Co-author of The Twelve Chairs, satirist who captured the contradictions of NEP-era Soviet society
Coughing up blood during the US road trip, he told Petrov, 'It's nothing, keep going,' and kept jotting scenes in his notebook.
A Soviet satirist who co-wrote The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf with Yevgeny Petrov. Through the con-man Ostap Bender, he skewered NEP-era bureaucracy and petty-bourgeois ambition with piercing humor.
Career Timeline
- 1897Born in Odessa, third son of a bank accountant (born Iehiel-Leib Fainzilberg)
- 1913Graduated technical school; draftsman, telephone repairman, lathe operator
- 1919–1921Served in Red Army vs Denikin; later food-supply accountant
- 1923Moved to Moscow; journalist for railway workers' paper Gudok
- 1927Began literary collaboration with Yevgeny Petrov
- 1928Published The Twelve Chairs; introduced iconic Ostap Bender
- 1931Published The Golden Calf
- 1935–1936Crossed US by car with Petrov; wrote One-Storied America
- 1937Died 13 April, Moscow, of TB; buried Novodevichy Cemetery
Related historical events
The Notebooks: A Literary Confession Discovered After Death
Ilf kept notebooks from 1925 until his death. They filled with travel diaries from across the USSR and abroad, satirical fragments, and trial lines and scenes for future works. When a note found its way into a published piece, he crossed it out. Gradually the notebooks became an independent literary work: a kind of confession. They contained prose-poem landscapes, acerbic and melancholy observations of Soviet reality, and coinages like "the land of unfrightened idiots" (twisting Prishvin's title In the Land of Unfrightened Birds). His co-author Petrov called them "poetic and sad."
After Ilf's death, the complete edition faced prolonged censorship; only heavily cut versions appeared in the USSR. Even so, scores of his aphorisms, "The ice has broken, gentlemen of the jury!", "Where is the savior?", passed from mouth to mouth and entered the everyday Russian lexicon.