I. Il'f and E. Petrov's Ostap Bender novels: The (re)production of anti -Soviet Soviet classics.

Abstract

The status and function of reading in Russia gave it a power which the Soviet government tried hard to control, in part through the medium of the book form itself. This dissertation analyzes book publishing practices meant to shape the reader's understanding of two hilarious, daring Soviet Russian novels about the con man Ostap Bender, <italic>The Twelve Chairs</italic> (<italic>Dvenadtsat' stul'ev</italic>, 1928) and <italic>The Golden Calf</italic> (<italic>Zolotoi telenok</italic>, 1931), and evaluates the efficacy of these practices as evidenced by reader's responses. These novels, which have been described as encyclopedias of their time, were banned after World War Two as libel but were soon reinstated as classics of Soviet satire during the Thaw and later became genuine cult classics for a new generation of readers. This popularity surge had two important consequences: in the 1970s, some intellectuals began to publicly reject the novels, claiming that by writing them their authors were collaborating with Stalin's regime, and, in the late- and post-Soviet period, other intellectuals who had grown up reading the novels found that they provided a forum for exchanging and evaluating their memories of Soviet life. Thus these popular, quintessentially Soviet novels have become a paradigmatic arena for discussions both of Soviet history and of the intelligentsia's culpability in that history. This dissertation unlocks these readings of the novels by applying Genette's theory of paratexts to the production of Soviet and post-Soviet book editions, using paratexts to reveal the disparate political and artistic agendas negotiated in each edition. By reworking Genette's typology with an emphasis on the hierarchies and rituals characteristic of a literature subject to institutionalized political control, this dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of the function of paratexts in book production and reception. It also models the usefulness of comparing different editions in understanding how the practical matter of putting a book together affected the way Soviet literature functioned. Although the Bender novels mock the characteristic Russian valorization of cultured reading, they became the carriers of a national debate about Soviet Russian culture, a debate about the proper attitude toward a compromising history and the culpability of those who survive under a totalitarian regime.