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.

Chapter 25 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s brief turn as Hollywood screenwriters. At the suggestion of the director Lewis Milestone (born Leib Milstein in the Russian empire), the pair spent nine days before Christmas 1935 holed up in their hotel writing a treatment of The Twelve Chairs – a story they did not tell in their travelogue. Still, the published work suggested bridges across the vast cultural divide. Extravagantly criticizing Hollywood films as mindless, Ilf and Petrov noted that they found many movie people who shared their perspective. Their unpublished accounts and evidence from the American side bring the central paradox of Ilf and Petrov’s Hollywood venture into sharper focus: Their brief and publicly unacknowledged work in Hollywood solidified both their disdain and their respect for the American dream factory.