A Ford bought on credit in New York, in which the writers traveled all over America. Photo by Ilya Ilf

On September 19, 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, as correspondents for the newspaper Pravda, set off on a four-month trip to America. On the Ford bought in New York, the writers crossed the whole country, visited the factories of Henry Ford and the birthplace of Mark Twain, in the Indian villages of Santa Fe and Taos, examined the construction of the Hoover Dam (then Boulder Dam), drove through the Colorful Desert of Arizona, visited the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, spent two weeks in Hollywood and returned through the southern states back to New York. Ilf wrote down his impressions in a diary, sent detailed long letters, short postcards, telegrams and stacks of photographs to his wife Maria every day. Returning to Moscow, the writers published their travel notes under the title "One-story America". Translated to English language, the book was a great success in the United States, and then in other countries.

Envelope of Ilya Ilf from the Normandy on the way to New York. October 4, 1935

From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

The first letter from Ilya Ilf from the Normandy on the way to New York. October 4, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

The first letter from Ilya Ilf from the Normandy on the way to New York. October 4, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Writers sailed to New York on. Ilf's letters are written on special paper with the logo of the liner, which was in abundance in a special room for writing and sending letters. Ilf and Petrov described the journey in the first class cabin in detail in the book “ One Story America».

“In general, the amenities here are enormous, if you take the vibration calmly. Our cabin is huge (because we are lucky, in Paris, when we exchanged ship cards for tickets, they gave us a cabin not a tourist one, but a first class one. They do this because the season has already ended so that the first class is not empty ugly) , sheathed in light wood, the ceiling is like in the subway, luxurious, there are two wide wooden beds, wardrobes, armchairs, a washbasin, a shower, a toilet. In general, the ship is huge and very beautiful. But in the field of art, it is clearly unfavorable here. Art Nouveau in general is a bit nasty thing, but on the Normandy it is further enhanced by gold and mediocrity.

“A group of our engineers with the radio designer Shorin is riding on the Normandy. Everyone lay down like bones, showed up for a minute today and again hid in their cabins. I walk alone, mad admiral, insensitive to seasickness.

From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Postcard from New York. October 9, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Ilf and Petrov arrived in New York on October 7, 1935, and spent almost a month there. They saw a lot of people - from Ernest Hemingway to, visited the big Van Gogh exhibition, at one of the first performances of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, saw a boxing match in Madison Square Garden and the dark corners of Sing Sing prison.

"Dear daughter Ilya Ilf addresses his wife Maria., sent you a letter yesterday. I live in the building on the back. I will be writing to you tonight. Kiss our dear Sasha Sashenka - Alexandra, daughter of Ilya Ilf and Maria.,
Your Ilya.

“In the morning, waking up on our twenty-seventh floor and looking out the window, we saw New York in a transparent morning fog.”

"One Story America"

“It was what is called a peaceful village picture. A few white smokes rose into the sky, and an idyllic all-metal cockerel was even attached to the spire of a small twenty-story hut. The sixty-story skyscrapers that seemed so close last night were separated from us by at least a dozen red iron roofs and a hundred tall chimneys and dormer windows, among which laundry hung and ordinary cats roamed.

"One Story America"

Solomon Tron (1872-1969) - electrical engineer, often visited the Soviet Union, worked at Dneprostroy, Chelyabinsk and other places. Together with his wife Florence, the lively, energetic, curious and very sociable Solomon Throne accompanied the writers on their trip to America.

Dearborn envelope. November 14, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

The main impressions of Ilf and Petrov on the way from New York to Hollywood were the factories of Henry Ford in Dearborn, Chicago and advertising, especially light advertising.

“It was Mr. Henry Ford. He has wonderful eyes, sparkling, similar, apparently, to Tolstoy's, muzhik's. A very moving person. He sat down too. He moved his feet all the time. Then he rested them on the table, then he laid them one after another, then he put them on the floor again. We said what is called “for life”. The date lasted about 15 or 20 minutes. Of course, a person like Ford no longer thinks only about making money. He said that he was serving the community and that life was more than a car. In a letter, it's a pity, it's hard to tell, my daughter. In the book One-Storied America, a separate chapter is devoted to the meeting with Henry Ford. In general, I saw a wonderful person who greatly influenced people's lives. He himself, one must think, is not very pleased with the dominance of machines over man, because he said that he wanted to make small factories where people would work and at the same time be engaged in agriculture.

An envelope from the Stevens Hotel. Chicago, November 16, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Letter from the Stevens Hotel. Chicago, November 16, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

In his diary, Ilya Ilf complained that it was impossible to shoot in Chicago:

"15th of November
<…>Brilliant car light. Embankment and slums. The Stevens Hotel has three thousand rooms. Patronage to single traveling women, and next to Gehry 30 miles from Chicago, in the city of Gary, there is a large smelter U.S. Steel.. Everything is clear with them, as in a copper basin.
It would be nice to film it, but it’s a terrible, dark day, nothing can be done, it’s a disgrace.”

From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Postcard from Albuquerque. November 25, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

“Dear Marusik, if an Indian has an apartment on the third tier of a house, then he climbs these stairs from roof to roof. Dogs also walk up these stairs. Goodbye, my daughter.
Your Ilya.

Dogs walking on the roofs of Indian dwellings later appeared in One-Story America:

“The dogs ran to their homes without touching us, quickly climbed the stairs and disappeared at the door.”

From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Postcard from the Navajo Bridge. November 28, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

The desert made a huge impression on Ilf - he shot a lot in Arizona and sent his wife several postcards from the Grand Canyon.

“Dear Marusik, I left Grand Kenyon in the morning and drove through the mountainous desert all day. So good in this colorful desert, like nowhere else. The best I have ever seen.
Yours and Sashenkin Ilya.

The colorful desert of Arizona. Photo by Ilya IlfRussian State Archive of Literature and Art

The stamp on the envelope was cut off for Evgeny Petrov's stamp collection.

From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Letter from San Francisco. December 5, 1935From the family archive of Ilya Ilf

Before Hollywood, the writers stopped for a few days in San Francisco (“the city of fogs, very light and bright”) - to look at the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, walk around the city, go to American football and take a break from the endless road.

“Dear, tender daughter, I’m already very bored. Neither you are gone for a very long time, nor our little Pig Nickname of Ilf's daughter Alexandra.. My children are dear, it seems to me that I will never part with you again. I'm bored without you.
Here Indians, Japanese, Dutch, anyone walk through the streets, and the Pacific Ocean is here, and the whole city is on falling slopes, on cliffs, and I already have too much, I need to see with you how our girl sleeping in bed."

Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

San Francisco. Photo by Ilya IlfRussian State Archive of Literature and Art

Descriptions of these photographs were included in the book One-Storied America:

“It is not clear how and why we ended up in the Tropical Swimming Pool, that is, the winter pool. We stood, without taking off our coats, in a huge, rather old wooden room, where there was a heavy orange-rhine air, some kind of bamboo poles stuck out and curtains hung, admired a young couple in bathing suits, busily playing ping-pong, and on the fat man who was floundering in a large box filled with water ... "

The travel notes of Ilf and Petrov "One-storied America" ​​were published in 1937, more than seventy years ago. In the fall of 1935, Ilf and Petrov were sent to the United States as correspondents for the Pravda newspaper.

It is difficult to say what exactly the top authorities were guided by when they sent satirists into the very thick of capitalism. Most likely, they expected a vicious, destroying satire on the "country of Coca-Cola", but it turned out to be a smart, fair, benevolent book. It aroused keen interest among Soviet readers, who up to that time had not even a rough idea of ​​the North American United States.

The further history of the book cannot be called simple: it was either published, then banned, then removed from libraries, then parts of the text were cut off.

As a rule, "One-story America" ​​was included in a few collected works of Ilf and Petrov, separate editions rarely appeared ("no matter how it happened!"). There are only two editions with Ilfov's photo illustrations.

It is remarkable that the time has come when the desire to repeat the journey of Ilf and Petrov brought to life the documentary television series “One-story America” by Vladimir Pozner (he conceived this project thirty years ago). In addition to the series, we received a book of travel notes by Posner and the American writer, radio journalist Brian Kahn, with photographs by Ivan Urgant.

In a series worthy of all praise, one feels respect for the original. Vladimir Pozner constantly refers to Ilf and Petrov, keenly noting the similarities and differences in the life of America then and now. Posner's television series is known to have aroused great interest in the United States. And I was pleased to discover that many of my compatriot acquaintances, under the influence of the series, are re-reading the old One-Story America.

Today's America is very interested in its history, including the time reflected in the book of Ilf and Petrov. More recently, exhibitions of Ilf's "American photographs" have been successfully held at several American universities. And in New York, an edition was published: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip. The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov(2007). This is a translation of the Ogonkovskaya publication of 1936, with numerous Ilfov photographs.

Good mutual interest benefits everyone.

However, modern America continues to be "one-story".

Alexandra Ilf

A number of surnames and geographical names given according to modern spelling.

At nine o'clock a special train leaves Paris, taking passengers of the Normandie to Le Havre. The train goes non-stop and after three hours rolls into the building of the Havre maritime station. Passengers go to the closed platform, go up to the top floor of the station on the escalator, go through several halls, go along the gangways closed on all sides and find themselves in a large lobby. Here they sit in the elevators and disperse to their floors. This is the Normandy. What is her appearance- the passengers do not know, because they never saw the ship.

We entered the elevator, and a boy in a red jacket with gold buttons pressed a beautiful button with a graceful movement. The shiny new elevator rose a little, got stuck between floors and suddenly moved down, ignoring the boy who was desperately pressing the buttons. Having gone down three floors, instead of going up two, we heard a painfully familiar phrase, uttered, however, on French: "The elevator is not working."

We climbed the stairs to our cabin, entirely covered with a fireproof light green rubber carpet. Corridors and vestibules of the ship are covered with the same material. The step is soft and inaudible. It's nice. But you really begin to appreciate the advantages of rubber flooring during pitching: the soles seem to stick to it. This, however, does not save you from seasickness, but it prevents you from falling.

The staircase was not at all like a steamboat - wide and sloping, with flights and landings, the dimensions of which are quite acceptable for any home.

The cabin was also some kind of non-ship. A spacious room with two windows, two wide wooden beds, armchairs, closets, tables, mirrors, and all amenities, down to the telephone. In general, the Normandy looks like a steamship only in a storm - then it shakes at least a little. And in calm weather, it is a colossal hotel with a magnificent view of the sea, which suddenly broke off the embankment of a fashionable resort and sailed at a speed of thirty miles an hour to America.

Deep below, from the platforms of all the floors of the station, the mourners shouted out their last greetings and wishes. They shouted in French, in English, in Spanish. They also shouted in Russian. A strange man in a black naval uniform with a silver anchor and a shield of David on his sleeve, in a beret and with a sad beard was shouting something in Hebrew. Later it turned out that this was a steamship rabbi, whom the General Transatlantic Company maintains in the service to meet the spiritual needs of a certain part of the passengers. For the other part, there are Catholic and Protestant priests at the ready. Muslims, fire worshipers and Soviet engineers are deprived of spiritual service. In this respect, the General Transatlantic Company has left them to their own devices. There is a fairly large Catholic church on the Normandy, illuminated by an extremely convenient electric demi-light for prayer. The altar and religious images can be covered with special shields, and then the church automatically turns into a Protestant one. As for the rabbi with the sad beard, he is not given a separate room, and he performs his services in the children's room. For this purpose, the company gives him a tales and a special drapery, with which he closes for a while the vain images of bunnies and cats.

The ship left the harbour. There were crowds of people on the embankment and on the pier. The Normandie is still unaccustomed to, and every voyage of the transatlantic colossus attracts everyone's attention in Le Havre. The French coast disappeared in the smoke of a cloudy day. By evening, the lights of Southampton shone. For an hour and a half, the Normandy stood in the roadstead, taking passengers from England, surrounded on three sides by the distant mysterious light of an unfamiliar city. And then she went out into the ocean, where the noisy fuss of invisible waves, raised by a storm wind, was already beginning.

Everything trembled in the stern, where we were placed. The decks, the walls, the portholes, the deck chairs, the glasses over the washbasin, the washbasin itself were trembling. The vibration of the ship was so strong that even such objects from which this could not be expected began to make sounds. For the first time in our lives, we heard the sound of a towel, soap, carpet on the floor, paper on the table, curtains, a collar thrown on the bed. Everything that was in the cabin sounded and rattled. It was enough for the passenger to think for a second and weaken the muscles of his face, as his teeth began to chatter. All night long it seemed that someone was breaking at the door, knocking on the windows, laughing heavily. We counted a hundred various sounds published by our cabin.

The Normandy was making its tenth voyage between Europe and America. After the eleventh voyage, she will go to the dock, her stern will be dismantled, and the design flaws that cause vibration will be eliminated.

In the morning a sailor came and tightly closed the portholes with metal shields. The storm intensified. The small cargo steamer struggled its way to the French shores. Sometimes he disappeared behind the wave, and only the tips of his masts were visible.

For some reason, it always seemed that the ocean road between the Old and New Worlds was very busy, that every now and then funny steamships came across, with music and flags. In fact, the ocean is a majestic and desolate thing, and the steamer, which was stormy four hundred miles from Europe, was the only ship that we met in five days of travel. The Normandie rocked slowly and importantly. She walked, almost without slowing down, confidently throwing high waves that climbed on her from all sides, and only occasionally gave uniform bows to the ocean. It was not a struggle of a meager creation of human hands with a raging element. It was a fight of equals.

Ilya Ilf

(Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg)

Evgeny Petrov

(Evgeny Petrovich Kataev)

One Story America

Ilf and Petrov traveled around the United States of America and wrote a book about their journey called One-Story America. This is an excellent book. It is full of respect for the human person. In it, the work of man is majestically praised. This is a book about engineers, about the structures of technology that conquer nature. This book is noble, subtle and poetic. It extraordinarily clearly manifests that new attitude towards the world, which is characteristic of the people of our country and which can be called the Soviet spirit. This is a book about the richness of nature and the human soul. It is permeated with indignation against capitalist slavery and tenderness for the country of socialism.

Y. Olesha

Part one.

FROM THE WINDOW OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH FLOOR

Chapter first. "NORMANDY"

At nine o'clock a special train leaves Paris, taking passengers of the Normandie to Le Havre. The train goes non-stop and after three hours rolls into the building of the Havre maritime station. Passengers go out to the closed platform, go up to the upper floor of the station along the escalator, go through several halls, go along the gangways closed on all sides and find themselves in a large lobby. Here they sit in the elevators and disperse to their floors. This is the Normandy. What her appearance is - the passengers do not know, because they never saw the ship.

We entered the elevator, and a boy in a red jacket with gold buttons pressed a beautiful button with a graceful movement. The shiny new elevator rose a little, got stuck between floors and suddenly moved down, ignoring the boy who was desperately pressing the buttons. Going down three floors, instead of going up two, we heard a painfully familiar phrase, uttered, however, in French: "The elevator does not work."

We climbed the stairs to our cabin, which were entirely covered with a light green fireproof rubber carpet. Corridors and vestibules of the ship are covered with the same material. The step is soft and inaudible. It's nice. But you really begin to appreciate the advantages of rubber flooring during pitching: the soles seem to stick to it. This, however, does not save you from seasickness, but it prevents you from falling.

The staircase was not at all like a steamboat - wide and sloping, with flights and landings, the dimensions of which are quite acceptable for any home. The cabin was also some kind of non-ship. A spacious room with two windows, two wide wooden beds, armchairs, closets, tables, mirrors, and all amenities, down to the telephone. In general, the Normandy looks like a steamship only in a storm - then it shakes at least a little. And in calm weather, it is a colossal hotel with a magnificent view of the sea, which suddenly broke off the embankment of a fashionable resort and sailed at a speed of thirty miles an hour to America.

Deep below, from the platforms of all the floors of the station, the mourners shouted out their last greetings and wishes. They shouted in French, in English, in Spanish. They also shouted in Russian. A strange man in a black naval uniform with a silver anchor and a shield of David on his sleeve, in a beret and with a sad beard was shouting something in Hebrew. Later it turned out that this was a steamship rabbi, whom the General Transatlantic Company maintains in the service to meet the spiritual needs of a certain part of the passengers. For the other part, there are Catholic and Protestant priests at the ready. Muslims, fire worshipers and Soviet engineers are deprived of spiritual service. In this respect, the General Transatlantic Company has left them to their own devices. There is a fairly large Catholic church on the Normandy, illuminated by an extremely convenient electric demi-light for prayer. The altar and religious images can be covered with special shields, and then the church automatically turns into a Protestant one. As for the rabbi with the sad beard, he is not given a separate room, and he performs his services in the children's room. For this purpose, the company gives him a tales and a special drapery, with which he closes for a while the vain images of bunnies and cats.

The ship left the harbour. There were crowds of people on the embankment and on the pier. The Normandie is still unaccustomed to, and every voyage of the transatlantic colossus attracts everyone's attention in Le Havre. The French coast disappeared in the smoke of a cloudy day. By evening, the lights of Southampton shone. For an hour and a half, the Normandy stood in the roadstead, taking passengers from England, surrounded on three sides by the distant mysterious light of an unfamiliar city. And then she went out into the ocean, where the noisy fuss of invisible waves, raised by a storm wind, was already beginning.

Everything trembled in the stern, where we were placed. The decks, the walls, the portholes, the deck chairs, the glasses over the washbasin, the washbasin itself were trembling. The vibration of the ship was so strong that even such objects from which this could not be expected began to make sounds. For the first time in our lives, we heard the sound of a towel, soap, carpet on the floor, paper on the table, curtains, a collar thrown on the bed. Everything that was in the cabin sounded and rattled. It was enough for the passenger to think for a second and weaken the muscles of his face, as his teeth began to chatter. All night long it seemed that someone was breaking at the door, knocking on the windows, laughing heavily. We counted a hundred different sounds that our cabin made.

The Normandy was making its tenth voyage between Europe and America. After the eleventh voyage, she will go to the dock, her stern will be dismantled, and the design flaws that cause vibration will be eliminated.

In the morning a sailor came and tightly closed the portholes with metal shields. The storm intensified. The small cargo steamer struggled its way to the French shores. Sometimes he disappeared behind the wave, and only the tips of his masts were visible.

For some reason, it always seemed that the ocean road between the Old and New Worlds was very busy, that every now and then funny steamships came across, with music and flags. In fact, the ocean is a majestic and desolate thing, and the steamer, which was stormy four hundred miles from Europe, was the only ship that we met in five days of travel. The Normandie rocked slowly and importantly. She walked, almost without slowing down, confidently throwing high waves that climbed on her from all sides, and only occasionally gave uniform bows to the ocean. It was not a struggle of a meager creation of human hands with a raging element. It was a fight of equals.

In the semicircular smoking hall, three famous wrestlers with squashed ears took off their jackets and played cards. Shirts protruded from under their vests. The wrestlers thought painfully. Large cigars hung from their mouths. At another table, two people were playing chess, constantly correcting the pieces moving off the board. Two more, resting their hands on their chins, watched the game. Well, who else, except for the Soviet people, will play the rejected Queen's Gambit in stormy weather! So it was. The handsome Botvinniks turned out to be Soviet engineers.

Gradually, acquaintances began to be made, companies were formed. They handed out a printed list of passengers, among which was one very funny family: Mr. Butterbrodt, Mrs. Butterbrodt and young Mr. Butterbrodt. If Marshak had been on the Normandy, he would probably have written poems for children called "Fat Mr. Sandwich".

We entered the Gulfstrom. It was raining warmly, and oil soot was deposited in the heavy greenhouse air, which was thrown out by one of the Normandy's pipes.

We went to inspect the ship. A third class passenger does not see the ship he is traveling on. He is not allowed in either the first or tourist classes. A tourist class passenger also does not see the Normandy, he is also not allowed to cross the borders. Meanwhile, the first class is the Normandie. It occupies at least nine-tenths of the entire ship. Everything is huge in first class: the promenade decks, the restaurants, the smoking lounges, the card-playing lounges, the special ladies' lounges, and the conservatory, where plump French sparrows jump on glass branches and hundreds of orchids hang from the ceiling, and a theater with four hundred seats, and a swimming pool with water,

One-Story America is a book created by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov in 1935-1936. Published in 1937 in the Soviet Union. The four of them (both authors and the Adams married couple from New York) crossed America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and back in the acquired brand new Ford "noble mouse color" within two months (late 1935 - early 1936).

On the pages of the book, the authors:

Deep and detailed reveal ordinary life Americans of that time;
. Acquainted with many American celebrities: Hemingway, Henry Ford, Morgan, Williams, Reed, Townsend, Steffens and others;
. They describe many cities and towns in America: New York, Chicago, Kansas, Oklahoma, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, El Paso, San Antonio, New Orleans and the US capital - Washington;
. Visit an Indian wigwam and a Mexican village;
. Periodically meet with Russian emigrants, including Molokans in San Francisco;
. They talk about some national sports: rodeo, wrestling, American football and Mexican bullfighting;
. Rise to the roof of the Empire State Building in New York and descend deep underground into the caves of Carlsbad;
. They describe in detail a unique American invention - the "electric chair" of Sing Sing prison and the creation of the first electric light bulb and phonograph by Edison;
. They represent the most beautiful landscapes of America, located in the prairies, mountains, national parks and even in deserts;
. They visit the White House, where the conversation between US President Roosevelt and reporters took place;
. They talk in detail about the production of films in Hollywood.

Henry Ford and "Tin Lizzie" 1921

A characteristic feature of the book is the minimum (more precisely, the practical absence) of ideological moments, which was simply an exceptional phenomenon for Stalin's time. Ilf and Petrov, being subtle, intelligent and insightful observers, made up a very objective picture of the United States and its inhabitants. Such unattractive features as general standardization and lack of spirituality, or rather, the intellectual passivity of Americans, especially young people, are repeatedly criticized.

At the same time, the authors admire American roads and excellent service, clear organization and pragmatism in everyday life and at work. It was from "One-Story America" ​​that the Soviet reader first learned about publicity, life on credit and the ideology of consumption (chapter "Mr. Ripley's Electric House").

History of creation

In September 1935, Pravda correspondents Ilf and Petrov left for the United States of America. In those days, the President of the United States was Franklin Roosevelt, who did a lot for rapprochement between the United States and the USSR. This allowed the authors to freely move around the country and get closely acquainted with the life of different strata of American society. In America, Ilf and Petrov lived for three and a half months.

During this time they crossed the country twice from end to end. Returning to Moscow in the first days of February 1936, Ilf and Petrov announced in a conversation with a Literaturnaya Gazeta correspondent that they would be writing a book about America. In fact, work on "One-Story America" ​​began in the United States. The essay “Normandy”, which opens the book, was written by Ilf and Petrov shortly after their arrival in America. Under the heading "The Road to New York," it appeared, with minor cuts, in Pravda on November 24, 1935.

“I would like to sign this picture like this:“ This is America! ”(photo by I. Ilf)

During the writers' stay in America, Pravda also published their essay "American Encounters" (January 5, 1936), which in the book concludes chapter twenty-five, "The Desert." Ilf and Petrov published the first brief notes about the trip in 1936 in the Ogonyok magazine under the title American Photographs. The text was accompanied by about 150 American photographs of Ilf, which captured the face of the country and portraits of people whom the writers met in America.

One-Story America was written fairly quickly, during the summer months of 1936. While the book was being written, Pravda published five more essays from it:

June 18 - "Journey to the Land of Bourgeois Democracy";
. July 4 - "New York";
. July 12 - "Electric Gentlemen";
. September 5 - Glorious City of Hollywood;
. October 18 - "In Carmel".

In 1936, the travel essays "One-story America" ​​were first published in the Znamya magazine. In 1937, they were published as a separate publication in Roman-gazeta, Goslitizdat and the Soviet Writer publishing house. In the same year the book was republished in Ivanov, Khabarovsk, Smolensk.

Heroes and prototypes

Under the surname Adams in the book, Solomon Abramovich Tron (1872-1969), an engineer of the General Electric company, who played an important role in the electrification of the USSR, and his wife Florence Tron are displayed in the book.

We met Tron at one of my public lectures on the Soviet Union. Then, in the thirtieth year, we met in Moscow. He has already managed to work at the Dneprostroy, in Stalingrad and Chelyabinsk. Together with him in Moscow was his son from his first marriage, also an electrical engineer. The throne was exactly as depicted in One-Storied America.

Before the Second World War, the beginning of which, as you probably remember from the book, he predicted with an error of only one year, this fidget managed to visit and work in China, India and Switzerland. Last time we met with him already at the end of the war. He was about to move from New York to Youngstown, Ohio, with relatives of his wife, bred in One-Story America under the name Becky. … He was already a rather sick man, old age made itself felt, but in his heart he remained the same “Mr. Adams” - an energetic, inquisitive, interesting conversationalist.

Having become acquainted with the manuscript of One-Storied America, Tron jokingly stated that from now on he and his wife were “ready to live under the name of the Adams.” The Thrones' daughter Sasha (b. 1933), mentioned several times in the book as "baby", subsequently studied in Switzerland.

Reissues

In Soviet times, the book was reprinted in 1947, 1961 and 1966, but in these editions its text was subjected to political censorship. So, references to Stalin and other political figures disappeared from the text. The text underwent an even greater number of edits when it was published in the Collected Works of Ilf and Petrov in 1961. For example, a sympathetic mention of Charles Lindrberg's move from America to Europe after the kidnapping and murder of his son disappeared from the text, which is probably due to Lindrberg's subsequent collaboration with the Nazis.

In 2003, a new edition of the book, restored from the original source, was published, including previously unknown materials from the personal archive of Alexandra Ilyinichna Ilf (daughter of I. Ilf). It published for the first time letters that Ilf sent to his wife and daughter during the trip, and photographs taken by him in the United States.

Together with Petrov's letters, they are a kind of travel diary and naturally complement the book. In the 2000s, exhibitions of Ilf's "American photographs" were successfully held at several American universities, and a translation of the "Ogonkovskaya" publication of 1936 was published in New York, with numerous Ilfov's photographs.

Hot dog vendor in New York, 1936

Translations

One-Storied America has been repeatedly published in Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Czech, Serbian, French, Italian and other languages. In the United States, One-Story America was published in 1937, after Ilf's death, by Farrar & Rinehart under the title Little Golden America. This name was invented by the publisher, despite the protest of the author - Evgeny Petrov and translator Charles Malamute. According to the publisher, such a title should have reminded readers of the previous book by Ilf and Petrov, The Golden Calf, previously published in the United States under the title The Little Golden Calf.

"One-Storied America" ​​was a success with American readers and caused a lot of responses in the metropolitan and provincial press.

Here is some of them:

This book should be marked as a very significant work.
Americans and America would benefit greatly if they thought about these
observations.
Allentown Morning Call

Not many of our foreign guests have traveled this far
from Broadway and the central streets of Chicago; not many could talk about their
impressions with such liveliness and humour.
New York Herald Tribune

This is one of best books written about America by foreigners.
Pleasant, but sometimes hectic, to rediscover America,
through the eyes of the authors of this book.
News Courier, North Carolina

Followers

In 1955, the writer B. Polevoy, as part of a delegation of Soviet journalists, made a trip to the United States. Travel notes created during this trip formed the basis of the book "American Diaries". According to the author, the attitude towards Soviet journalists in the United States changed for the worse and, although the delegation followed almost in the footsteps of Ilf and Petrov, they were deprived of the opportunity to see many aspects of American life.

In 1969, the journalists of the Pravda newspaper B. Strelnikov and I. Shatunovsky repeated the route of Ilf and Petrov in order to compare how much the United States has changed over the past third of a century. The result of the trip was the book "America on the Right and on the Left".

In the summer of 2006, Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner and TV presenter Ivan Urgant made a trip to the United States in the footsteps of Ilf and Petrov. In February 2008, Russian TV premiered their film "One-Story America", which presented the ordinary life of modern America. In 2011, their book One-Storied America was also published.

"One-story America" ​​by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov - perhaps too famous work to seriously review it 75 years after its publication. Nevertheless, I can't help but tell about this wonderful book in my journal after finally reading it, I also can't.
The history of the creation of the book is as follows: in the fall of 1935, correspondents from the newspaper Pravda came to America to make a road trip around this country for several months. “The plan was striking in its simplicity. We come to New York, buy a car and drive, drive, drive - until we get to California. Then we turn back and drive, drive, drive until we get to New York.”. The result of this journey, of course, should have been, if not a full-fledged book, then a series of essays about a country far and little known to Soviet people.
It is difficult to say what the party leaders were guided by when sending satirists into the thick of capitalism. On the one hand, in the mid-1930s, there was a rapprochement between the USSR and America, as a result of which many American engineers worked in the Soviet Union, helping to carry out the industrialization of our country. On the other hand, as Ilya Ilf's daughter Alexandra suggests in her preface to the modern edition of the book, “most likely, they expected a vicious, destroying satire on the “country of Coca-Cola”, but it turned out to be a smart, fair, benevolent book". However, whatever the reason for the appearance of this, as they would say now, travelogue, the possibility of its creation was a great success for the authors, and even for modern readers like me, who have the opportunity to look at America in the 30s through the eyes of Soviet people, then there is, by the standards of that time, practically to fly to another planet.
Having lived for a month in New York, the city of skyscrapers, Ilf and Petrov, in the company of General Electric engineer Solomon Tron, whom they met in the USSR, and his wife Florence Tron, presented in the book as the Adams spouses, made an automobile journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of America and back. On the way, the writers not only visited large and small cities and natural attractions, but also visited factories and film studios, met with famous people(for example, with Henry Ford), studied the lifestyle and character of ordinary Americans, as well as Indians and Negroes, made observations about the pros and cons of capitalism, met emigrants from Russia, got acquainted with national sports (American football, wrestling, Mexican bullfighting) , visited the construction site of the Golden Gate Bridge and so on. Many things and concepts that have long and firmly entered our lives, Ilf and Petrov open up for Soviet readers. On the pages of the book, they explain what service, publicity, rockets (racket), hitchhiking (hitchhiking) are. This also applies to some small everyday moments, including food. In America, for the first time, the authors come across tomato juice, which is called tomato juice, and popcorn. In general, not a book, but a historical document. At the same time, it was written in a habitually lively language for Ilf and Petrov.

I note that the book can hardly be called a product of Soviet propaganda. It’s not that there are no ideological moments in it at all, but, firstly, they are present only as conclusions from descriptions of American realities, and secondly, obviously, they are explained by the fact that the authors were quite sincerely influenced by the romantic moods of building socialism, which seemed to them a far fairer model than American capitalism. This, however, did not at all prevent Ilf and Petrov from honestly and benevolently pointing out the advantages of the American world order, not embarrassed to admit that Soviet Union There is a lot to learn from the USA.
The absence of "ideological heaviness" is also confirmed by the way "One-Storied America" ​​was received in the United States itself. Among the short newspaper reviews given on Wikipedia, there is not a single negative one. But there are such reviews: “Not many of our foreign guests have traveled this far from Broadway and downtown Chicago; not many people could talk about their impressions with such vivacity and humor. and “Not for one minute did the authors let themselves be fooled. Next to the main streets they saw slums, they saw poverty next to luxury, dissatisfaction with life, breaking through everywhere..

“Barely dragging our feet after these terrible adventures, we went for a walk in Santa Fe. American brick and wood are gone. Here stood Spanish houses of clay, supported by heavy buttresses, the ends of square or round ceiling beams sticking out from under the roofs. Cowboys walked the streets, tapping their high heels. A car drove up to the entrance of the cinema, an Indian with his wife got out of it. On the forehead of the Indian was a wide bright red bandage. Thick white windings were visible on the Indian woman's legs. The Indians locked the car and went to see the picture.

“There are many wonderful and attractive features in the character of the American people. These are excellent workers, golden hands. Our engineers say they really enjoy working with Americans. Americans are precise, but far from being pedantic. They are careful. They know how to keep their word and trust the word of others. They are always ready to help. These are good comrades, easy people.
But here's a wonderful feature - curiosity - the Americans are almost absent. This is especially true for young people. We did 16,000 kilometers by car on Great Danes and saw a lot of people. Almost every day we took "hitchhikers" into the car. They were all very talkative, and none of them were curious or asked who we were.”

“And here, in the desert, where for two hundred miles in a circle there is not a single settled dwelling, we found: excellent beds, electric lighting, steam heating, hot cold water - we found the same furnishings as can be found in any house in New York , Chicago or Gallop. In the canteen they put stacks of tomato juice in front of us and gave us a T-bone "steak" as beautiful as in Chicago, New York or Gallop, and charged us almost the same for all this ... This is an American standart spectacle of life (standard of living) was no less majestic than the painted desert.

“You have to look at the mountains from the bottom up. On the canyon - from top to bottom. The spectacle of the Grand Canyon is unparalleled on earth. Yes, it did not look like the ground. The landscape overturned everything, so to speak, European ideas about the globe. Such may appear to a boy while reading a science fiction novel Moon or Mars. We stood for a long time at the edge of this magnificent abyss. We four talkers didn't say a word. Deep below, a bird floated by, slow as a fish. Deeper still, almost engulfed in shadow, flowed the Colorado River.

“Most of these girls live with their parents, their earnings go to help their parents pay for a house bought on an installment plan, or for a refrigerator, also bought on an installment plan. And the future of the girl comes down to the fact that she will get married. Then she would buy the house herself on an installment plan, and her husband would work tirelessly for ten years to pay the three, five, or seven thousand dollars that the house cost. And for ten years, a happy husband and wife will tremble with fear that they will be fired from work and then there will be nothing to pay for this house. Oh, what a terrible life millions of American people lead in the struggle for their tiny electric happiness!

“To many people, America seems to be a country of skyscrapers, where day and night you can hear the clanging of overground and underground trains, the hellish roar of cars and the continuous desperate cry of stockbrokers who rush about among the skyscrapers, waving every second falling shares. This notion is solid, old and familiar. Of course, everything is there - skyscrapers, and elevated roads, and falling stocks. But this belongs to New York and Chicago. […] There are no skyscrapers in small towns. America is predominantly a one-story and two-story country. Most of the American population lives in small towns, where the inhabitants are three thousand people, five, ten, fifteen thousand.

“We have already said that the word "publicity" has a very broad meaning. This is not only direct advertising, but also any mention of the advertised subject or person in general. When, say, they do "publicity" to some actor, then even a note in the newspaper that he recently had a successful operation and that he is on the road to recovery is also considered an advertisement. One American, with a certain envy in his voice, told us that the Lord God has a splendid "publicity" in the United States. Fifty thousand priests talk about him every day.”

“Negroes met more and more often. Sometimes for several hours we did not see whites, but the white man reigned in the towns, and if a black man appeared at a beautiful, ivy-covered mansion in the "residential part", then always with a brush, bucket or package, indicating that he can be just a servant. […] Negroes are almost deprived of the opportunity to develop and grow. The careers of doormen and elevator operators are open to them in the cities, but in their homeland, in the Southern states, they are laborers without rights, reduced to the state of pets - here they are slaves. […] Of course, under American law, and especially in New York, a Negro has the right to sit in any place among whites, to go to a "white" cinema or a "white" restaurant. But he will never do it himself. He knows only too well how such experiments end. He, of course, will not be beaten, as in the South, but that his closest neighbors in most cases will immediately defiantly come out - this is beyond doubt.

“America lies on the highway. When you close your eyes and try to resurrect in your memory the country in which you spent four months, you imagine not Washington with its gardens, columns and a complete collection of monuments, not New York with its skyscrapers, with its poverty and wealth, not San Francisco with its steep streets and suspension bridges, not mountains, not factories, not canyons, but the intersection of two roads and a gasoline station against the backdrop of wires and advertising posters.

Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov in America
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