Reader's Expectations and Their Violation in Il'f and Petrov's «One-storied America».
Two Russian Soviet writers travel through the USA in the 1935 and then publish a book in the USSR in which they show America from an unusual point of view.
I want to devote this post to the text I have been studying for the last two years of my bachelor’s degree and to which I suddenly returned these days, because I am planning to write an article about this book.
It is a travelogue written by two Soviet authors, Il’f and Petrov. Studying this text was a real pleasure for me. I enjoy the style of these writers, I like reading about travels and I was also glad to study this text as a scholar because it was not studied properly and there are a lot of interesting things about it yet to reveal.
This post will be although about only one issue I find interesting about this text – about the divergence of the expectations the readers of the travelogue had and the way the travel was described in the book.
Il’f and Petrov set off to the USA on the 19th of September 1935 having been sent into this trip by the main newspaper of the Soviet Union, «Pravda». In America they bought a ford and crossed the USA two times, from one ocean to the other and then back. On the 22nd of January 1936 Il’f and Petrov boarded a ship which took them back home. During their trip the writers were constantly making notes (and Il’f was also taking photos) about everything they saw on the way.
After they returned to the USA the book which is known in Russia as «One-storied America» and in America as «Little Golden America» was published in the 1936. 20 chapters were written by Il’f, 20 by Petrov and 7 chapters they wrote together (the same way they were writing their novels).
«One-storied America» is considered to be the culmination of the «American text» in Russian literature.
Il’f and Petrov collect themes and motives which were typical for texts about America in Soviet literature and cover them from new sides, adding to them their own opinions and impressions [2].
By the time Ilf and Petrov's travelogue was published (in the 1936), Russian Soviet literature had already established a specific (and rather rigid) model by which texts about Soviet writers' trips to the West in general and to America in particular had to be created. Before Ilf and Petrov's trip, Sergey Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Boris Pilnyak had already travelled to the USA. And by the time «One-storied America» was published, texts such as «Iron Mirgorod» (1923), «Poems about America» (1925), and the novel «O'Key» (1932) had already been written. America was perceived and described by Soviet authors as a stronghold of capitalist evil, a mirage country where the dollar rules everything, subjugating people's lives and turning them into a monotonous conveyor of money-making [1].
The texts of Soviet authors about America form a single metaphorical series, which does not function as a decoration for the travelling impressions, but rather forms a certain ideological image of the hostile country.
Moreover, this metaphorical series which is common to all American travelogues written by the Soviet authors in the 1920–1930s, turns out to be more important than the plot of the texts [1].
This manifests itself in the fact that Soviet travellers set off across the ocean with clear concepts. Firstly, they perceived America as another world, an alien space, a dwelling place of antipodes which was even not a country, but an illusion of it. Secondly, the travellers actually had a general plan for the trip and for the way of describing it in advance. According to this plan, first the big cities had to be covered in the travelogue, the mechanisation of production and of the everyday life being especially emphasized, and then came the province – its squalor and soullessness [1].
All the above mentioned authors (Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pilnyak, Ilf and Petrov) developed in their texts the same motifs when describing the USA. The narrative about America in all travelogues begins with a description of the majestic ocean by which the travellers arrive in the country. Entering the USA, almost all the travellers feel a hidden threat, which is connected with the check for «trustworthiness» (in Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue this motif does not occur, as they went to America after the USSR and the USA had established diplomatic relations).
The journey to America itself begins in New York, and New York begins with Broadway. The artificiality of the Broadway is underlined by all Soviet travellers. New York is mythologised by Soviet writers: it is said to be a grandiose city, a city of obsession, it is perceived as a ghostly and fairy-tale world. The traveller then moves through the country and describes the standardised and spiritless American life [1].
Due to this feature of the texts about the USA, the Soviet reader had certain ideas about how a journey abroad should be described in Russian literature, and the horizon of the Soviet person’s expectations was linked to these principles of describing the United States.
When the reader opened «One-storied America», he expected to see a familiar, «canonical» description of the country: a sharp criticism of the capitalist system, which was opposed to the socialist system, and a description of America as a foreign space and «illusive world».
These expectations, however, were not fully justified. Ilf and Petrov, on the one hand, adhere to the «rules of the game» described above, and on the other hand, they stand apart from the rest of the authors who wrote about America. They, like the previous travellers, include familiar motifs in the travelogue: in the first chapter there is a canonical description of a journey across the ocean, in the second chapter New York («the tormented city») and Broadway appear, etc.
But in the main, the co-authors deviate from the generally accepted perception of America. They do not present capitalism as an unconditional enemy, but look for opportunities to borrow the best features of this system, which could then be developed in the USSR. Such a perception of the West has not been seen in any Soviet text before.
Consequently, the horizon of the reader’s expectations, which initially coincided with the horizon of the text’s expectations, then begins to diverge from it.
The recipient expects that the description of Western comfort and service (first on the «Normandie» – the ship which brought Ilf and Petrov to America – and then in the descriptions of America itself) will be followed by the authors' comments denouncing capitalism. But this does not happen.
On the contrary, Ilf and Petrov openly admire the level of American service, saying to have accustomed to the fact that «in laundries they not only wash but also darn the laundry, and if cufflinks are forgotten in the sleeves of a dirty shirt, they will be attached to the washed laundry in a special envelope on which will be printed an advertisement of the laundry establishment. We have stopped noticing that in restaurants, cafes and pharmacies we are warned to put ice in our water glasses, that gasoline stations provide free information and road maps, and museums provide free catalogues and brochures. Service is all the more good because it becomes as necessary and imperceptible as air» [2].
In this respect, «One-storied America», on the one hand, conforms to aesthetic principles familiar to the reader, and on the other hand, partially violates them.
This mismatch of expectations probably explains the contradictory reviews of critics of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue. Some reviewers believed that the book was a success, saying that the authors showed the radical difference that distinguishes the socialist system of economic management from the system of capitalist. While others reproached the writers for excessive preoccupation with comfort and service writing that the authors were highly influenced by American advertising, no less famous than American 'service’.
It happened so, that «One-storied America», on the one hand, is a part of the canon of «American texts» of Russian Soviet literature, but on the other hand, it breaks out of their ranks. Using motifs familiar to Soviet people in their travelogue, Ilf and Petrov first build a certain horizon of expectation in the reader and then destroy it, demonstrating – unlike other authors – a positive attitude towards the achievements of capitalism. Due to this the ambivalent attitude towards Ilf and Petrov became entrenched in Soviet culture after the publication of their novels and has not been clarified to this day.
P.
Literature:
1. Пономарев Е. Р. Типология советского путешествия: «путешествие на Запад» в литературе межвоенного периода. СПб, 2013. С. 321.
2. Эткинд А. М. Толкование путешествий. Россия и Америка в травелогах и интертекстах. М., 2001.
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