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Book
Review
ILF & PETROV’S AMERICAN ROAD TRIP: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writersby
Evgeny Petrov (Author), Ilya Ilf (Author), Erika Wolf (Editor)
Princeton Architectural
Press
1st edition (December 2006)
Reviewed by Mel
BrownTexas
Mystery Monument Turns Up Unexpectedly In Moscow .....
yes, the Moscow in
Russia | |
Driving
across America by Ford in 1935 from New York City to San Francisco and then back
again gave two Soviet journalists an opportunity to discover our homeland at an
important time in its colorful history. Fortunately one of them carried a 35 mm
Leica camera and took hundreds of photos along the way. Now after languishing
in various crumby USSR and then Russian archives, many of those images have been
found and published in America after 70 years of neglect or abuse in Moscow. These
unique pictures along with the diaries the two men kept of that historic trip
have been joined into an entertaining little book, newly titled, Ilf & Petrov's
American Road Trip; The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers.
So why
am I sharing this with TE readers? You might well wonder so here it goes. The
title caught my eye during a weekly trip to Austin Public Library and it hooked
me immediately with its humorously insightful, if somewhat dated, commentary and
a bunch of wonderful photographs; some are decidely reminiscent of our own WPA
images of Depression era America. Early in the modest volume is an intriguing
scene shot somewhere along a North Texas border highway with the following textual
note. “Once, right before evening, having driven across the state of Oklahoma
all day, we noticed a monument with rather strange architecture, something like
a little grain elevator, off to the right of the road. It was the boundary marker
for the state of Texas. As we learned later, Texans love to decorate the borders
of their state. On the monument’s pedestal, there was a five-pointed star: the
emblem of Texas, the biggest and most romantic state in America.” As a bona fide
history nut, I was really hooked now. |
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| 1930s
photo courtesy Richard Benton, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma |
The curious
“monument” was decidedly picturesque so I fired off a query to Anne Cook, my longtime
pal at the TxDoT Library here in Austin. She immediately responded with a page
full of TE exchanges from last fall under the title Texas
Panhandle Mystery Monument. With those fascinating entries under my belt,
I resumed my travels with Ilf and Petrov and have been rewarded more than I not
only expected but could nearly wish for and I read a lot. This book was perhaps
providentially intended to be sought out by many of TE’s faithful so I’ll keep
my remarks brief.
With
chapter headings like The Road, Small Towns, The Desert, Indians, Hollywood, Advertising,
Negroes and New York, the two “Russian satirical writers” were tasked by Pravda
to portray America and Americans to its Soviet readers. Pravda(the Truth) was
the USSR’s leading(official) newspaper from 1912 until 1991 and so was read by
millions daily. And while Ilf and Petrov kept it light for the most part, they
also took several swipes at a mid 20th century USA that was far from the mostly
quaint and charming place that Hollywood presented weekly to the world. Their
two month sojourn was smack in the middle of America’s version of the Great Depression.
This nation was, in their eyes, a country utterly different from their own and,
in some ways, more than a little unrecognizable to us now, 70 years later. You
will also discover an America strikingly familiar to the present generation as
the long gone authors describe a Hollywood totally out of touch with daily life
with the excesses of commercial advertising made modern only by its ever more
immediate technology.
This very readable artifact will make you laugh
often and, nearly as often, will remind you that we’re still wrestling with crass
materialism, racism, and several other sadly familiar conundrums that may simply
be part of the human condition as lived within our borders at this moment, much
as it was in 1935. The words, thoughts and images presented by the two Soviet
men were never intended for the American public which gives them a freshness that
was delightful to find. The book ends with a compelling account of how it was
brought to us in spite of the ravages of time, warfare, neglect, and carelessness.
Many of Ilf Petrov’s photographs were lost to oblivion but enough survived to
make this volume dearly special. Alas, the book’s thirty-something authors were
not so lucky as both perished within eight years of their memorable trip across
our motherland. This bittersweet epilogue lends a preciousness to the material
that cannot be measured but can certainly be appreciated and deserves to be, more
than I can say. | |
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