freshen up their heads with toilet water and then die. 'There were so many hairdressing establishments and funeral homes in the regional centre of N.

The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf