Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip

Retracing the 10,000-mile road trip—from New York to Hollywood and back—Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov undertook in 1935, historian Kirschenbaum (International Communism and the Spanish Civil War) paints a nuanced portrait of interwar America. Born Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg and Evgeny Petrovich Katev respectively, the duo began their literary partnership in 1927 writing for the Moscow newspaper Gudok (alongside Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov) and quickly became famous for their novels satirizing the Soviet Union of the 1920s. Their road trip—eventually recounted in their 1937 travelogue Low-Rise America—was intended to reveal the “ ‘real’ America of low-rise buildings beyond the skyscrapers of New York.” Kirschenbaum digs into Ilf and Petrov’s travel notes to see what was left out of their published account due to both Soviet censorship and the pair’s own nuanced political point of view (they were for and against various aspects of Soviet and American life). She uncovers a teeming American network of Soviet émigrés, communists, and modernists (among them novelists John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway) interested in building friendly relations with the U.S.S.R., and she draws out the implications of the travelogue’s elided facts, including the pair’s extensive association with Jewish Soviet immigrants and their meeting with singer and activist Paul Robeson at a queer cabaret. The result is a meticulously pieced together new perspective on Soviet-U.S. relations. (Apr.)