Revival: Little Golden America (1944)

by Yevgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf

Book Overview

Odnoetazhnya Amerika (One-Storied America) First published in the U.S.S.R. 1936. Little Golden America. First published in England in 1944. Translated from the Russian by Charles Malamuth This is one of the most popular books ever published in the Soviet Union. It remains popular in Russia today. We Americans cannot figure out what makes it so popular. It is a good book, interesting and well written, but does not contain anything so outstanding...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138567515
• ISBN13: 9781138567511
• Release Date: January 2019
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A delicious travelogue of Depression era American by two Soviet serfs

Two totalitarian Russian commies travel through America in the 1930's and have a jolly capitalist time (and a hard time concealing it). Quite funny, specially when one considers how much their anti-American comments must have been forced upon them, as expected from serfs of the Soviet regime. It's like Michael Moore criticizing capitalism while cashing in. The vivid pictures of the places and people they meet, as well as the conversations captured, are all beautifully expressed, in a very fluid and fresh prose. These two cowards, defendants of tyrants, are having the time of their life, New York to San Francisco and back, all expenses paid. Fittingly chosen photos accompany their trip. A beautiful and amusing travelogue. A study of American society during Depression times, turned into a psychoanalysis of two soviet commies and their servile characters. The contrast, if you understand the circumstances of the times, are a real treat for the reader. Should be made into a road movie by Woody Allen.

Still-recognizable portrait of America

Apart from this book's obvious value as a humorous and intelligent look at 1935 America, it is most interesting for showing the many respects in which FDR's New Deal America was already fixed in many of the cultural and political ruts in which we still find the U.S. It can be so revealing because it observes the ordinary and the stupid as keenly as the elite and accomplished. (As a result, the book's occasional smugness will certainly grate on some American readers. The authors describe to us an incurious and unthinking people and are most dated by their certainty that the economic stagnation of 1935 is a loud and final trumpet-blast giving the final verdict on the American kind of capitalism. Maybe it was, in some ways, but in general this is facile in retrospect, especially in comparison with the Soviet trajectory. The point of this positive review is how much truth comes through despite this somewhat churlish--though always witty--attitude.) The very premise of the book is that knowledge of the nation comes on a road trip, that the rhythm of stopping at gas stations and proceeding along endless highways is somehow definitive of America. Ilf and Petrov ponder the essential sameness of so many American towns. The book begins at once with New Yorkers' and Washingtonians' admonitions to the authors that the "real America" lies somewhere else, out on the roads sprawling westward. (The New Yorkers' children meanwhile, they observe, learn what a cow might be like by looking at the rhino in the Central Park Zoo.) Some of what Ilf and Petrov hear in 1935 America is disgustingly familiar to us still: otherwise thriving families bankrupted by medical expenses; the ordinary man's belief that it's all right to soak the rich with progressive taxation so long as we leave them $5 million (around $75 million today) -- $4 million being perhaps not generous enough; Santa Fe overrun by millionaires; Los Angeles characterized by the peculiar ineradicability of exhaust in its air, and by a plenty of oranges that look better than they taste. (Americans, they observe, seem more interested in vitamins than taste.) The authors' dark diagnosis of America is perhaps most fascinated by the role of advertising and idiot mass culture. They observe that an American might well graduate from a series of excellent schools, but that a few years of watching the dreck from Hollywood will stupefy them soon enough (and this was clear to them some years before the advent of commercial TV). They see that many of America's churches, schools, and journalistic organs serve, in effect, to reinforce this same effect of the movies, that "publicity" defines a wider theater of thought invasion than just the explicit ads. They are amused that Christmas is advertised in much the same way as Coca Cola, and for the same reasons. They understand how corporate branding really works--the irrelevant advertisement whose work is done just by making you pay attention to it. They look at

This almost-lost work is a gem

This new translation (the last was in 1937) of this almost-lost work is a gem. And not just because it is by two of Soviet Russia's greatest writers and humorists. After all, it is always fascinating to hear how others see us, to see what photos they take, what impressions they bring away. Ilf and Petrov were trenchant observers of human nature, and this travelogue of their 1935 trip across America is simply a piece of classic journalism. Of course, this is not the pair's funniest work. Hardly surprising, given that the system they lampooned with The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf (sadly, only the former is currently in print in English) was, by the time the pair turned up in America, engulfed in a paroxysm of self-mutilation. But the account of their journey is funny and at times biting, even taking into account Ilf and Petrov's need to toe the Party line (they were working for Pravda, after all). Add in the candid and revealing photos of everyday Americans, and you have a true collector's item. In the end, reading this book is like leafing through an old family album full of vaguely familiar faces and places, with running commentary by a sarcastic, immigrant uncle. (Reviewed in Russian Life)

Fantastic snapshot of 1930 USA thru Soviet Lens

What a terrific job on the translation and reproduction of the documentation of this fascinating trip by the two Soviet journalists. Highly recommend the book.