>>REVIEW
ILF AND PETROV’S AMERICAN ROAD TRIP: THE 1935 TRAVELOGUE OF TWO SOVIET WRITERS
Ilia Ilf and Evgeny Petrov
Princeton Architectural Press, 158 pp.
The word "America," wrote Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, had, for Soviets, "grandiose associations." During the depression, the two well-known Soviet humorists set out to find this mythological place in a crisscross car trek from New York to California and back. Their findings became a series of magazine photo essays and an eventual book entitled One-storied America. Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip is the first-ever English-language collection of their initial magazine pieces.
Soviet communism was, at the time the two made their trip, robust. The feudalism of Imperial Russia had given way to manic industrialization. Russia’s economy was growing steadily. By contrast, capitalist North America was struggling through a long, humiliating economic hiccup. If the two writers were after ammunition for an ideological attack on the capitalist way of life, they didn’t have to look very hard. While American Road Trip is biting in its critical observations, the book takes a far friendlier approach to skewering America. The two had great reverence for American literary giants such as Mark Twain, for example, and the travelogue is full of remarks on the earnest goodness of the people they met.
Hunting for the "real" America, Ilf and Petrov concluded early in their travels that it wasn’t to be found in the grandeur, nor in the physical or cultural uniqueness of New York, Chicago or San Francisco. No, America, they illustrate with a banal photograph, is a highway intersection with a gas station, some commercial signs and a string of telephone poles and no people in sight. "The traveller," they write, "goes through the desert and here he finds a small town that differs from the previous ones only by the presence of two cactuses with which the enterprising owner has adorned the entrance to his café." Ironically, two visitors from the conformist environs of a communist dictatorship found the land of liberty "striking not for its differences, but for its similarities. Its vast network of recent-vintage highways cut through towns and cities that all looked the same and were filled with give-you-the-shirt-off-their-backs types, who nonetheless lived uniformly similar lives. Church, idiotically lame movies and the newspaper constituted "the entire spiritual subsistence that capitalism gives the people." America, they concluded, had the "most advanced technology in the world and a horrifyingly oppressive, stupefying social order."
The arts and world affairs meant little to the maddeningly incurious people they met. Not one asked the men where they were from or what language they spoke to each other. One guy even chalked up their cheekiness on the subject of segregation to the assumption that they must simply be from New York.
Of course, America gets the last bitter laugh on the two Soviet travellers. Most everyone would agree that the happy, homogenous America of any era beats the tar out of both murderous, brutal Soviet Stalinism and the scarcities of the pre-breakup U.S.S.R.
The Soviet Union’s decline doesn’t diminish American’s Road Trip’s central criticisms, however. The book is as much an unintended critique of America today as it was an intended poke at depression-era America. The highway intersections of today’s highways (Canada can safely be lumped in with the U.S.) remain as the two Soviet writers described them, just with a greater profusion of signs and gas stations. This speaks volumes of American travel writers’ obsession with, and even demand for, novelty and unique cultural experience abroad when it’s so hard to find at home. Ilf and Petrov’s sunny frankness, wry observations and the pat certainty of their pronouncements also beg the reader to question the assumed rottenness of Soviet life. American Road Trip shines a playful light on two opposing ideologies leading one to question assumptions about both. |
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