The Ostap Bender dilogy: What the authors omitted to mention

Abstract

The article refines the plot source of the novel “The Twelve Chairs” by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. The author puts forward a reasoned hypothesis according to which the list of sources traditionally mentioned by researchers consists not only of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Lev Lunts and Aron Erlikh, but may as well include the court report signed “A. Trol” and published in the “Gudok” newspaper in February 1927. The pseudonym “A. Trol” was used by the poet, translator, critic and poetry scholar Georgy Shengeli during his 1925 – 1928 period of work in “Gudok”. The article questions the believability of a well-known story stating that the basic storyline of the novel was granted to Ilf and Petrov by Valentin Kataev. The plot of the chapter “The End of the Crow’s Nest” from the novel “The Little Golden Calf”, according to the author, is entirely borrowed from the court report by “A. Trol”, published in “Gudok” in October 1926. Boris Flit’s critical essay published in “Gudok” in August 1928 is proposed to be considered the first review of “The Twelve Chairs”; Flit was eventually imprisoned and executed. In the penultimate section of the article a possible origin of the protagonist’s surname is specified: supposedly, Ostap gained his surname from a pseudonym of a “Gudok” worker correspondent. Thus, observations and conclusions presented in the article make significant adjustments to the study of the creative history of Ilf and Petrov’s dilogy.

Keywords

• “the twelve chairs”
• “the little golden calf”
• “gudok” newspaper
• ilya ilf
• evgeny petrov
• valentin kataev
• georgy shengeli
• boris flit
• plot sources