the twelve chairs book review

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Book Of A Lifetime: The Twelve Chairs, By Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov

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"There were so many hairdressing establishments and funeral homes in the regional centre of N. that the inhabitants seemed to be born merely in order to have a shave, get their hair cut, freshen up their heads with toilet water and then die. In actual fact, people came into the world, shaved, and died rather rarely in the regional centre of N... The spring evenings were delightful, the mud glistened like coal in the light of the moon, and all the young men of the town were so much in love with the secretary of the communal-service workers' committee that she found difficulty in collecting their subscriptions." This is the opening paragraph of The Twelve Chairs, my favourite book of all time. I re-read it several times a year – now mostly in English translations. Re-reading my favourite Russian books in my second mother tongue has become an addiction: it adds some coveted balance and symmetry to my otherwise rather chaotic life. I find it both reassuring and calming – like looking at the quiet sea.

The Twelve Chairs and its sequel The Little Golden Calf were both penned by the brilliant Odessa-born tandem of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Hilarious, vitriolic and deeply anti-Soviet, the novels became cult reading for the embattled Soviet intelligentsia. They were like a breath of fresh air in the stuffy communal flat of Soviet reality, replete with stale smells of cabbage soup and rotten political dogma.

By the age of 16, I had read the novels dozens of times and knew them almost by heart. In 1966, when I was 12, we were asked at school to write an essay on our literary hero. Instead of extolling the virtues of Pavel Korchagin, the clichéd proletarian protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky's politically correct drivel, How Steel was Tamed, I chose to write about Ostap Bender, the "great schemer" from The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf. In The Twelve Chairs, Bender travels about the Soviet Union trying to find which one of a dozen dining-room chairs contains the jewels hidden in its upholstery by a provincial aristocratic family during the Revolution.

As a result of my timid literary deviation, my grandfather, an old Bolshevik and a revolutionary in his youth who had become profoundly disillusioned with communism, was summoned to the school headmistress, a blue-stocking and virago, and reprimanded for his grandson's "dangerous literary tastes". He came back home very upset. But instead of telling me off, he said: "I am ashamed. Not for you but for your teachers. They want you all to like the same books. They want you to have the same tastes and thoughts. If this is what we fought for in the revolution, then I am ashamed for myself, too." I will remember this first lesson of literary integrity, taught by my granddad and by Ilf and Petrov, for as long as I live.

Vitali Vitaliev's 'Life as a Literary Device' is published by Beautiful Books

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The Twelve Chairs

Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov | 4.31 | 19,685 ratings and reviews

Ranked #29 in Russian

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• The Twelve Chairs: A Novel

In this Book

• Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Translated from the Russian by Anne O. Fisher, Foreword by Alexandra Ilf
• Published by: Northwestern University Press
• Series: Northwestern World Classics

Winner, 2012 Northern California Book Award for Fiction in Translation More faithful to the original text and its deeply resonant humor, this new translation of The Twelve Chairs brings Ilf and Petrov’s Russian classic fully to life. The novel’s iconic hero, Ostap Bender, an unemployed con artist living by his wits, joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to look for a cache of missing jewels hidden in chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the chairs takes them from the provinces of Moscow to the wilds of the Transcaucasus mountains. On their quest they encounter a variety of characters, from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the old propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and bungling than the last. A brilliant satire of the early years of the Soviet Union, as well as the inspiration for a Mel Brooks film, The Twelve Chairs retains its universal appeal.

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright Page
• pp. xi-xxvi
• Translator’s Introduction
• pp. xxvii-xxviii
• Part One: The Lion of Stargorod
• 1. Bezenchuk and the Nymphs
• 2. The Demise of Madame Petukhova
• 3. The Sinner’s Mirror
• 4. The Muse of Distant Travel
• 5. The Registrar’s Past
• 6. The Smooth Operator
• 7. Diamond Smoke
• 8. Traces of the Titanic
• 9. The Little Sky-Blue Thief
• 10. Where Are Your Curls?
• pp. 103-112
• 11. The Parakeet, the Repairman, and the Fortune-Teller
• pp. 113-124
• 12. The Alphabet, the Mirror of Life
• pp. 125-140
• 13. A Passionate Woman, a Poet’s Dream
• pp. 141-154
• 14. Breathe Deeper, You’re Excited!
• pp. 155-174
• 15. The Union of the Sword and the Plowshare
• pp. 175-188
• Part Two: In Moscow
• pp. 189-219
• 16. Amid an Ocean of Chairs
• pp. 191-194
• 17. The Brother Berthold Schwartz Dormitory
• pp. 195-210
• 18. Respect Your Mattresses, Citizens!
• pp. 211-218
• 19. The Furniture Museum
• pp. 219-228
• 20. European-Style Voting
• pp. 229-240
• 21. From Seville to Granada
• pp. 241-254
• 22. Corporal Punishment
• pp. 255-268
• 23. Ellochka the Cannibal
• pp. 269-278
• 24. Absalom Vladimirovich Iznurenkov
• pp. 279-290
• 25. The Motorists’ Club
• pp. 291-304
• 26. Conversation with a Naked Engineer
• pp. 305-314
• 27. Two Visits
• pp. 315-320
• 28. The Excellent Jailhouse Basket
• pp. 321-330
• 29. The Little Hen and the Pacifi c Rooster
• pp. 331-342
• 30. The Author of “The Gavriliad”
• pp. 343-354
• 31. The Mighty Handful, or the Gold-Seekers
• pp. 355-364
• 32. In the Columbus Theater
• pp. 365-380
• Part Three: Madame Petukhova’s Treasure
• pp. 381-411
• 33. A Magical Night on the Volga
• pp. 383-396
• 34. A Pair of Unclean Animals
• pp. 397-410
• 35. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
• pp. 411-420
• 36. The Interplanetary Chess Congress
• pp. 421-438
• 37. And Others
• pp. 439-448
• 38. A View of a Malachite Puddle
• pp. 449-458
• 39. Cape Green
• pp. 459-468
• 40. Under the Clouds
• pp. 469-480
• 41. Earthquake
• pp. 481-494
• 42. Treasure
• pp. 495-506
• Translator’s Notes
• pp. 507-575

Additional Information

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the twelve chairs.

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How would you shoot this scene? Dom DeLuise is playing a greed-crazed Russian Orthodox priest who has snatched away a chair that maybe has a fortune sewn into its seat. Pursued by two other fortune hunters, he somehow finds the superhuman strength to climb straight up the side of a mountain. On top, he rips the chair to shreds and finds no fortune inside. What's worse, he doesn't know how he got up the mountain and doesn't think he can get down again. He cries out: "Oh Lord, you're so STRICT."

Would you put the camera above him? Or go with a closeup? Or what? Mel Brooks , who probably understands movie comedy better than anyone since the silent era, plays the scene from the bottom of the mountain, and all we see is a flash of DeLuise's bald head. Just a flash, as we hear the line.

Now I don't expect that to seem very funny in print, but I wanted to point it out because somehow, if you can get inside this shot, you can get inside why Brooks is funny. The DeLuise character is filled with greed and with hatred for those who would steal his chair. He is a priest who would gladly sell his soul, or anything else, for a profit. There is not a shred of charity or kindness in him.

And yet when he cries out, the words are so full of anguish, so full of the bitter realization that the chair is indeed empty and that God has double-crossed him, that in his very avarice he becomes human. And then just the flash of the bald head. No close-up of his face, no throwing of arms out to heaven. Just a throwaway shot from halfway down the mountain, showing that bald head, and the shot is pathetic and funny, cruel and warm, all at once. And it is on this slender thread that "The Twelve Chairs" balances itself.

Mel Brooks has grown as a director since " The Producers " (1968), I think. "The Producers" was one of the funniest films ever made, and it will be studied for its art long after "Anne of the Thousand Days" has been cut up to make ukulele picks. But "The Twelve Chairs" is more than merely funny. It brings to a full flowering the Brooks attitude.

It believes man is infinitely corrupt and corruptible, that drunks enjoy kicking orphans, that greed is more important in the scheme of things than charity, and that, given the opportunity, your best friend will gladly sell you out if there's a dime in it for himself. W. C. Fields would have loved this movie.

But Brooks is not content with mere cynicism, or with the simple Fields hostility. He goes beyond comedy this time, and he gets all the way to the pathos. And so while "The Producers" was hilarious, yes, "The Twelve Chairs" is a more fully realized work because it uses comedy not just for laughs but as a tool for examining the human condition.

Brooks' story is based on the Russian classic about a man whose mother confesses, on her deathbed, to having hidden the family fortune in the seat of one of a matched set of 12 chairs. The idea was to hide the jewels from the recently victorious revolution. But, alas, the chairs have been scattered. And so the greedy son ( Ron Moody ) bolts from his mother's deathbed and begins a chase across the whole of Russia, looking for that chair. He is accompanied by a young nobleman ( Frank Langella ), whose aristocratic background has suited him only to ride horses and look nice. And they are in competition with the avaricious priest, who has likewise bolted from his parishioner's bedside, consumed by greed for the jewels.

"The Twelve Chairs" belongs, then, to the basic comedy genre of the chase. But it draws most of its strength from character, not pratfalls. When DeLuise cries out to the Lord (in a line that will surely become as famous as "If you've got it, flaunt it"), we understand the depth of his obsession. And when the old woman's 52-year-old son walks straight out onto a tightrope to snatch one of the chairs away from an aerialist, Brooks has found another perfect metaphor.

The film is filled with them. Brooks himself turns up in a cameo as the son's slavishly adoring manservant, humiliating his master by sheer worship. Langella plays a somewhat thankless straight man, whose sanity keeps the others from whirling off into other countries or even other movies. Yet he is just as single-mindedly cynical as the rest, and it's his idea for Moody to fake an epileptic fit in front of a statue of Dostoyevsky. ("Give us your donations, please, to help cure this disease which even the great Dostoyevsky," etc.).

"The Twelve Chairs" is the sort of movie that improves upon reflection. You go in expecting to laugh a lot, because you've seen "The Producers." And you do laugh a lot -- to the point, perhaps, that you miss what this new Brooks film is about. It's not going for the laughs alone. It has something to say about honor among thieves, and by the end of the film we can sense a bond between the two main characters that is even, amazingly, human.

To arrive at humanity through total cynicism is a very difficult thing in a work of fiction, although it happens all the time in life. Samuel Beckett does it, somehow, and so, somehow, does Brooks. It all has something to do with that faraway flash of a bald head, and with the despairing realization that, Lord, I am a sinner, but, Lord, you're so STRICT.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Twelve Chairs

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Ippolit Vorobyaninov

Frank Langella

Ostap Bender

Dom DeLuise

Father Fyodor

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On The Site

The twelve chairs.

Northwestern World Classics

by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov

Translated by Anne O. Fisher

Foreword by Alexandra Ilf

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

574 Pages , 5.12 x 7.75 in

• 9780810127722
• Published: October 2011
• 9780810167162
• Description

Winner, 2012 Northern California Book Award for Fiction in Translation More faithful to the original text and its deeply resonant humor, this new translation of The Twelve Chairs brings Ilf and Petrov’s Russian classic fully to life. The novel’s iconic hero, Ostap Bender, an unemployed con artist living by his wits, joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to look for a cache of missing jewels hidden in chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the chairs takes them from the provinces of Moscow to the wilds of the Transcaucasus mountains. On their quest they encounter a variety of characters, from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the old propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and bungling than the last. A brilliant satire of the early years of the Soviet Union, as well as the inspiration for a Mel Brooks film, The Twelve Chairs retains its universal appeal.

ILYA ILF (1837–1937) and EVGENY PETROV  (1903–1942) met in Moscow in 1925 and wrote this novel from a plot idea suggested to them by Kataev’s famous brother, the novelist Valentin. Their subsequent joint works – including The Golden Calf (1931) and One-Storey High America (1936) – were equally popular in Russia. ANNE O. FISHER translated Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s The Little Golden Calf (2009), awarded the 2011 AATSEEL Book Prize for Best Translation into English, and Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers (2007), short-listed for the 2007 Rossica prize . She lives in San Francisco.

"No translator knows Ilf and Petrov like Anne Fisher. The Twelve Chairs is a ruthless skewering of Soviet and Russian culture and society that is as relevant (and funny) today as when it was published in 1928. And of course Fisher’s translation is brilliant and fresh, brimming with invaluable footnotes to provide context and meaning to the text." — Russian Life

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The Twelve Chairs: A Novel (Northwestern World Classics) Paperback – 30 Oct. 2011

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• Print length 560 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Northwestern University Press
• Publication date 30 Oct. 2011
• Dimensions 13.02 x 3.56 x 19.69 cm
• ISBN-10 0810127725
• ISBN-13 978-0810127722
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Northwestern University Press (30 Oct. 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0810127725
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0810127722
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.02 x 3.56 x 19.69 cm
• 10,101 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• 13,715 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)

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Il'ia il'f.

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Anne O. Fisher

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The Twelve Chairs (European Classics) Paperback – April 2, 1997

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• Print length 395 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Northwestern University Press
• Publication date April 2, 1997
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0810114844
• ISBN-13 978-0810114845
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Northwestern University Press; Translated edition (April 2, 1997)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 395 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0810114844
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0810114845
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
• #94,765 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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