The final chapter considers how Ilf and Petrov responded to the cultural crackdown, show trials, and purges that confronted them when they returned to the Soviet Union. In the travelogue’s penultimate chapter, “Anxious Life,” the anxiety that the writers attributed to capitalism provided an ambivalent and ironic framework for their explicit and implicit comparisons. Emphasizing the “anxiety” caused by the Stalinist purges, the chapter considers a range of possible readings of Ilf and Petrov’s claim that Soviet people were calmer and happier than Americans. The chapter concludes with an analysis of American and Soviet reviewers’ varied responses to the travelogue and asks: To what extent did Ilf and Petrov’s epic American road trip confirm their presuppositions? Did it allow them to glimpse the United States, the Soviet Union, and perhaps themselves anew?

In their published work, Ilf and Petrov equated low culture – trashy movies, wrestling, burlesque – with American culture. At the other end of the spectrum, they endeavored to show that American high culture consisted entirely of high-priced European imports that wealthy patrons appreciated only as luxury commodities, not art. Nothing, Ilf and Petrov emphasized, could be further from the situation in the Soviet Union, where the state-supported opera houses and concert halls made high culture available to all. Recovering the encounters with middlebrow culture that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue largely ignored, Chapter 12 argues that Soviet and American cultural producers shared some of the same aims and challenges – even as they operated under different constraints.