The Golden Calf Read online

  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, we resolved as follows:

  a) to make the novel as funny as possible;

  b) should the stern citizen continue to insist that satire should not be funny, to ask the Prosecutor General, Comr. Krylenko, to charge the above citizen with the crime of stupidity with malicious intent.

  —I. Ilf & E. Petrov

  “Look both ways before crossing the street.”

  —Traffic regulation

  PART 1

  THE CREW OF

  THE ANTELOPE

  CHAPTER 1

  HOW PANIKOVSKY

  BROKE THE PACT

  You have to be nice to pedestrians.

  Pedestrians comprise the greater part of humanity. Moreover, its better part. Pedestrians created the world. They built cities, erected tall buildings, laid out sewers and waterlines, paved the streets and lit them with electricity. They spread civilization throughout the world, invented the printing press and gunpowder, flung bridges across rivers, deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, introduced the safety razor, abolished the slave trade, and established that no less than 114 tasty, nutritious dishes can be made from soybeans.

  And just when everything was ready, when our native planet had become relatively comfortable, the motorists appeared.

  It should be noted that the automobile was also invented by pedestrians. But, somehow, the motorists quickly forgot about this. They started running over the mild-mannered
and intelligent pedestrians. The streets—laid out by pedestrians—were taken over by the motorists. The roads became twice as wide, while the sidewalks shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. The frightened pedestrians were pushed up against the walls of the buildings.

  In a big city, pedestrians live like martyrs. They’ve been forced into a kind of traffic ghetto. They are only allowed to cross the streets at the intersections, that is, exactly where the traffic is heaviest—where the thread by which a pedestrian’s life hangs is most easily snapped.

  In our expansive country, the common automobile—intended by the pedestrians to peacefully transport people and things—has assumed the sinister role of a fratricidal weapon. It puts entire cohorts of union members and their loved ones out of commission. And if on occasion a pedestrian manages to dart out from under a silver grille, he is fined by the police for violating the traffic laws.

  In general, the pedestrians’ standing is not what it used to be. They, who gave the world such outstanding figures as Horace, Boyle, Mariotte, Lobachevsky, Gutenberg, and Anatole France, have been forced to jump through ridiculous hoops just to remind others of their existence. Lord, oh Lord (who, frankly, doesn’t exist), how low you (who don’t really exist) have let the pedestrian stoop!

  Here he is, walking along a Siberian road from Vladivostok to Moscow, carrying a banner that reads IMPROVE THE LIVING CONDITIONS OF THE TEXTILE WORKERS in one hand, and with an extra pair of Uncle Vanya sandals and a lidless tin kettle dangling from a stick that he’s slung over his shoulder. This is a Soviet hiker who left Vladivostok as a young man and who, upon reaching the outskirts of Moscow in his old age, will be run over and killed by a heavy truck. And nobody will even manage to get the license plate number.

  Here’s another one, the last of the Mohicans of European foot traffic. He is pushing a barrel around the world. He would have been more than happy to walk just like that, without the barrel, but then nobody would notice that he is a long-distance hiker, and the press would ignore him. And so all his life he is forced to push the damn thing, which, to add insult to injury, has a large yellow advertisement extolling the unparalleled qualities of Motorist’s Dream engine oil.

  This is how far the pedestrian has fallen.

  Only in small Russian towns is the pedestrian still loved and respected. In those towns, he still rules, wandering carelessly in the middle of the street and crossing it in the most intricate manner in whatever direction he chooses.

  A man wearing a white-topped captain’s cap, the kind favored by administrators of summer amusement parks and MCs, undoubtedly belonged to this greater and better part of humanity. He traveled the streets of the town of Arbatov on foot, looking around with somewhat critical curiosity. He carried a small doctor’s bag in his hand. Apparently the town made no particular impression on the pedestrian in the artsy cap.

  He saw a dozen or so blue, yellow, and pinkish white church towers and noticed the peeling gold of the domes. A flag crackled above a government building.

  Near the white gate tower of the provincial citadel, two severe-looking old ladies conversed in French, complaining about the Soviet regime and reminiscing about their beloved daughters. Cold air and a sour wine-like smell wafted from the church basement. Apparently, it was used to store potatoes.

  “Church of the Savior on Spilled Potatoes,” muttered the pedestrian.

  He walked under the plywood arch with the freshly painted banner, WELCOME TO THE 5TH DISTRICT CONFERENCE OF WOMEN AND GIRLS, and found himself at the beginning of a long tree-lined alley named Boulevard of Prodigies.

  “No,” he said with chagrin, “this is no Rio de Janeiro, this is much worse.”

  Almost all the benches on the Boulevard of Prodigies were taken up by young women sitting alone with open books in their hands. Dappled shade fell across the pages of the books, the bare elbows, and the cute bangs. When the stranger stepped into the cool alley there was a noticeable stir on the benches. The girls hid their faces behind volumes by Gladkov, Eliza Orzeszkowa, and Seyfullina and eyed the visitor with temerity. He paraded past the excited book lovers and emerged from the alley at his destination, the city hall.

  At that moment, a horse cab appeared from around the corner. A man in a long tunic briskly walked next to it, holding on to the dusty, beat-up fender and waving a bulging portfolio embossed with the word “Musique.” He was heatedly arguing with the passenger. The latter, a middle-aged man with a pendulous banana-shaped nose, held a suitcase between his legs and from time to time shook a finger in his interlocutor’s face in vehement disagreement. In the heat of the argument his engineer’s cap, sporting a band of plush green upholstery fabric, slid to one side. The adversaries uttered the word “salary” loudly and often.

  Soon other words became audible as well.

  “You will answer for this, Comrade Talmudovsky!” shouted the Tunic, pushing the engineer’s hand away from his face.

  “And I am telling you that no decent professional would come to work for you on such terms,” replied Talmudovsky, trying to return his finger to its original position.

  “Are you talking about the salary again? I’m going to have to launch a complaint about your excessive greed.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the salary! I’d work for free!” yelled the engineer, angrily tracing all kinds of curves in the air with his finger. “I can even retire if I want to. Don’t treat people like serfs! You see ‘Liberty, equality, brotherhood’ everywhere now, and yet I am expected to work in this rat hole.”

  At this point, Talmudovsky quickly opened his hand and started counting on his fingers:

  “The apartment is a pigsty, there’s no theater, the salary . . . Driver! To the train station!”

  “Whoa!” shrieked the Tunic, rushing ahead and grabbing the horse by the bridle. “As the secretary of the Engineers and Technicians local, I must . . . Kondrat Ivanovich, the plant will be left without engineers . . . Be reasonable . . . We won’t let you get away with this, Engineer Talmudovsky . . . I have the minutes here with me . . .”

  And then the secretary of the local planted his feet firmly on the ground and started undoing the straps of his “Musique.”

  This lapse decided the argument. Seeing that the path was clear, Talmudovsky rose to his feet and yelled at the top of his lungs:

  “To the station!”

  “Wait, wait . . .” meekly protested the secretary, rushing after the carriage. “You are a deserter from the labor front!”

  Sheets of thin paper marked “discussed-resolved” flew out of the portfolio.

  The stranger, who had been closely watching the incident, lingered for a moment on the empty square, and then said with conviction:

  “No, this is definitely not Rio de Janeiro.”

  A minute later he was knocking on the door of the city council chairman.

  “Who do you want to see?” asked the receptionist who was sitting at the desk by the door. “What do you need to see the chairman for? What’s your business?”

  Apparently the visitor was intimately familiar with the principles of handling receptionists at various governmental, non-governmental, and municipal organizations. He didn’t bother to claim that he had urgent official business.

  “Private matters,” he said dryly and, without looking back at the receptionist, stuck his head in the door. “May I come in?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he approached the chairman’s desk.

  “Good morning, do you recognize me?”

  The chairman, a dark-eyed man with a large head, wearing a navy blue jacket and matching pants that were tucked into tall boots with high angled heels, glanced at the visitor rather distractedly and said he did not recognize him.

  “You don’t? For your information, many people think I look remarkably like my father.”

  “I look like my father, too,” said the chairman impatiently. “What do you want, Comrade?”

  “What matters is who the father was,” said the visitor sad
ly. “I am the son of Lieutenant Schmidt.”

  The chairman felt foolish and started rising from his seat. He instantly recalled the famous image of the pale faced revolutionary lieutenant in his black cape with bronze clasps in the shape of lion’s heads. While he was pulling his thoughts together to ask the son of the Black Sea hero an appropriate question, the visitor examined the office furnishings with the eye of a discriminating buyer.

  Back in tsarist times, all government offices were furnished in a particular style. A special breed of office furniture was developed: flat storage cabinets rising to the ceiling, wooden benches with polished seats three inches thick, desks on monumental legs, and oak barriers separating the office from the turmoil of the world outside. During the revolution, this type of furniture almost disappeared, and the secret of making it was lost. People forgot how to furnish government offices properly, and official spaces started filling up with objects that until then were thought to belong exclusively in private apartments. Among these were soft lawyer’s couches with springs and tiny glass shelves for the seven porcelain elephants that supposedly bring luck, as well as china cabinets, flimsy display shelves, folding leather chairs for invalids, and blue Japanese vases. In addition to a regular desk, the office of the chairman of the Arbatov city council also gave refuge to two small ottomans, which were upholstered with torn pink silk, a striped love seat, a satin screen depicting Mount Fuji with a flowering cherry tree, and a heavy mirrored wardrobe that was slapped together at the local open-air market.

  “The wardrobe, I’m afraid, is of the Hey Slavs type,” thought the visitor. “The pickings here are slim. Nope, this is no Rio de Janeiro.”

  “It’s very good of you to stop by,” said the chairman finally. “You must be from Moscow?”

  “Yes, just passing through,” replied the visitor, examining the love seat and becoming even more convinced that the city’s finances were not in good shape. He much preferred city halls with new, Swedish-style furniture from the Leningrad Woodworks Enterprise.