The Golden Calf
Review of Ukrainian comic novel by Ilf and Petrov
First published in 1930–1931 in Stalinist Russia, The Golden Calf mocks the bureaucracy and the peculiarities of Soviet life but ends with an almost Christian moral — that it doesn’t pay to strive for personal wealth.
The authors, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, were from Odessa, in today’s Ukraine, and the landscape the characters travel through and talk about is mainly Ukrainian, echoing with current news of the heroic defense against Russian invasion. A friend of mine, who lives near Kharkiv, recommended this novel, saying that Ukrainians in all walks of life find it hilarious and frequently allude to it.
The main character, Ostap Bender, is a con man, who brilliantly carries out one scam after another, sometimes alone and sometimes with the help and hindrance of a team. At times, he reminds me of Milo Minderbinder, in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22, an entrepreneur capitalizing on the bureaucracy of the WWII military for personal gain. But Heller probably wasn’t influenced by Ilf and Petrov. When I had a writing class with him in 1968, he cited another book written around the same time as Golden Calf — Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Voyage to the End of the Night) by Céline, a dark satiric account of World War I and its aftermath.
Ostap isn’t interested in small scale swindles, except as means to his end — becoming a millionaire. He goes to great lengths to achieve that goal, only to discover that it is worthless. In Stalinist communist Russia, there is very little that he can do with great personal wealth. Everything he dreamed of buying and doing is limited to members of unions and collectives.
