Ilf and petrov one-story america lj. One-story America. Here is some of them

The travel notes of Ilf and Petrov "One-storied America" were published in 1937, more than seventy years ago. In the fall of 1935, Ilf and Petrov were sent to the United States as correspondents for the Pravda newspaper.

It is difficult to say what exactly the top authorities were guided by when they sent satirists into the very thick of capitalism. Most likely, they expected a vicious, destroying satire on the "country of Coca-Cola", but it turned out to be a smart, fair, benevolent book. It aroused keen interest among Soviet readers, who up to that time had not even a rough idea of the North American United States.

The further history of the book cannot be called simple: it was either published, then banned, then removed from libraries, then parts of the text were cut off.

As a rule, "One-story America" was included in a few collected works of Ilf and Petrov, separate editions rarely appeared ("no matter how it happened!"). There are only two editions with Ilfov's photo illustrations.

It is remarkable that the time has come when the desire to repeat the journey of Ilf and Petrov brought to life the documentary television series “One-Story America” by Vladimir Pozner (he conceived this project thirty years ago). In addition to the series, we received a book of travel notes by Posner and the American writer, radio journalist Brian Kahn, with photographs by Ivan Urgant.

In a series worthy of all praise, one feels respect for the original. Vladimir Pozner constantly refers to Ilf and Petrov, keenly noting the similarities and differences in the life of America then and now. Posner's television series is known to have aroused great interest in the United States. And I was pleased to discover that many of my compatriot acquaintances, under the influence of the series, are re-reading the old One-Story America.

Today's America is very interested in its history, including the time reflected in the book of Ilf and Petrov. More recently, exhibitions of Ilf's "American photographs" have been successfully held at several American universities. And in New York, an edition was published: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip. The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov(2007). This is a translation of the Ogonkovskaya publication of 1936, with numerous Ilfov photographs.

Good mutual interest benefits everyone.

However, modern America continues to be "one-story".

Alexandra Ilf

A number of surnames and geographical names are given in accordance with modern spelling.

Part one

From the window of the 27th floor

"Normandy"

At nine o'clock a special train leaves Paris, taking passengers of the Normandie to Le Havre. The train goes non-stop and after three hours rolls into the building of the Havre maritime station. Passengers go to the closed platform, go up to the top floor of the station on the escalator, go through several halls, go along the gangways closed on all sides and find themselves in a large lobby. Here they sit in the elevators and disperse to their floors. This is the Normandy. What her appearance is - the passengers do not know, because they never saw the ship.

We entered the elevator, and a boy in a red jacket with gold buttons pressed a beautiful button with a graceful movement. The shiny new elevator rose a little, got stuck between floors and suddenly moved down, ignoring the boy who was desperately pressing the buttons. Going down three floors, instead of going up two, we heard a painfully familiar phrase, uttered, however, in French: "The elevator does not work."

We climbed the stairs to our cabin, entirely covered with a fireproof light green rubber carpet. Corridors and vestibules of the ship are covered with the same material. The step is soft and inaudible. It's nice. But you really begin to appreciate the advantages of rubber flooring during pitching: the soles seem to stick to it. This, however, does not save you from seasickness, but it prevents you from falling.

The staircase was not at all like a steamboat - wide and sloping, with flights and landings, the dimensions of which are quite acceptable for any home.

The cabin was also some kind of non-ship. A spacious room with two windows, two wide wooden beds, armchairs, closets, tables, mirrors, and all amenities, down to the telephone. In general, the Normandy looks like a steamship only in a storm - then it shakes at least a little. And in calm weather, it is a colossal hotel with a magnificent view of the sea, which suddenly broke off the embankment of a fashionable resort and sailed at a speed of thirty miles an hour to America.

Deep below, from the platforms of all the floors of the station, the mourners shouted out their last greetings and wishes. They shouted in French, in English, in Spanish. They also shouted in Russian. A strange man in a black naval uniform with a silver anchor and a shield of David on his sleeve, in a beret and with a sad beard was shouting something in Hebrew. Later it turned out that this was a steamship rabbi, whom the General Transatlantic Company maintains in the service to meet the spiritual needs of a certain part of the passengers. For the other part, there are Catholic and Protestant priests at the ready. Muslims, fire worshipers and Soviet engineers are deprived of spiritual service. In this respect, the General Transatlantic Company has left them to their own devices. There is a fairly large Catholic church on the Normandy, illuminated by an extremely convenient electric demi-light for prayer. The altar and religious images can be covered with special shields, and then the church automatically turns into a Protestant one. As for the rabbi with the sad beard, he is not given a separate room, and he performs his services in the children's room. For this purpose, the company gives him a tales and a special drapery, with which he closes for a while the vain images of bunnies and cats.

The ship left the harbour. There were crowds of people on the embankment and on the pier. The Normandie is still unaccustomed to, and every voyage of the transatlantic colossus attracts everyone's attention in Le Havre. The French coast disappeared in the smoke of a cloudy day. By evening, the lights of Southampton shone. For an hour and a half, the Normandy stood in the roadstead, taking passengers from England, surrounded on three sides by the distant mysterious light of an unfamiliar city. And then she went out into the ocean, where the noisy fuss of invisible waves, raised by a storm wind, was already beginning.

Everything trembled in the stern, where we were placed. The decks, the walls, the portholes, the deck chairs, the glasses over the washbasin, the washbasin itself were trembling. The vibration of the ship was so strong that even such objects from which this could not be expected began to make sounds. For the first time in our lives, we heard the sound of a towel, soap, carpet on the floor, paper on the table, curtains, a collar thrown on the bed. Everything that was in the cabin sounded and rattled. It was enough for the passenger to think for a second and weaken the muscles of his face, as his teeth began to chatter. All night long it seemed that someone was breaking at the door, knocking on the windows, laughing heavily. We counted a hundred different sounds that our cabin made.

The Normandy was making its tenth voyage between Europe and America. After the eleventh voyage, she will go to the dock, her stern will be dismantled, and the design flaws that cause vibration will be eliminated.

In the morning a sailor came and tightly closed the portholes with metal shields. The storm intensified. The small cargo steamer struggled its way to the French shores. Sometimes he disappeared behind the wave, and only the tips of his masts were visible.

For some reason, it always seemed that the ocean road between the Old and New Worlds was very busy, that every now and then funny steamships came across, with music and flags. In fact, the ocean is a majestic and desolate thing, and the steamer, which was stormy four hundred miles from Europe, was the only ship that we met in five days of travel. The Normandie rocked slowly and importantly. She walked, almost without slowing down, confidently throwing high waves that climbed on her from all sides, and only occasionally gave uniform bows to the ocean. It was not a struggle of a meager creation of human hands with a raging element. It was a fight of equals.

Ilya Ilf

(Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg)

Evgeny Petrov

(Evgeny Petrovich Kataev)

One Story America

Ilf and Petrov traveled around the United States of America and wrote a book about their journey called One-Story America. This is an excellent book. It is full of respect for the human person. In it, the work of man is majestically praised. This is a book about engineers, about the structures of technology that conquer nature. This book is noble, subtle and poetic. It extraordinarily clearly manifests that new attitude towards the world, which is characteristic of the people of our country and which can be called the Soviet spirit. This is a book about the richness of nature and the human soul. It is permeated with indignation against capitalist slavery and tenderness for the country of socialism.

Y. Olesha

Part one.

FROM THE WINDOW OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH FLOOR

Chapter first. "NORMANDY"

At nine o'clock a special train leaves Paris, taking passengers of the Normandie to Le Havre. The train goes non-stop and after three hours rolls into the building of the Havre maritime station. Passengers go out to the closed platform, go up to the upper floor of the station along the escalator, go through several halls, go along the gangways closed on all sides and find themselves in a large lobby. Here they sit in the elevators and disperse to their floors. This is the Normandy. What her appearance is - the passengers do not know, because they never saw the ship.

We climbed the stairs to our cabin, which were entirely covered with a light green fireproof rubber carpet. Corridors and vestibules of the ship are covered with the same material. The step is soft and inaudible. It's nice. But you really begin to appreciate the advantages of rubber flooring during pitching: the soles seem to stick to it. This, however, does not save you from seasickness, but it prevents you from falling.

The staircase was not at all like a steamboat - wide and sloping, with flights and landings, the dimensions of which are quite acceptable for any home. The cabin was also some kind of non-ship. A spacious room with two windows, two wide wooden beds, armchairs, closets, tables, mirrors, and all amenities, down to the telephone. In general, the Normandy looks like a steamship only in a storm - then it shakes at least a little. And in calm weather, it is a colossal hotel with a magnificent view of the sea, which suddenly broke off the embankment of a fashionable resort and sailed at a speed of thirty miles an hour to America.

In the semicircular smoking hall, three famous wrestlers with squashed ears took off their jackets and played cards. Shirts protruded from under their vests. The wrestlers thought painfully. Large cigars hung from their mouths. At another table, two people were playing chess, constantly correcting the pieces moving off the board. Two more, resting their hands on their chins, watched the game. Well, who else, except for the Soviet people, will play the rejected Queen's Gambit in stormy weather! So it was. The handsome Botvinniks turned out to be Soviet engineers.

Gradually, acquaintances began to be made, companies were formed. They handed out a printed list of passengers, among which was one very funny family: Mr. Butterbrodt, Mrs. Butterbrodt and young Mr. Butterbrodt. If Marshak had been on the Normandy, he would probably have written poems for children called "Fat Mr. Sandwich".

We entered the Gulfstrom. It was raining warmly, and oil soot was deposited in the heavy greenhouse air, which was thrown out by one of the Normandy's pipes.

We went to inspect the ship. A third class passenger does not see the ship he is traveling on. He is not allowed in either the first or tourist classes. A tourist class passenger also does not see the Normandy, he is also not allowed to cross the borders. Meanwhile, the first class is the Normandie. It occupies at least nine-tenths of the entire ship. Everything is huge in first class: the promenade decks, the restaurants, the smoking lounges, the card-playing lounges, the special ladies' lounges, and the conservatory, where plump French sparrows jump on glass branches and hundreds of orchids hang from the ceiling, and a theater with four hundred seats, and a swimming pool with water,

"One-Story America" - travel essays by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, creators of the famous novels "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf". In the fall of 1935, satirists were sent to the United States as correspondents for the Pravda newspaper. They traveled America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, and then, with their usual vivacity and sense of humor, told about this journey in a book. Ilf and Petrov spoke about the life of small and large cities, about the most beautiful landscapes: prairies, mountains and national parks, visited the White House and an Indian wigwam, told about American celebrities and film production in Hollywood, about rodeo, wrestling and American football, about the creation of a light bulb , phonograph and electric chair and much, much more.

01. Part I. "From the window of the twenty-seventh floor." Chapter One Normandy. (16:14)
02. Chapter two. First evening in New York. (18:52)
03. Chapter three. What can be seen from the window of the hotel. (15:08)
04. Chapter four. Appetite goes away while eating. (18:00)
05. Chapter five. We're looking for an angel without wings. (19:34)
06. Chapter six. Dad and mom. (15:09)
07. Chapter seven. Electric chair. (26:16)
08. Chapter eight. Big New York arena. (19:37)
09. Chapter nine. We buy a car and leave. (20:35)
10. Part II. "Across the Eastern States". Chapter ten. On the highway. (18:57)
11. Chapter Eleven. Small city. (18:23)
12. Chapter twelve. Big little city. (18:48)
13. Chapter thirteen. Mr. Ripley's Electric House. (21:40)
14. Chapter fourteen. America cannot be taken by surprise. (24:32)
15. Chapter fifteen. Dearborn. (18:47)
16. Chapter sixteen. Henry Ford. (24:02)
17. Chapter seventeen. Scary Chicago. (29:46)
18. Chapter eighteen. The best musicians in the world. (16:17)
19. Part III. "To the Pacific". Chapter nineteen. The birthplace of Mark Twain. (26:44)
20. Chapter Twenty. Marine Corps soldier. (16:05)
21. Chapter twenty-one. Roberts and his wife. (23:42)
22. Chapter twenty-two. Santa Fe. (15:46)
23. Chapter twenty-three. Meeting with the Indians. (23:30)
24. Chapter twenty-four. Day of misfortune. (22:14)
25. Chapter twenty-five. Desert. (20:04)
26. Chapter twenty-six. Grand Canyon. (14:44)
27. Chapter twenty-seven. Man in a red shirt. (28:14)
28. Chapter twenty-eight. Young Baptist. (15:07)
29. Chapter twenty-nine. On the crest of the dam. (19:12)
30. Part IV. "Golden State" Chapter Thirty. Mrs Adams record. (25:52)
31. Chapter thirty-one. San Francisco. (23:01)
32. Chapter thirty-two. American football. (21:18)
33. Chapter thirty-three. "Russian Hill". (15:56)
34. Chapter thirty-four. Captain X. (26:25)
35. Chapter thirty-five. four standards. (20:15)
36. Chapter thirty-six. God of bullshit. (28:28)
37. Chapter thirty-seven. Hollywood fortresses. (05:26)
38. Chapter thirty-eight. Pray, weigh and pay!. (16:26)
39. Chapter thirty-nine. God's country. (19:52)
40. Part V. "Back to the Atlantic". Chapter forty. Along the old Spanish trail. (22:12)
41. Chapter forty-one. Day in Mexico. (20:24)
42. Chapter forty-two. New Years in San Antonio. (22:13)
43. Chapter forty-three. We're moving into the southern states. (21:13)
44. Chapter forty-four. Black people. (23:34)
45. Chapter forty-five. American Democracy. (14:38)
46. Chapter forty-six. Restless life. (21:05)

The further history of the book cannot be called simple: it was either published, then banned, then removed from libraries, then parts of the text were cut off.

Good mutual interest benefits everyone.

However, modern America continues to be "one-story".

...

A number of surnames and geographical names are given in accordance with modern spelling.

Part one
From the window of the 27th floor

Chapter 1
"Normandy"

The staircase was not at all like a steamboat - wide and sloping, with flights and landings, the dimensions of which are quite acceptable for any home.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Ilf and Petrov's book One-Story America.

One-Story America is a book created by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov in 1935-1936. Published in 1937 in the Soviet Union. The four of them (both authors and the Adams married couple from New York) crossed America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and back in the acquired brand new Ford of “noble mouse color” within two months (late 1935 - early 1936).

On the pages of the book, the authors:

Deeply and in detail reveal the ordinary life of Americans of that time;
. Acquainted with many American celebrities: Hemingway, Henry Ford, Morgan, Williams, Reed, Townsend, Steffens and others;
. They describe many cities and towns in America: New York, Chicago, Kansas, Oklahoma, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, El Paso, San Antonio, New Orleans and the US capital - Washington;
. Visit an Indian wigwam and a Mexican village;
. Periodically meet with Russian emigrants, including Molokans in San Francisco;
. They talk about some national sports: rodeo, wrestling, American football and Mexican bullfighting;
. Rise to the roof of the Empire State Building in New York and descend deep underground into the caves of Carlsbad;
. They describe in detail a unique American invention - the "electric chair" of Sing Sing prison and the creation of the first electric light bulb and phonograph by Edison;
. They represent the most beautiful landscapes of America, located in the prairies, mountains, national parks and even in deserts;
. They visit the White House, where the conversation between US President Roosevelt and reporters took place;
. They talk in detail about the production of films in Hollywood.

Henry Ford and "Tin Lizzie" 1921

A characteristic feature of the book is the minimum (more precisely, the practical absence) of ideological moments, which was simply an exceptional phenomenon for Stalin's time. Ilf and Petrov, being subtle, intelligent and insightful observers, made up a very objective picture of the United States and its inhabitants. Such unattractive features as general standardization and lack of spirituality, or rather, the intellectual passivity of Americans, especially young people, are repeatedly criticized.

At the same time, the authors admire American roads and excellent service, clear organization and pragmatism in everyday life and at work. It was from "One-Story America" that the Soviet reader first learned about publicity, life on credit and the ideology of consumption (chapter "Mr. Ripley's Electric House").

History of creation

In September 1935, Pravda correspondents Ilf and Petrov left for the United States of America. In those days, the President of the United States was Franklin Roosevelt, who did a lot for rapprochement between the United States and the USSR. This allowed the authors to freely move around the country and get closely acquainted with the life of different strata of American society. In America, Ilf and Petrov lived for three and a half months.

During this time they crossed the country twice from end to end. Returning to Moscow in the first days of February 1936, Ilf and Petrov announced in a conversation with a Literaturnaya Gazeta correspondent that they would be writing a book about America. In fact, work on "One-Story America" began in the United States. The essay “Normandy”, which opens the book, was written by Ilf and Petrov shortly after their arrival in America. Under the heading "The Road to New York," it appeared, with minor cuts, in Pravda on November 24, 1935.

“I would like to sign this picture like this:“ This is America! ”(photo by I. Ilf)

During the writers' stay in America, Pravda also published their essay "American Encounters" (January 5, 1936), which in the book concludes chapter twenty-five, "The Desert." Ilf and Petrov published the first brief notes about the trip in 1936 in the Ogonyok magazine under the title American Photographs. The text was accompanied by about 150 American photographs of Ilf, which captured the face of the country and portraits of people whom the writers met in America.

One-Story America was written fairly quickly, during the summer months of 1936. While the book was being written, Pravda published five more essays from it:

June 18 - "Journey to the Land of Bourgeois Democracy";
. July 4 - "New York";
. July 12 - "Electric Gentlemen";
. September 5 - Glorious City of Hollywood;
. October 18 - "In Carmel".

In 1936, the travel essays "One-story America" were first published in the Znamya magazine. In 1937, they were published as a separate publication in Roman-gazeta, Goslitizdat and the Soviet Writer publishing house. In the same year the book was republished in Ivanov, Khabarovsk, Smolensk.

Heroes and prototypes

Under the surname Adams in the book, Solomon Abramovich Tron (1872-1969), an engineer of the General Electric company, who played an important role in the electrification of the USSR, and his wife Florence Tron are displayed in the book.

We met Tron at one of my public lectures on the Soviet Union. Then, in the thirtieth year, we met in Moscow. He has already managed to work at the Dneprostroy, in Stalingrad and Chelyabinsk. Together with him in Moscow was his son from his first marriage, also an electrical engineer. The throne was exactly as depicted in One-Storied America.

Before the Second World War, the beginning of which, as you probably remember from the book, he predicted with an error of only one year, this fidget managed to visit and work in China, India and Switzerland. The last time we met with him was at the end of the war. He was about to move from New York to Youngstown, Ohio, with relatives of his wife, bred in One-Story America under the name Becky. … He was already a rather sick man, old age made itself felt, but in his heart he remained the same “Mr. Adams” - an energetic, inquisitive, interesting conversationalist.

Having become acquainted with the manuscript of One-Storied America, Tron jokingly stated that from now on he and his wife were “ready to live under the name of the Adams.” The Thrones' daughter Sasha (b. 1933), mentioned several times in the book as "baby", subsequently studied in Switzerland.

Reissues

In Soviet times, the book was reprinted in 1947, 1961 and 1966, but in these editions its text was subjected to political censorship. So, references to Stalin and other political figures disappeared from the text. The text underwent an even greater number of edits when it was published in the Collected Works of Ilf and Petrov in 1961. For example, a sympathetic mention of Charles Lindrberg's move from America to Europe after the kidnapping and murder of his son disappeared from the text, which is probably due to Lindrberg's subsequent collaboration with the Nazis.

In 2003, a new edition of the book, restored from the original source, was published, including previously unknown materials from the personal archive of Alexandra Ilyinichna Ilf (daughter of I. Ilf). It published for the first time letters that Ilf sent to his wife and daughter during the trip, and photographs taken by him in the United States.

Together with Petrov's letters, they are a kind of travel diary and naturally complement the book. In the 2000s, exhibitions of Ilf's "American photographs" were successfully held at several American universities, and a translation of Ogonkov's publication of 1936 was published in New York, with numerous Ilf's photographs.

Hot dog vendor in New York, 1936

Translations

One-Storied America has been repeatedly published in Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Czech, Serbian, French, Italian and other languages. In the United States, One-Story America was published in 1937, after Ilf's death, by Farrar & Rinehart under the title Little Golden America. This name was invented by the publisher, despite the protest of the author - Evgeny Petrov and translator Charles Malamute. According to the publisher, this title should have reminded readers of Ilf and Petrov's previous book, The Golden Calf, previously published in the United States under the title The Little Golden Calf.

"One-Storied America" was a success with American readers and caused many responses in the metropolitan and provincial press.

Here is some of them:

This book should be marked as a very significant work.
Americans and America would benefit greatly if they thought about these
observations.
Allentown Morning Call

Not many of our foreign guests have traveled this far
from Broadway and the central streets of Chicago; not many could talk about their
impressions with such liveliness and humour.
New York Herald Tribune

This is one of the best books written about America by foreigners.
Pleasant, but sometimes hectic, to rediscover America,
through the eyes of the authors of this book.
News Courier, North Carolina

Followers

In 1955, the writer B. Polevoy, as part of a delegation of Soviet journalists, made a trip to the United States. Travel notes created during this trip formed the basis of the book "American Diaries". According to the author, the attitude towards Soviet journalists in the United States changed for the worse and, although the delegation followed almost in the footsteps of Ilf and Petrov, they were deprived of the opportunity to see many aspects of American life.

In 1969, the journalists of the Pravda newspaper B. Strelnikov and I. Shatunovsky repeated the route of Ilf and Petrov in order to compare how much the United States has changed over the past third of a century. The result of the trip was the book "America on the Right and on the Left".

In the summer of 2006, Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner and TV presenter Ivan Urgant made a trip to the United States in the footsteps of Ilf and Petrov. In February 2008, Russian TV premiered their film "One-Story America", which presented the ordinary life of modern America. In 2011, their book One-Storied America was also published.