Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Apart from this book's obvious value as a humorous and intelligent look at 1935 America, it is most interesting for showing the many respects in which FDR's New Deal America was already fixed in many of the cultural and political ruts in which we still find the U.S. It can be so revealing because it observes the ordinary and the stupid as keenly as the elite and accomplished. (As a result, the book's occasional smugness will certainly grate on some American readers. The authors describe to us an incurious and unthinking people and are most dated by their certainty that the economic stagnation of 1935 is a loud and final trumpet-blast giving the final verdict on the American kind of capitalism. Maybe it was, in some ways, but in general this is facile in retrospect, especially in comparison with the Soviet trajectory. The point of this positive review is how much truth comes through despite this somewhat churlish--though always witty--attitude.)

The very premise of the book is that knowledge of the nation comes on a road trip, that the rhythm of stopping at gas stations and proceeding along endless highways is somehow definitive of America. Ilf and Petrov ponder the essential sameness of so many American towns. The book begins at once with New Yorkers' and Washingtonians' admonitions to the authors that the "real America" lies somewhere else, out on the roads sprawling westward. (The New Yorkers' children meanwhile, they observe, learn what a cow might be like by looking at the rhino in the Central Park Zoo.)

Some of what Ilf and Petrov hear in 1935 America is disgustingly familiar to us still: otherwise thriving families bankrupted by medical expenses; the ordinary man's belief that it's all right to soak the rich with progressive taxation so long as we leave them $5 million (around $75 million today) -- $4 million being perhaps not generous enough; Santa Fe overrun by millionaires; Los Angeles characterized by the peculiar ineradicability of exhaust in its air, and by a plenty of oranges that look better than they taste. (Americans, they observe, seem more interested in vitamins than taste.)

The authors' dark diagnosis of America is perhaps most fascinated by the role of advertising and idiot mass culture. They observe that an American might well graduate from a series of excellent schools, but that a few years of watching the dreck from Hollywood will stupefy them soon enough (and this was clear to them some years before the advent of commercial TV). They see that many of America's churches, schools, and journalistic organs serve, in effect, to reinforce this same effect of the movies, that "publicity" defines a wider theater of thought invasion than just the explicit ads. They are amused that Christmas is advertised in much the same way as Coca Cola, and for the same reasons. They understand how corporate branding really works--the irrelevant advertisement whose work is done just by making you pay attention to it.

They look at the business end of consumer culture, too, amazed at how much crap you don't need you will buy when everything at Woolworth's costs a nickel or a dime.

These are just some of the ideas that made an impression on me; I have omitted most of the book's topics, such as a notable report on how whites think (or, more accurately, do not think) of the blacks they keep down.

One note about what this book actually is: it is NOT an English translation of the authors' 1937 book Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (Single-Storey America). Not only does the introduction fail to clarify this, but the book's Library in Congress cataloging-in-publication is utterly erroneous in claiming this. The book SEEMS to be a (complete?) translation of the photo essays printed in the periodical Ogonek. The disadvantage of this is that you are missing the vast majority of the authors' writing about America (just at random, here are some chapters of Odoetazhnaia Amerika not represented here: The Electric Chair; Dearborn & Henry Ford; American football; A day in Mexico)--however, the entire book was immediately translated into English by Charles Malamuth and published in 1937 by Farrar & Rinehart under the title Little Golden America: Two Famous Soviet Humorists Survey These United States (not in print). But the huge advantage of this format is that it includes the photographs--which are half the fun of the whole thing (and whose omission from the 1937 book deprived it of much of its meaning, since many passages refer in detail to the subjects photographed). So I'd certainly recommend this volume as an introduction to Ilf and Petrov, and curious readers can hunt down "Little Golden America" afterwards.

This new translation (the last was in 1937) of this almost-lost work is a gem. And not just because it is by two of Soviet Russia's greatest writers and humorists. After all, it is always fascinating to hear how others see us, to see what photos they take, what impressions they bring away. Ilf and Petrov were trenchant observers of human nature, and this travelogue of their 1935 trip across America is simply a piece of classic journalism.

Of course, this is not the pair's funniest work. Hardly surprising, given that the system they lampooned with The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf (sadly, only the former is currently in print in English) was, by the time the pair turned up in America, engulfed in a paroxysm of self-mutilation. But the account of their journey is funny and at times biting, even taking into account Ilf and Petrov's need to toe the Party line (they were working for Pravda, after all).

Add in the candid and revealing photos of everyday Americans, and you have a true collector's item. In the end, reading this book is like leafing through an old family album full of vaguely familiar faces and places, with running commentary by a sarcastic, immigrant uncle. (Reviewed in Russian Life)

What a terrific job on the translation and reproduction of the documentation of this fascinating trip by the two Soviet journalists.
Highly recommend the book.