Anne O. Fisher

Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip  

In 2005, as graduate students, Vadim Besprozvany and I organized an exhibit at the University of Michigan devoted to Ilf and Petrov’s road trip and Ilf’s pictures. We called it "Soviet Writers, American Images: Il’f and Petrov Tour the United States, 1935-1936." Our exceptional graphic designer Elena Godina gave the show an urbane yet bold look, and we had a symposium with lectures from Erika Wolf and Alexandra Ilf. The exhibit also traveled to Colgate and Cornell.

Reviews of/press about Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip

Ilf and Petrov’s trip was mentioned in Valeria Luiselli’s book Lost Children Archive:

I know, as we drive through the long, lonely roads of this country—a landscape that I am seeing for the first time—that what I see is not quite what I see. What I see is what others have already documented: Ilf and Petrov, Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, Stephen Shore—the first road photographers and their pictures of road signs, stretches of vacant land, cars, motels, diners, industrial repetition, all the ruins of early capitalism now engulfed by future ruins of later capitalism.

—Rob Spillman, quoting from Lost Children Archive in Guernica

“Washington and Moscow had recently established diplomatic relations. The United States was mired in the Great Depression. The Stalinist terror was about to get under way in the Soviet Union. World War II was just a few years away. Such was the state of the world when Soviet journalists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov set out in November 1935 to discover America as correspondents for the Communist mouthpiece "Pravda." The resulting book, "One-Storied America" (Odnoetazhnaya Amerika), was published in 1937 and for decades remained the only expose of contemporary America accessible to Soviet readers.”

—Nikola Krastev, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

“In 1935, two Soviet writers embarked on a Borat-like tour of the U.S. Relive their strange journey in this delightful book.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“[Ilf and Petrov] arrived in New York in early October 1935. After spending a week in the city and thinking they had begun to understand America, they were told that New York is not America - only a bridge between Europe and the real America. So they went to Washington, certain that the capital city must be America. They fell in love with that pure American city instantly, but then were told that it is only a city of government officials. Bewildered, they headed for Hartford, Connecticut, the city where Mark Twain lived. To their dismay, the local residents told them that Hartford is by no means America. Some said America was in the South, others that it lay in the West. "A few didn't say anything at all - they just pointed their fingers vaguely into space."

—Michael Handelzalts, Haaretz

“Sorry, Borat, but two sassy Soviet Russians beat you to it. Just published for the first time ever in English, Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip is a lost treasure... It’s a cool, strange artifact, but it’s also simply a hoot; Ilf and Petrov are dry and pithy... Unlike Borat, they’re not boors... These guys are wise wiseacres.”

—The Observer

“[On their trip, Ilf and Petrov] gawked and got bored, picked up hitchhikers, palavered when they could (they were stunned by Americans’ incuriosity about them), swallowed a couple of stretchers, and reported everything in 11 loosely thematic pieces whose prose is clean as a whistle and much more ingenuous... Impeccably translated, edited, and introduced... this is riveting, fresh-eyed Americana and—how d’you say?—Sovietiana?”

—Booklist Starred Review

“... a jovial and surprisingly affectionate account... a fascinating snapshot of a nation's history... before the Cold War took firm hold.”

— CNN Traveler

“When I saw the first installment of Knausgaard’s travelogue for the New York Times Magazine, I thought of Ilf and Petrov’s American Roadtrip, their account of driving around the U.S. for ten weeks in 1935. But in truth, the two chronicles have little in common. Where Knausgaard is expansive and self-seeking, Ilf and Petrov are witty and concisely observant.”

—Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

“Close to seven decades ago, wry Russian satirists Ilia Ilf and Eugeny Petrov were assigned as special U.S. correspondents for Pravda, prompting them to spend ten weeks driving across the country, taking photographs and capturing and contrasting the nuances of living in the Land of the Free with their steel-teated Soviet motherland.”

The word 'America' has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares.

—John Brownlee, WIRED