3. Ostap Bender: the King Is Born
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——————————————— Ostap Bender: The King Is Born ——————————————— CHAPTER 3 OSTAP BENDER: THE KING IS BORN — 89 — —————————————————— CHAPTER THREE —————————————————— — 90 — ——————————————— Ostap Bender: The King Is Born ——————————————— Dvenadtsat’ stuliev (The Twelve Chairs, 1928) and Zolotoi telenok (The Golden Calf, 1931, Soviet book edition 1933), by Ilya Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, hold a unique place in Soviet culture. Although incorporated into the official canon of SocialistR ealist satire (a phenomenon whose very existence was constantly put into question), the books “became a pool of quotes for several generations of Soviet intellectuals, who found the diptych to be a nearly overt travesty of propagandistic formulae, newspaper slogans, and the dictums of the founders of ‘Marxism- Leninism.’ Paradoxically, this ‘Soviet literary classic’ was read as anti- Soviet literature.” (Odesskii and Feldman, 6) As Mikhail Odesskii and David Feldman (12–25) have shown, Dvenadtsat’ stuliev was commissioned to Valentin Kataev and his “brigade” in 1927 by Vladimir Narbut, editor-in-chief of the journal 30 days, which serialized the novel throughout the first half of 1928. Narbut also was a director of a major publishing house, “Zemlia i Fabrika” (“Land and Factory”), which released the novel in book form after the journal publication. Kataev, already a recognized writer, invited two young journalists into his “brigade,” his brother Petrov and Il’f—an old acquaintance from Odessa and a colleague at the newspaper Gudok (Train Whistle) where Kataev had also worked in the past—letting them develop his story of a treasure hidden inside one chair of a dining room set. However, once Kataev had ascertained that the co-authors were managing fine without a “master’s oversight,” the older brother left the group and the agreement with the journal and publisher was passed on to Il’f and Petrov. As Odesskii and Feldman suggest, Kataev purposefully acted as the project’s “locomotive” by — 91 — —————————————————— CHAPTER THREE —————————————————— securing a contract for the unfinished novel in his name and then passing it on to his co-authors. These researchers also show that the novel was commissioned as part of the campaign against Trotskyism, waged by the “Stalin wing” throughout 1927. The pretense of attacking Trotskyism gave Il’f and Petrov free reign to mock NEP (which Trotsky actively defended) and left-wing ideology. Later the authors excised a number of chapters which related to Trotskyism too directly, as the subject lost its relevance with the onset of the attack on Bukharin, Stalin’s past ally, and the “right opposition” in 1928. Generally speaking, these events benefited the novel as they involuntarily broadened the scope and focus of the satire from mere Trotskyism to include “real socialism” and Soviet ideological language. Of course, even the first novel went far beyond the boundaries of the politically motivated commission, mostly thanks to the figure of Ostap Bender. It was Bender who filled Il’f and Petrov’s novels with his own, alternative and unorthodox, ideology: himself embodying the discourse of total irony and kynical trickery as a form of social resistance and even a type of romantic pose, which was later inherited by several generations of Soviet readers. The novel’s first critics sensed this. It is no accident that Soviet criticism of the 1920s and 30s at first accused Il’f and Petrov’s novels of “thematic pettiness” (melkotem’e) and “insufficiently profound hatred for the class enemy.” For instance, Dvenadtsat’ stuliev provoked criticism along the lines of: “… By laughing at the nincompoopery of daily life and speaking ironically of the representatives of philistinism, the novel does not rise to the height of satire… the authors passed real life by—it is not reflected in their observations, their artistic lens only caught the types who are leaving the stage of life: the doomed, ‘former people.’” (Sitkov, 38) Even after favorable publications in Literaturnaia gazeta, such as an article by Anatolii Tarasenkov that took Dvenadtsat’ stuliev beyond the dangerous discussion on the necessity of satire in a perfect Soviet society (Tarasenkov), Il’f and Petrov’s novel instilled unease in the Soviet official organs.1 It is a small wonder, then, that Zolotoi telenok, after the initial (abridged) publication in serial form in 1931, was released as a novel in Germany, Austria, the U.S. and England two years prior to the first book edition in the USSR. The publication 1 See: Zorich, Selivanovskii, Troshchenko. — 92 — ——————————————— Ostap Bender: The King Is Born ——————————————— would not have occurred at all if Gorky had not pressed A.S. Bubnov, the then People’s Commissar of Enlightenment.2 Anatolii Lunacharsky (a former Commissar of Enlightenment) supplied a foreword to the American edition in which he described Ostap Bender in the following words: “This unusually dexterous, daring, ingenious, and, in his own way, great-hearted rogue, Bender, who showers derisions, aphorisms, paradoxes around him, seems the only real person in the midst of these microscopic vipers [the novel’s characters—ordinary Soviet ‘philistines’]… This Bender is more attractive and more human than those who surround him. His band is lost in the rays of light shed by its talented leader who is almost a genius.” (Lunacharsky, xvii) Having said that, Lunacharsky carefully disclaimed: “… Further sympathy for such a type [Ostap Bender] assumes the natures of anarchism.” (ibid., xviii) 1. Ostap Bender and Koreyko by Kukryniksy The response of the critics of the 1960s–70s to the renewed interest in Il’f and Petrov’s diptych and the new popularity of its protagonist, who was to become a real hero for the new generation, did not add much to Lunacharsky’s duality. Thus, Abram Vulis, in the first book written about Il’f and Petrov, argues that the authors “underestimated 2 See about this in Munblit and Raskin, 209. — 93 — —————————————————— CHAPTER THREE —————————————————— the attractiveness of this, essentially negative character who was armed with their fabulous irony” (Vulis, 270), while Ostap’s “negative” characteristics derive from the fact that “rejecting both Soviet power and its enemies, Bender finds a place between two warring forces.” (idem., 278) Vladimir Sappak formulated a similar idea in “Manichean” terms: Bender is “a negative character who fulfils a positive function. […] His ability to see the real value of things […] his talent for ridicule, mockery and parody towards everything that deserves to be ridiculed, constitutes the immense positive charge carried by Ostap Bender…” (Sappak, 123)3 2. Ostap Bender by Kukryniksy Yurii Shcheglov and Alexander Zholkovsky were the first critics to dispense with this awkward interpretational construct. In Shcheglov’s view, the character Bender is formed at the intersection of two 3 Somewhat similar interpretation of Ostap is presented in Ianovskaia, 94–107. — 94 — ——————————————— Ostap Bender: The King Is Born ——————————————— archetypal models: the rogue and the “demonic hero.” Bender’s roguish genealogy is self-evident—the scholar indicates numerous parallels with the characters of Mark Twain, O. Henry’s “noble conmen,” some of Chaplin’s heroes, Babel’s Benya Krik, Bulgakov’s Ametistov (also see Likhachev), as well as older examples of rogues from Lazarillo de Tormes and Gil Blas de Santillane, to Gogol’s Chichikov and Dickens’s Mr. Alfred Jingle, and Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers.4 All the same, Ostap’s intellectual brilliance, the virtuosity of his parodic aphoristic formulae, his masterful manipulation of linguistic stereotypes, his aptitude at momentarily recognizing people’s weaknesses and exploiting them for his own benefit, multiplied by his charm, all bring him into the “scattered family of intellectually sophisticated heroes, rising above the ‘crowd’ and lonely atop their Olympus… Such a hero habitually gives himself the right to dispose of ‘little people’ and their lives as cheap material for his titanic experiments… In less appealing variations he exhibits such traits as emptiness, cynicism, a mockery of everything and all, and the Devil’s famous lack of a stable character, his endless multiplicity of masks and guises.” (Shcheglov, 31) A few years before Shcheglov, Maya Kaganskaia, and Zeev Bar-Sella demonstrated parallels between Ostap and Bulgakov’s Woland (see Kaganskaia and Bar-Sella). Shcheglov and Lurie point at a resemblance between Ostap and Erenburg’s Khulio Khurenito (“the great provocateur”—“the great combinator”) and even Sherlock Holmes (death and resurrection; the likeness in plot between “Six Napoleons” and Dvenadtsat’ stuliev was noticed as early as in 1929 [Kashintsev]). Though presented ironically, Bender’s romanticism and sometimes “demonism” is apparent in several of his features and particularly evident in Zolotoi telenok; examples include Ostap’s resurrection after the finale of Dvenadtsat’ stuliev, his agency’s specialization in “horns and hooves,” his debate with the catholic priests over Kozlevich’s soul (analogous to his tormenting Father Fyodor in the first novel), and his tragic defeat during the crossing of the Dniestr—the mythological boundary between this world and the other—completing the realization of Bender’s own maxim that “the ice is moving”; this scene 4 Viktor Shklovsky was one of the first to detect the genealogy of Ostap in rogue novels. See Shklovsky, 1934. — 95 — —————————————————— CHAPTER THREE —————————————————— is comparable to the “infernal” depiction of the Crimean earthquake which accompanies the loss of hope for the recovery of the 11th chair in the second-to-last chapter of Dvenadtsat’ stuliev. However, both as the rogue and as the “demonic” hero, embodying a philosophical superiority over the “crowd,” Ostap appears as the sole free character in the whole Soviet world. Shcheglov suggests that in Il’f and Petrov’s novels the characters’ involvement in the utopian project of building the communist future serves as the main criterion for their aesthetic evaluation by the authors (22–24). This principle of aesthetic evaluation, however, does not appear to extend to Ostap (at least until the finale of Zolotoi telenok).