The Golden Calf

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Overview

"A remarkably funny book written by a remarkable pair of collaborators."
—New York Times

Ostap Bender, the "grand strategist," is a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. He’s obsessed with getting one last big score—a few hundred thousand will do—and heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are "a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception."

When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an "undercover millionaire"—no Soviet citizen was allowed to openly hoard so much capital—the chase is on. Koreiko has made his millions by taking advantage of the wide-spread corruption and utter chaos of the NEP, all while serving quietly as an accountant at a government office and living on 46 rubles a month. He's just waiting for the Soviet regime to collapse so he can make use of his stash, which he keeps hidden away in a suitcase.

Teaming up with two petty criminals and a hopelessly naïve driver, Bender leads his merry band of mischief makers on a raucously hilarious jaunt across the "wild west" of the early Soviet Union. One of the true classics of Russian literature, this new translation of "The Golden Calf"—the first complete translation of the novel—restores the absurd, manic energy of the original and reaffirms the judgment of the Soviet censors, who said: "You have a very nice hero, Ostap Bender. But really, he's just a son of a bitch."

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

A hilarious blend of absurdist, futurist and surrealist sensibilities, this new (and only complete) translation of Ilf and Petrov's novel following The Twelve Chairs, first serialized in 1931, is a highly animated tale of a con artist's journey through the cities and hinterlands of Soviet Russia. Part anarchist, part Quixote and part jester, “grand strategist” Ostap Bender, along with his lackeys, rides through the country in a yellow jalopy in search of the elusive “secret millionaire” Alexander Koreiko. Along the way, a superabundance of wild, arresting images and uncanny scenarios materialize, from an elaborate bureaucracy housed in a former hotel where the “white bathtubs were filled with files,” to the introduction of a puzzle maker attempting to make a riddle out of the word “industrialisation”; from the sight of doormen “selling white-striped watermelons by their doorways” to the use of a telegram machine missing a letter. It's an invigorating journey through innumerable paradoxes, dreams and burlesque routines, and though it's intensely chaotic (at times to dizzying effect), this is a finely translated edition of a triumphant literary experiment. (Dec.)

Library Journal

War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Doctor Zhivago weigh so heavily on Russian literature that many readers don't realize that there are some truly hilarious Russian novels. This classic picaresque, first serialized in 1931, is one of them. Enlisting the help of two other con artists and a simple chauffeur, Ostep Bender devises one ridiculous scheme after another to wrest a million rubles from another con man, who's living a quiet life waiting for socialism to end, toting the wealth he can't spend in a comically enormous suitcase. Although Bender is a crook with hundreds of nonviolent ways to separate people from their money, his mark is equally crooked. Furthermore, because the original wealth was acquired from an absurd system rather than an innocent individual, the reader feels a greater affinity with the antihero. When Bender finally succeeds in stripping his mark of a million rubles, he isn't any happier. In this way, the novel is able to satirize both Soviet collectivism and capitalism. VERDICT This outstanding work recalls Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk and will appeal to a wide range of readers—K.H. Cumiskey, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, NC

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781934824078
Publisher: Open Letter
Publication date: 12/15/2009
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 336
Sales rank: 852,362
Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Ilya Ilf (1897–1937) and Evgeny Petrov (1903–1942) were the pseudonyms of Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg and Evgeny Petrovich Katayev, a pair of Soviet writers who met in Moscow in the 1920s while working on the staff of a newspaper that was distributed to railway workers. The foremost comic novelists of the early Soviet Union (invariably referred to as Ilf & Petrov), the pair collaborated together for a dozen years, writing two of the most revered and loved Russian novels, "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf," as well as various humorous pieces for "Pravda" and other magazines. Their collaboration came to an end following the death of Ilya Ilf in 1937—he had contracted tuberculosis while the pair was traveling the United States researching the book that eventually became "Little Golden America."

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