The epigraphs are from A. I. Il'f, Il'ia Il'f, ili Pis'ma o liubvi: Neizvestnaia perepiska Il'fa. Biograficheskii ocherk. Kommentarii (Moscow, 2004), 171; and Anatolii Lunacharskii, the first Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment, in “Il'f i Petrov,” 30 dnei, no. 8 (August 1931), at http://lunacharsky.newgod.su/lib/ss-tom-2/ilf-i-petrov (last accessed February 19, 2015). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

1. Among Ostap's many mottos is “We must venerate the Code.” I. Il'f and E. Petrov, Dvenadtsat' stul'ev (Moscow, 2003), 216.

2. Quoted in Anne O. Fisher, foreword to Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, The Little Golden Calf, trans. Anne O. Fisher (Montpelier, 2009), 14.

3. Mikhail Fel'dman and David Odesskii, foreword to Il'f and Petrov, Dvenadtsat’ stul'ev, 15.

4. Ibid., 5-15. Apart from two negative reviews published in the newspapers Evening Moscow and The Book and Workers’ Unions in September 1928 and an unfavorable mention in the 1929 digest of 30 Days, the monthly journal in which they were initially published, the novels received very little attention in the literary press in the first few years following their publication. Further, although The Golden Calf was serialized in 30 Days in 1931, it did not appear in Russia in book form until 1933 due to censors’ misgivings. See also Alexandra Ilf, introduction to Ilf and Petrov, The Little Golden Calf. Serious persecution of Zoshchenko began only in 1946 with Andrei Zhdanov's attack on “The Adventures of a Monkey” and was thus not contemporary to Il'f and Petrov. Before World War II, however, he had been praised by Maksim Gor'kii and received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor from the Supreme Soviet in 1939. I mention him in the same breath as Zamiatin, Pil'niak (eviscerated in the pages of Literaturnaia gazeta in 1929 and subject to further persecution thereafter), and the satirist Kol ‘tsov (once the editor of the humor journal Krokodil, he was accused of espionage and sentenced to death in 1940) to illustrate the potential fickleness of Soviet literary success and thus accentuate Il'f and Petrov's remarkable critical unassailability. Milne, Lesley, Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership: How They Laughed (Birmingham, 2003), 173 Google Scholar; Carleton, Gregory, The Politics of Reception: Critical Constructions of Mikhail Zoshchenko (Evanston, 1998), 1–8 Google Scholar.

5. David Zaslavskii, introduction to I. Il'f and E. Petrov, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow, 1961; hereafter SS), 1:10.

6. Among those articulating these views are Iakov Lur'e, in his V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov: Kniga ob Il'fe i Petrove (St. Petersburg, 2005), and Iurii Shcheglov, in his Romany I. Il' fa i E. Petrova: Sputnik chitetelia, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1990), who, in particular, notes Il'f and Petrov's loyalty to the “myth” of socialism while acknowledging that they held a “critical point of view” toward Soviet life as they observed it, along with a general “position of nonacceptance of various features of totalitarian thought and the totalitarian style of life” (1:15).

7. See Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005), 265-81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Lipovetsky, Mark, Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster's Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Brighton, 2011), 38 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

9. I. Il'f and E. Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, ed. M. Odesskii and D. Fel'dman (Moscow, 2000), 176.

10. See the thematic cluster on Soviet laughter in the Summer 2011 issue of Slavic Review, especially Serguei Oushakine, “Laughter under Socialism: Exposing the Ocular in Soviet Jocularity,” Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 247-55; and Natalia Skradol, “‘There Is Nothing Funny about It’: Laughing Law at Stalin's Party Plenum,” Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 334-52. See also Kukulin, I., Lipovetskii, M., and Maiofis, M., eds., Veselye chelovechki: Kul'turnye geroi sovetskogo detstva (Moscow, 2008)Google Scholar, a collection of scholarly articles on such canonical figures from children's fiction as Buratino, Cheburashka, and Karlsson. In 2009, a conference at Princeton University titled “Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic under Socialism” examined the development of a Soviet laughter. Conference participants and organizers contributed to the special section on “Jokes of Repression” in East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 4 (November 2011): 655-758. See also Oushakine, Serguei, “‘Red Laughter’: On Refined Weapons of Soviet Jesters,” Social Research 79, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 189–216 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salys, Rimgaila, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov: Laughing Matters (Bristol, 2009)Google Scholar; and Lipovetsky, Charms of the Cynical Reason. Il'f and Petrov's two novels have recently been retranslated. See The Twelve Chairs, trans. Anne O. Fisher (Evanston, 2011) and The Little Golden Calf, trans. Anne O. Fisher (Montpelier, 2009). For the authors’ biographies and the works’ publication and reception histories in Soviet and post-Soviet times, see David Fel'dman and Mikhail Odesskii, introduction to Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, at http://www.koreiko.ru/12-chairs_intro.htm (last accessed January 3, 2015); Lur'e, V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov; and Il'f s correspondence, published by his daughter, Aleksandra Il'f, in A. I. Il'f, I'lia Il'f, ili Pis'ma o liubvi.

11. As several scholars have noted, Soviet collective trauma is distinct in its historical and cultural legacy from other collective traumas in twentieth-century European history. For instance, one crucial difference between Soviet and Nazi terror was that in the Soviet case, “the perpetrators of one wave of terror” often “became victims of the next,” leading to a form of terror that tended toward the “suicidal” rather than the exclusively homicidal. Etkind, Alexander, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, 2013), 8 Google Scholar. For more on the connection between trauma and social discipline, see Kevin M. F. Piatt, “Secret Speech: Wounding, Disavowal and Social Belonging in the USSR” (unpublished paper, 2013); and Kevin M. F. Piatt, “Idti v nauku—terpet’ muku: Travma i distsiplina v rossiiskoi shkole,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 124 (2014).

12. In the 1950s, a moot court of student lawyers convened to “try” Ostap Bender in a sendup of the public trials so typical for the period, but “the whole thing ended in a terrible scandal because this court,” motivated by deep sympathy for Il'f and Petrov's character, “acquitted Ostap Bender.” Sinyavsky, Andrei, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. Turnbull, Joanne and Formozov, Nikolai (New York, 1990), 180 Google Scholar.

13. Aleksandr Zholkovskii applied this phrase to Ostap Bender's famously controversial “winningness.” Aleksandr Zholkovskii, “Iskusstvo prisposobleniia,” in Bumazhdaiushchie sny i drugie raboty (Moscow, 1994), 31-53, at http://www-bcf.usc.edu/-alik/rus/ess/isk-prisp-ll.htm (last accessed December 3, 2014).

14. Carleton, The Politics of Reception, 31.

15. Ibid., 34.

16. Early drafts of The Twelve Chairs included chapters called “A Boisterous Boy” and “Continuation of the Previous Chapter” that chronicled Vorobianinov's bawdy, spendthrift, and generally un-Soviet prerevolutionary exploits. Both chapters were removed before it went to print, and subsequent editions of the novel continued to exclude them.

17. Il'f and Petrov, Dvenadtsat' stul'ev, 31-32.

18. “But this is madness! How like your daughter you are!” shouts an exasperated Vorobianinov later in the same scene. Ibid., 32.

19. Ibid., 365.

20. For more on homeless children, see Stolee, Margaret K., “Homeless Children in the USSR, 1917-1957,” Soviet Studies 40, no. 1 (January 1988): 64–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Balina, Marina and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds., Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

21. Il'f and Petrov, Dvenatsat’ stul'ev, 213.

22. Fel'dman and Odesskii, introduction to Zolotoi telenok, 428; Maria Galmarini, “The ‘Right to Be Helped’: Welfare Policies and Notions of Rights at the Margins of Soviet Society, 1917-1950” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2012), 71. Ostap's use of the word defektivnyi reflects contemporary attitudes not just about marginalized children but also about people on the edges of society in general. Though “defective” individuals were flawed, they were not at fault, “defectiveness” being traced to a host of social factors. A defective child was temporarily relegated to the margins of society but, according to the theories of “defectologists,” could be reabsorbed into the fold after an intense course of moral and social orthopedics.

23. For more on this “hiatus,” see Milne, , Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, 127-28Google Scholar.

24. Fisher, foreword to Ilf and Petrov, The Little Golden Calf, 19.

25. “Unfortunately, these writers are much and eagerly talked about (by readers) but little written about (by critics).” Dmitrii Moldavskii, “Zametki o tvorchestve Il'ii Il'fa i Evgeniia Petrova,” Neva, no. 5 (1956): 173.

26. Ibid., 176.

27. Ibid., 177.

28. Gurovich, Lidiia, “Il'f i Petrov, satiriki,” Voprosy literatury, no. 4 (1957): 110-39Google Scholar.

29. Zaslavskii, introduction to Il'f and Petrov, SS, 1:6.

30. Lunacharskii, “Il'f i Petrov,” at http://lunacharsky.newgod.su/lib/ss-tom-2/ilf-i-petrov (last accessed February 19,2015).

31. Zaslavskii, introduction to Il'f and Petrov, SS, 1:16-17.

32. Alexopoulos, Golfo, “Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man,” Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 776 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Typical for a Soviet trickster, Ostap “simultaneously [undermines] and [embodies] the Soviet symbolic order.” Lipovetsky, Charms of the Cynical Reason, 42. Emphasis in the original.

34. Ostap exemplifies “the hero whose superiority over his/her opponents is grounded in its intellect, imagination and talent—and never on violence and terror. In other words, this character serves as the manifestation of the intelligentsia's dream about a victory of wit over a power based on violence.” Ibid., 269.

35. Il'f and Petrov's novels “became a pool of quotes for several generations of Soviet intellectuals, who found the diptych to be a nearly overt travesty of propagandistic formulae, newspaper slogans, and the dictums of the founders of ‘Marxism-Leninism.’ Paradoxically, this ‘Soviet literary classic’ was read as anti-Soviet literature.” Ibid., 91.

36. According to Odesskii and Fel'dman, Il'f and Petrov began writing The Twelve Chairs just as Stalin's anti-Trotskii campaign was gaining momentum in the mid-1920s. Though the novel was finished too late to be relevant to the undoing of Lev Trotskii, who was already in exile in Kazakhstan in January 1928, when the manuscript was still being edited, its essential message—that “the regime in the USSR is stable and there is no return to the past”—remained apt. The Golden Calf was, however, likely written earlier than Petrov would later claim, but it could not be published until 1931 due to satire's uncertain position within Soviet orthodoxy in the preceding three years. Fel'dman and Odesskii, introduction to Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 23. For more on the delay in the writing and publication of The Golden Calf, see Milne, , Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, 171-74Google Scholar.

37. Carleton, , The Politics of Reception, 34–35 Google Scholar.

38. Each character represents a type of Soviet outsider: Ostap is an anti-Soviet wheeler-dealer with no past and a suspiciously murky national identity; Kisa Vorobianinov, a high-strung former nobleman in drastically reduced circumstances; Mikhail Panikovskii, a parasitical “goose thief”; Father Fedor, a greedy, unethical, and impulsive Orthodox priest. The wealth these “socially alien elements” chase is always ill-gotten: in The Twelve Chairs, Vorobianinov's mother-in-law's jewels were obtained, no doubt, through exploitation of the proletariat, as was the petty bureaucrat Koreiko's embezzled stash in The Golden Calf. Soviet morality would dictate that such fortunes, were they to fall into the hands of individuals, not be used as seed capital for a privately owned candle factory in Samara, for example, as Father Fedor would like; nor should they catapult their discoverer into a life of luxury in Rio de Janeiro (Ostap's dream).

39. In The Golden Calf, for instance, Panikovskii dies while stealing a goose, while Shura Balaganov, unable to control his kleptomania even after Ostap grants him 50,000 rubles, is arrested; subsequently, Ostap, having blackmailed Koreiko into giving him a million rubles, attempts to flee across the Romanian border but is savagely beaten, robbed, and redeposited on Soviet soil.

40. Konstantin Simonov, introduction to I. Il'f and E. Petrov, Dvenadtsat' stul'ev (Moscow, 1956), at http://az.lib.ru/i/ilfpetrov/text_0100.shtml (last accessed February 19,2015).

41. Indeed, “literary-political” events of the late 1920s, such as the persecution of Evgenii Zamiatin and Boris Pil'niak, “caused feelings of uncertainty” among writers, contributing to an “atmosphere of mutual distrust that ultimately led to complete disunion rather than the rallying together the party had sought.” Aleksandr Galushkin, “Delo Pil'niaka i Zamiatina,” in Leonid Geller, ed., Novoe o Zamiatine (Moscow, 1997), 130.

42. Boris Groys, conversely, argues that the cultural consolidation of the late 1920s was actually a natural extension of, rather than a departure from, the avant-garde movements. See Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar.

43. Il'f and Petrov, SS, 2:8.

44. Milne, Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, 136-37.

45. On May 27, 1929, a V. I. Blium, of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), wrote a damning article in the Literary Gazette. “The subtext of the RAPP member's words was obvious at the time: satire was interpreted as the notorious resistance of the ‘bourgeois intelligentsia.’ Blium identified satire in fiction with ‘anti-Soviet agitation,’ that is, with one of the ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ as they were defined under the criminal laws of the time.” Fel'dman and Odesskii, introduction to Zolotoi telenok, 19. For more on RAPP's “vituperative” campaigns against writers before its dissolution in 1932, see Milne, Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, xii.

46. Salys, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov, 21.

47. See Anatolii Lunacharskii, “O smekhe” (speech to the Committee for the Study of Satirical Genres at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow, January 30, 1931), at http://lunacharsky.newgod.su/lib/ss-tom-8/o-smehe (last accessed January 3,2015).

48. Salys, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov, 25.

49. Krokodil, too, was engaged in the “pedagogical” project of “adequate ‘framing’ of social ills and their ‘satirization.’ By introducing themes and boundaries—what to smile at, how, and where—Krokodil socialized and instructed the Soviet public on the matters of everyday life.” Ledeneva, Alena, “Open Secrets and Knowing Smiles,” East European Politics and Societies, no. 25 (September 2011): 726 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Kol'tsov, Mikhail, “Kto smeetsia poslednim,” in Kol'tsov, M., ed., Parad bessmertnykh: Khudozhestvenno-optimisticheskiii al'manakh “Krokodila,” posviashchennyiis” ezdu pisatelei voobshche i literature i ee posledstviiam v chastnosti (Moscow, 1934), 11 Google Scholar.

51. Gurovich, “Il'fi Petrov, satiriki,” 125.

52. In the film, Martynov “refuses a safety rope during the rehearsal for the Stratosphere [circus] act,” which involves jumping from a great height. After he falls, he denies being in pain despite “eventually [losing] consciousness.” It is also worth noting that the plot of Circus was based on Il'f and Petrov's play Pod kupolom tsirka (Under the big top, 1934), though their names did not make it into the film's credits due to creative differences between the authors and Aleksandrov. Salys, , The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov, 128, 178Google Scholar.

53. Quoted in ibid., 99.

54. For more on the “key social problem of Soviet jocularity,” see Oushakine, “Laughter under Socialism,” 248.

55. Stalin, J. V., “Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites,” in Stalin, J. V., Problems of Leninism (Peking, 1976), 783 Google Scholar, at http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/SCS35.html (last accessed January 3,2015).

56. Indeed, “merry laughter” (veselyi smekh) became part of the “obscene comedy” of the exercise of power: “Ordered to remember that ‘life had become better, life had become merrier,’ Soviet citizens had, at every moment, the ideological priority to find, always and everywhere, a cause for merry celebration. As editorials from the central Soviet newspapers at the time of the show trials demonstrate, the sadistic policies of the state triggered many such expressions of ecstatic joy and merriment.” Natalia Skradol, “‘There Is Nothing Funny about It,’” 351.

57. See LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, 2001)Google Scholar; and Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996)Google Scholar. Both authors “treat matters of collective violence and its memory in the key of psychological theories geared toward recovery (with regard to individuals) and toward the establishment of an ethical relationship to history (with reference to societies).” Kevin M. F. Piatt, “Trauma and Social Discipline: Text, Subject, Memory and Forgetting” (keynote address, Slavic Graduate Students Conference, University of Toronto, Ontario, 2011).

58. In Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Ithaca, 2011), Kevin M. F. Piatt presents a notion of collective trauma specific to the Russian context. In particular, he argues that although individual trauma may contribute to collective trauma, it cannot be figured simply as the summation of individual traumas. See also Kevin M. F. Piatt, “History, Social Discipline, and Trauma in Russia” (talk at the History, Memory, Politics Seminar, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Helsinki, Finland, 2011).

59. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 65-66.

60. Ibid., 22-23.

61. Zaslavskii, introduction to Il'f and Petrov, SS, 1:6.

62. Il'ia Erenburg, speaking not only for “victors” but for Soviet readers generally, echoes this view, praising Il'f and Petrov for allowing “people [to] laugh in very hard times.” Il'ia Erenburg, “Iz knigi,” in G. Munblit and A. Raskin, eds., Sbornik vospominanii ob I. Il'fe i E. Petrove (Moscow, 1963), 186. Similarly, Omri Ronen describes Il'f and Petrov as “two writers who helped make the blackest years funny, rather than scary, for my generation [s kotorymi moemu pokoleniiu bylo smeshno, a ne strashno v samye chernye gody].” Omri Ronen, “Pravda istorika,” foreword to Iakov Lur'e, V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov (St. Petersburg, 2005), 11.

63. Platt, “History, Social Discipline, and Trauma in Russia.”

64. Dobrenko, Evgenii, “Gossmekh, ili Mezhdu rekoi i noch'iu,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 19 (1993): 44 Google Scholar. Emphasis in the original.

65. See Plessner, Helmuth, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. Churchill, James Spencer and Grene, Marjorie (Evanston, 1970), 111 Google Scholar.

66. LaCapra, , Writing History, Writing Trauma, 42 Google Scholar.

67. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, 48.

68. Ibid., 114.

69. “The new residents of the Soviet village” were at once “the objects of laughter” (as imperfect Soviet citizens) and “the possessors of a right to laugh … who understand instinctively what should be mocked [osmeiano]—even if the laughter in question is aimed at themselves.” Natalia Skradol, “‘Zhit’ stalo veselee’: Stalinskaia chastushka i proizvodstvo ‘ideal'nogo sovetskogo sub“ekta,’” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 108 (2011), at http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2011/108/sl4.html (last accessed January 5, 2015).

70. Bergson, Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Brereton, Cloudeseley and Rothwell, Fred (Rockville, 2008), 12 Google Scholar.

71. Ibid., 84, 92.

72. Milne, , Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, 153 Google Scholar. For more on Il'f and Petrov's relationship with the ocherk, see Carleton, , The Politics of Reception, 83–84 Google Scholar.

73. In an autumn 1928 review of Zolotoi telenok in Evening Moscow, a reviewer identified only as “L. K.” noted, “The novel reads quickly and lightheartedly, though by the end, the cinematographic succession of the heroes’ adventures becomes tiresome.” Quoted in Fel'dman and Odesskii, introduction to Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 28.

74. Ibid., 398-99. For more on anachronism in Il'f and Petrov's novels, see Iu. V. Podkovyrin, “Vneshnost’ geroev v romanakh I. Il'fa i E. Petrova ‘Dvenadtsat’ stul'ev’ i ‘Zolotoi telenok,’” Novyi filologicheskii vestnik, no. 1 (2007): 190-99.

75. Il'f and Petrov, SS, 2:364-65.

76. Ibid.

77. Milne, Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, 171-72.

78. In The Little Golden Calf, bookkeeper Berlaga voluntarily commits himself to a mental institution during the purge of GERKULES. Because the imprisonment of dissenters in psychiatric institutions became common only in the 1970s and was not a feature of penal practice in the 1920s and ’30s, the Berlaga scenes in The Little Golden Calf can only be described as serendipitously predictive rather than descriptive or satirical.

79. Kol'tsov, “Kto smeetsia poslednim,” 8-9.

80. Built in 1926-31, the Turkestan-Siberian Railway linked Central Asia to Siberia and was one of the most representative large-scale projects of the first Five-Year Plan.

81. Ilf, Ilya and Petrov, Evgeny, The Golden Calf, trans. Anderson, Helen and Gurevich, Konstantin (Rochester, 2009), 246 Google Scholar.

82. On Il’ f and Petrov as “‘true believers’ in the Soviet dream,” see Milne, Zoshchenko and the Ilf-Petrov Partnership, xii.

83. Of course, some aspects of satire inevitably escape even the most vigilant ideological surveillance—as illustrated by V. Ardov's anecdote about one of Ostap's catchphrases, “I will be in charge of the parade!” (Komandovat’ paradom budu ia!), becoming unusable in the official discourse whence it came following the wild success of The Golden Calf. See Ardov, B., “Chudodei,” in Munblit, and Raskin, , eds., Sbornik vospominanii ob I. life i E. Petrove, 184 Google Scholar.