« One Story America» 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 industrialize 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 emergence 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 back 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 blacks, made observations about the pros and cons of capitalism, met with 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 completely 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 the Soviet Union has a lot to learn from the United States.
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 in installments, and the husband would work tirelessly for ten years to pay the three, five or seven thousand dollars that this 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 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
9

"One-Story America" ​​- travel essays by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, creators of the famous novels "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf". In the fall of 1935, satirists were sent to the United States as correspondents for the Pravda newspaper. They traveled America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, and then, with their usual vivacity and sense of humor, told about this journey in a book. Ilf and Petrov spoke about the life of small and large cities, about the most beautiful landscapes: prairies, mountains and national parks, visited the White House and an Indian wigwam, told about American celebrities and film production in Hollywood, about rodeo, wrestling and American football, about the creation of a light bulb , phonograph and electric chair and much, much more.

01. Part I. "From the window of the twenty-seventh floor." Chapter One Normandy. (16:14)
02. Chapter two. First evening in New York. (18:52)
03. Chapter three. What can be seen from the window of the hotel. (15:08)
04. Chapter four. Appetite goes away while eating. (18:00)
05. Chapter five. We're looking for an angel without wings. (19:34)
06. Chapter six. Dad and mom. (15:09)
07. Chapter seven. Electric chair. (26:16)
08. Chapter eight. Big New York arena. (19:37)
09. Chapter nine. We buy a car and leave. (20:35)
10. Part II. "Across the Eastern States". Chapter ten. On the highway. (18:57)
11. Chapter Eleven. Small city. (18:23)
12. Chapter twelve. Big small city. (18:48)
13. Chapter thirteen. Mr. Ripley's Electric House. (21:40)
14. Chapter fourteen. America cannot be taken by surprise. (24:32)
15. Chapter fifteen. Dearborn. (18:47)
16. Chapter sixteen. Henry Ford. (24:02)
17. Chapter seventeen. Scary Chicago. (29:46)
18. Chapter eighteen. The best musicians in the world. (16:17)
19. Part III. "To the Pacific". Chapter nineteen. The birthplace of Mark Twain. (26:44)
20. Chapter Twenty. Marine Corps soldier. (16:05)
21. Chapter twenty-one. Roberts and his wife. (23:42)
22. Chapter twenty-two. Santa Fe. (15:46)
23. Chapter twenty-three. Meeting with the Indians. (23:30)
24. Chapter twenty-four. Day of misfortune. (22:14)
25. Chapter twenty-five. Desert. (20:04)
26. Chapter twenty-six. Grand Canyon. (14:44)
27. Chapter twenty-seven. Man in a red shirt. (28:14)
28. Chapter twenty-eight. Young Baptist. (15:07)
29. Chapter twenty-nine. On the crest of the dam. (19:12)
30. Part IV. "Golden State" Chapter Thirty. Mrs Adams record. (25:52)
31. Chapter thirty-one. San Francisco. (23:01)
32. Chapter thirty-two. American football. (21:18)
33. Chapter thirty-three. "Russian Hill". (15:56)
34. Chapter thirty-four. Captain X. (26:25)
35. Chapter thirty-five. four standards. (20:15)
36. Chapter thirty-six. God of bullshit. (28:28)
37. Chapter thirty-seven. Hollywood fortresses. (05:26)
38. Chapter thirty-eight. Pray, weigh and pay!. (16:26)
39. Chapter thirty-nine. God's country. (19:52)
40. Part V. "Back to the Atlantic". Chapter forty. Along the old Spanish trail. (22:12)
41. Chapter forty-one. Day in Mexico. (20:24)
42. Chapter forty-two. New Year in San Antonio. (22:13)
43. Chapter forty-three. We're moving into the southern states. (21:13)
44. Chapter forty-four. Black people. (23:34)
45. Chapter forty-five. American Democracy. (14:38)
46. ​​Chapter forty-six. Restless life. (21:05)

Vladimir Pozner, Brian Kahn, Ivan Urgant

"One Story America"

"One-story America" ​​by Vladimir Pozner

A few words about

It so happened that I came to the Russian language later than you, reader. I will not explain why: this story is long, and besides, it refers to bygone years.

While studying in the first year of the biology and soil faculty of Moscow State University, I became friends with Semyon Mileikovsky, a very well-read man, despite his seventeen years, who introduced me to Ilf and Petrov, more precisely, to The Twelve Chairs. He introduced me in a rather peculiar way, reading me page after page almost in a whisper, during the summer practice, when there was no one around. It was the year 1953, and although Ilf and Petrov were not among the banned writers, they were not especially allowed: after 1937, the works of Ilf and Petrov were not reprinted, apparently neither The Twelve Chairs nor The Golden Calf fit into the ideological canons of the country of the victorious workers and peasants.

This was all the more true for One-Story America, about which I would like to say a special word.

In 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were seconded by the Pravda newspaper to the United States of America to write a book about this country. This in itself is surprising (especially since Ilf had relatives who once emigrated from Russia to America). In Pravda, the main printed organ of the CPSU(b), nothing appeared by chance. What were the reasons behind the decision to send two satirical writers to America, in order to later publish their impressions on the pages of this ideological "bible" of the party? We are unlikely to know the answer to this question. Is it because just three years earlier Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been elected to the presidency of the United States, and diplomatic relations had been established between the USSR and the USA? Is it because they counted on the satirical talent of writers who would present American capitalism to the Soviet reader in an "appropriate" way? Anyway, they went.

Arriving in New York, Ilf and Petrov spent a month there making contacts and preparing for the trip. To them who did not know of English language and who could not drive a car, managed to find an American married couple who agreed to be their chauffeur-translators, bought a brand new Ford and set off. The journey lasted exactly sixty days. They traveled from New York, on the East Coast, to California, on the West Coast, and back again, visiting twenty-five states and hundreds of cities and settlements, they met with countless Americans and, after returning home, wrote a book. The book is absolutely amazing for several reasons.

It contains forty-seven chapters, and it is known that they wrote seven chapters together, and twenty - separately. However, only a textual expert is able to determine which chapters were written by Ilf and which by Petrov. This is first.

Secondly, neither Ilf nor Petrov had been to America before and did not know English, which has already been noted, but this did not in the least prevent them from feeling the spirit of the country and the people with an unusually subtle and accurate feel. I, who grew up in America and read many books about it, believe that One-Story America is not only the best book written by foreigners about America (with the exception of de Tocqueville's study of "Democracy in America" ​​of the mid-19th century), but in general one one of the best "discoveries of America", which can only be compared with "Finding America with Charlie" by John Steinbeck.

How these two Odessans managed to figure out the most difficult country in just three months is a mystery to me. Today, re-reading One-Storied…, you understand that, in essence, they made very little mistake, except, of course, for some of their assessments regarding, for example, jazz and American cinema.

And one more thing: it was 1935, the hardest time of the Great Depression that swept America, which made millions of people unemployed, but at the same time neither Ilf nor Petrov doubted the ability of the American people to endure, to overcome the crisis. Perhaps they were mistaken in only one thing: comparing Soviet Union and the United States, they invariably emphasized the advantages of the first country of socialism over the main country of capitalism: the first five-year plan had just ended triumphantly in the USSR, the country was clearly on the rise, few knew about the horrors of forced collectivization, the mass repressions of 1937-1938 were still ahead. It seems to me that Ilf and Petrov sincerely believed in the advantages of Soviet socialism. Admiring the achievements of the Americans and America, they sincerely resented the social injustice of American society, and, while praising the USSR, they did not “work out the number”, but proudly emphasized the advantages of the country of which they were lucky to be citizens. Yes, they were wrong—well, they weren't the only ones wrong.

In 1961, when the five-volume collected works of Ilf and Petrov came out, I first read One-Story America.

Years have passed. I changed many jobs - I was the literary secretary of Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak, the executive secretary of the Soviet Life and Sputnik magazines, the commentator for the Main Editorial Board of Radio Broadcasting in the USA and England of the State Radio and Television. It was there, in the late seventies, that I began to appear regularly on various American television channels (this was done via a communications satellite, since I was not allowed to travel abroad). Around this time, I re-read One-Story... and then I thought: how great it would be to repeat the journey of Ilf and Petrov, but this time for television.

This dream seemed completely unrealistic. I knew that they would never let me out of the country - at least, so some general rank with a bull's head told me to my face. As it turned out, the general was mistaken: there were no more travel restrictions, the "Iron Curtain" fell, and with it the main obstacle to the implementation of the plan. But many more years had to pass, fate had to write out intricate pretzels, a variety of circumstances had to coincide, stars and planets had to line up in a certain way so that everything came together.

It took twenty-five years, but the dream came true: we, our television group, repeated the journey of Ilf and Petrov, filmed documentary"One Story America". Despite everything, everything came true.

As my beloved Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol once wrote: “No matter what you say, such incidents happen in the world - rarely, but they do happen.”

Gogol was right. Right.

Necessary recognition and warning

The confession lies in the fact that Brian Kahn and Vladimir Pozner are not Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. There is a certain similarity, of course, but only superficial: both they and we traveled across America, traveling sixteen thousand kilometers from East to West and from West to East. Both they and we wrote a book on this subject with the same title - One-Storied America. This is where the similarity ends.

They are primary, we are secondary. They inspired us, not the other way around. They are wonderful writers, one might say, classics, while we, if writers, are by no means classics. Finally, Ilf and Petrov wrote together, which cannot be said about Kahn and Posner. And the last thing: for Ilf and Petrov, the book One-Story America was the main and only result of their journey. Our book consists of observations and reflections that were not included in the documentary, it is still secondary: these are travel notes made, as they say, after.

For Russians who have not read or even heard about the book by Ilf and Petrov (and, as it turns out, there are surprisingly many of them), I want to say that by taking the name of Ilf and Petrov for our book, we only wanted to emphasize our admiration for them, and by putting the title of our book in quotation marks, we thereby make it clear that it was not invented by us and is actually a quote.

About how we came to New York and didn't end up in Cooperstown

We are in New York. We are our film crew, consisting of 12 people:

- Director Valery Spirin, a man who resembles a sleepy polar bear - firstly, with his dimensions, both in terms of height and weight, secondly, by color and thirdly, by habits: he is leisurely in movements and in speech, looks at you with a slightly distant blue gaze (blue-eyed polar bears are rare, but they do occur), but it’s completely clear that you don’t need to wake him up, it’s more expensive for yourself.

– Operators Vlad Chernyaev and Mikhail Kozlov. Operators are a special people. They, as a rule, have seen everything and know everything. First of all, they know that the most important thing is the picture, that is, what they consider necessary to shoot. Everything else is just the entourage. During the entire trip, these gentlemen sported some half-shorts, tattered T-shirts and sandals that clearly saw better days. I cannot say that they looked like Arab terrorists, but it is a fact that they aroused a certain alertness among the American public.

- Sound engineer Ivan Nekhoroshev, a man with a languid look, who free time talked on a cell phone with some incredible number of Moscow, and, perhaps, not Moscow girlfriends and admirers. Apparently, this distracted him from what was happening so much that he often only at the last moment remembered that it was necessary to “microphone” one or another participant in the filming, and began fussily rushing between the equipment and the object, often dropping microphones and getting tangled in wires.

- Grip ("specialist" in technology) Vladimir Kononykhin, a man of amazing calmness, silent, from whom an unusually pleasant confidence emanated: everything he did was done accurately and reliably. Short, slightly overweight, Kononykhin was everyone's favorite. It was he who figured out how to mount the cameras on the body of our jeep on ingenious suction cups so that at any speed and under any weather and other conditions they stood as firmly and unshakably as Gibraltar.

– Executive producer Alena Sopina. Special mention must be made of her. She had to organize absolutely everything: negotiate with motels where we were to spend the night, establish contacts with all the objects of filming, obtain all permits, manage all financial calculations, settle car rental issues (and there were three of them), collect all the newsreels of the thirties - just not list. And still work as a translator. In a word, an absolutely exorbitant burden fell on the shoulders of this young and unusually fragile creature. When something did not work out, no matter what, all the complaints were addressed to her, Helena Sopina ...

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-storied America" ​​was included in a few collected works of Ilf and Petrov, separate editions rarely appeared ("no matter what 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".

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

Part one
From the window of the 27th floor

Chapter 1
"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 to the closed platform, go up to the top floor of the station via 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.

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 of “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 an interview 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 Ogonkov's publication of 1936 was published in New York, with numerous Ilf'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.