Читать книгу The Golden Calf - Илья Ильф - Страница 6

Usually our communal literary enterprise inspires perfectly legitimate, though rather unoriginal, questions like: “How do you manage to write together?”

At first, we would give detailed responses and even tell the story of our big fight over whether to kill Ostap Bender, the protagonist of the novel The Twelve Chairs, or to let him live. We would painstakingly describe how his fate was decided by drawing lots. We put two pieces of paper in a sugar bowl—one blank, the other with a skull and two chicken bones sketched in a shaky hand. We drew the one with the skull, and in thirty minutes the grand strategist was dead, his throat slashed with a razor.

After a while, our responses grew shorter. First we dropped the story of the skull and chicken bones, then many other details. Finally, our answers lost all vestiges of enthusiasm.

“How do we manage to write together? Well, we just do. Like the Goncourt brothers. Edmond makes the rounds of the publishers, while Jules guards the manuscript, making sure their friends don’t steal it.”

Suddenly this monotonous line of questioning was interrupted.

“Tell me,” asked a stern citizen, one of those who recognized the Soviet government just after England and shortly before Greece, “tell me, why is your writing funny? Why all this giggling during the time of post-revolutionary reconstruction? Have you lost your mind?”

And then he gave us a long and angry lecture, trying to convince us that laughter has no place in these times.

“Laughing is wrong!” he said. “That’s right, no laughing! And no smiling either! When I see this new life, these monumental changes, I don’t feel like laughing, I feel like praying!”

“But we’re not just laughing,” we protested. “What we’re doing is satirizing exactly those people who do not understand the period of reconstruction.”

“Satire should not be funny,” said the stern comrade. He then grabbed some Baptist simpleton, whom he mistook for a dyed-in-the-wool proletarian, and led him off to his place. There, he would craft a boring description of the simpleton and write him into a six-volume novel entitled But Not These Bloody Despots!

We didn’t make this up. If we did, we could have made it funnier.

Cut this sanctimonious toady loose and he would make even men wear the hijab, while he himself would play hymns and psalms on the trumpet from early morning on, convinced that this is the best way to help build socialism.

And so whenever we worked on The Golden Calf, we always felt the presence of this stern citizen hovering over us:

“What if this chapter turns out funny? What will the stern citizen say?”

Finally, we resolved as follows:

a) to make the novel as funny as possible;

b) should the stern citizen continue to insist that satire should not be funny, to ask the Prosecutor General, Comr. Krylenko, to charge the above citizen with the crime of stupidity with malicious intent.

—I. Ilf & E. Petrov