The Twelve Chairs
Winner of the 2012 Northern California Book Award for Fiction in Translation
More faithful to the original text and its deeply resonant humor, this new translation of The Twelve Chairs brings Ilf and Petrov’s Russian classic fully to life. The novel’s iconic hero, Ostap Bender, an unemployed con artist living by his wits, joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to look for a cache of missing jewels hidden in chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the chairs takes them from the provinces of Moscow to the wilds of the Transcaucasus mountains. On their quest they encounter a variety of characters, from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the old propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and bungling than the last. A brilliant satire of the early years of the Soviet Union, as well as the inspiration for a Mel Brooks film, The Twelve Chairs retains its universal appeal.
Ilf and Petrov, in a famous and clearly posed photo (we know from memoirs that Ilf paced the floor twisting his hair as they worked, while Petrov wrote)
“Monument to Ilf and Petrov” by Kukryniksy, the famous trio of satirical cartoonists
Ilf reading the first book edition of Двенадцать стульев
“Marvelously savvy new translations by Anne O. Fisher... her rendering [is] vivacious and precise...”
—Seth Graham in the Times Literary Supplement
“Despite the many woes facing the humanities in the academy, and particularly those who study Russia, one area of great hope can be found in the remarkable achievements of translators in recent years... Robert Chandler’s groundbreaking translations of Platonov and Grossman, Joanne Turnbull's heroic work on Krzhizhanovsky, Anne Fisher's fantastic Twelve Chairs... Muireann Maguire's Red Spectres… [all have made] an important contribution to the corpus of Russian works translated into English…”
“Anne O. Fischer [sic] has done a masterful job in researching and translating this huge and difficult novel.”
—Northern California Book Awards citation [evidently I did better research than the author of this citation…]
Okay, so this has nothing to do with my translation, but I can’t help posting it anyway! Check out Lenora Ledwon’s article in the California Law Review: “Guilt, Greed, and Furniture: Using Mel Brooks’s The Twelve Chairs to Teach Dying Declarations”
Also not a review, but read the article to see why Ilf and Petrov are so beloved by so many. "There were so many hairdressing establishments and funeral homes in the regional centre of N. that the inhabitants seemed to be born merely in order to have a shave, get their hair cut, freshen up their heads with toilet water and then die. In actual fact, people came into the world, shaved, and died rather rarely in the regional centre of N... The spring evenings were delightful, the mud glistened like coal in the light of the moon, and all the young men of the town were so much in love with the secretary of the communal-service workers' committee that she found difficulty in collecting their subscriptions." This is the opening paragraph of The Twelve Chairs, my favourite book of all time. I re-read it several times a year – now mostly in English translations. Re-reading my favourite Russian books in my second mother tongue has become an addiction: it adds some coveted balance and symmetry to my otherwise rather chaotic life. I find it both reassuring and calming – like looking at the quiet sea.”