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?

My own Soviet American road trip ended amid pandemic and war. By the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 closed borders, not to mention libraries and archives, I was, quite fortuitously, ready to settle down to the task of writing. During the anxious months when I rarely ventured more than a few blocks from home, I traveled vicariously with Ilf and Petrov. Looking back, I can see that the unpleasant, often frightening experience of adjusting to a new “normal” aided historical understanding.1 In lockdown, I better appreciated the importance of travel literature for people with little prospect of going anywhere. Dealing with long lines at my local market and chatting via Zoom with family and friends scattered across the continent, I felt acutely the desire for “service” and the life-changing power of tekhnika. As the pandemic suddenly made unimaginable things that I had taken for granted – from dinner out to visiting my parents – it laid bare the presuppositions that so often impede the historian’s ability to understand the people of the past on their own terms.

Chapter 19 uncovers the lodge in the desert that Ilf and Petrov made an emblem of the high American standard of living in both the published work and a letter that they sent to Stalin upon their return. They spun their “great literary material” into two distinctive literary products: a “weapon” in the “struggle for socialism” that they presented to Stalin and a sympathetic portrait of an American missionary, “the man in the red shirt.” To reverse engineer these transformations, the chapter follows clues in the travelogue and Ilf’s notebook to the source of their impressions and identifies both the hostelry, the Vermillion Cliffs Lodge, and the missionary, Hugh Dickson “Shine” Smith.

Chapter 10 uncovers the Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire who, to an extent elided in Ilf and Petrov’s published work, served them as critical cultural mediators. It recounts their hunt for a guide willing to accompany them on their road trip, and sketches the biographies of their eventual “angels,” the retired GE engineer Solomon Trone and his wife Florence Trone, who became the prototypes for the fictionalized Mr. and Mrs. Adams. Recovering the writers’ connections with people like the Trones, the chapter explores cultural exchange as a process that at once sharpened and blurred the lines between "us" and the "Other."

The introduction argues that Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov’s 1935 American road trip offers a fruitful and innovative means of identifying the mediators who engaged in building friendly Soviet–American relations. Such means are necessary because unlike the Soviet state, the American government in the 1930s did not guide or systematically track Soviet visitors. Providing a brief overview of Ilf and Petrov’s biographies, the introduction highlights the mixture of fact and fiction in their American travelogue. It concludes with a sketch of their American itinerary and the wide range of sources employed to reconstruct their contacts with Americans.

The two chapters in Part V recount Ilf and Petrov’s hurried trip through the American South to New York and their encounter with the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere in which as they completed their travelogue. The last leg of the writers’ journey solidified their vision of America as a land of scenic wonders and standardized technical marvels. The new experience on this portion of the trip was the opportunity to observe American race relations in the “Negro states of the South.”

Chapter 24 reconstructs the writers’ encounter with Dr. Nahum Kavinoky, the president of the American-Russian Institute of Southern California. The meeting seems to have prompted Ilf, at least, to consider the multiple identities of the pair’s Jewish immigrant interlocutors. Kavinoky was a complex figure, a man born in the Pale of Jewish settlement, whose family history included both revolutionary radicalism and immigrant striving. He presided over a Soviet-affiliated friendship organization, was fluent in both Russian and English, and nurtured family ties to the Russian intelligentsia (through his daughter Galina Katanyan) and the Comintern (through his father-in-law Boris Reinstein, a Jewish return immigrant to the Soviet Union). The encounter in Pasadena suggested that powerful emotional bonds and cultural yearnings intensified, even underpinned, friendship with the Soviet Union.

Chapter 11 documents Ilf and Petrov’s family ties to America. The pair visited Ilf’s uncles in Hartford, Connecticut, and saw Petrov’s brother’s play, Squaring the Circle, on Broadway. They detailed neither of these adventures in the published travelogue. But again, as with the complex hybrids, the contacts shed light on the process of cultural exchange. Seeing Ilf’s Jewish Russian American relatives in Hartford and an American production of Valentin Kataev’s popular Soviet farce on Broadway allowed Ilf and Petrov to reflect on the possibility of bridging divides and to grapple with the most difficult kind of cultural understanding: getting one another’s jokes.

Chapter 7 details the American novelist John Dos Passos’s interactions with the Soviet authors as a guide, writer of letters of introduction, and literary model. At the time of their visit, Dos Passos was at the center of an important literary debate on the recently articulated socialist realism. By the time they returned, Soviet cultural authorities had turned decisively against Dos Passos’s so-called formalism. Excised from the 1937 Russian edition of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, Dos Passos nonetheless profoundly influenced their account. The Dos Passos connection allows us to understand the genre-defying Odnoetazhnaia Amerika as not only a travelogue, a satire, and picaresque but also as a valedictory intervention in the debate on the possibility of socialist realism with a modernist sensibility.

Chapter 16 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s visit to the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It argues that their encounter with the Lab’s exhibits and its assistant director Kenneth Chapman did not generate new knowledge. Rather, it affirmed their assumptions about both capitalism and American Indians. Even without understanding the Lab’s current financial crisis, they highlighted the irrationality of having a Rockefeller, rather than the state, support scientific institutions. The Laboratory’s exhibits, and perhaps Chapman’s explanation of them, offered confirmation of their view of American Indians as romantic relics.

Chapter 9 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s adventures in Black New York, which they largely omitted from their published work. Soviet antiracism offered little guidance when it came to understanding or recounting the unsettling intersections of gender, sexuality, pleasure, and race the writers encountered at a Harlem nightclub or the unexpected meeting with a Russian-speaking African American singer in the cast of "Porgy and Bess." To the extent that Ilf and Petrov told the story of Black New York at all, they relied on a “romantic racialization” of African Americans as naturally spiritual and musical.

Chapter 20 analyzes “The Desert” installment of Ilf and Petrov’s photo essay. It argues that their rushed tour of natural wonders produced a fundamental insight: In contrast to Soviet technical marvels, always represented as heroic prospects or the fruits of epic battles with nature, the American scenic road was a mundane marvel that conquered space and time with nothing more spectacular than regular road maintenance, cheap motels, plentiful gas stations, and accurate signage. Like the scenic road itself, the photo essay is full of contrasts and contradictions: the sublime beauty of the desert, smooth highways, and unsightly “oases.” To draw out these contrasts, Ilf and Petrov relied on the ironic back and forth between texts and images. Like a good sidekick, Ilf’s photos fed the writers’ deadpan observations that occasioned all manner of ironic, critical, and whimsical rejoinders.

The four chapters in Part I examine the assumptions, regulations, exceptions, compromises, and workarounds that shaped whether and how Soviet visitors made it into the United States. They address the overarching questions of why, despite deep mutual suspicions that persisted even after the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1933, Soviet citizens came to the United States and why the US government let them come.

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 23 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s representatives of what they considered the American “radical intelligentsia." To emphasize the radicals’ status as Americans, the writers scrubbed them of all complicating ethnic, national, or racial markers and elided their connections to the Soviet Union. Devoting a largely admiring passage to Alexander Kaun, a Berkeley professor, Ilf and Petrov neglected to mention that he was an immigrant. They also emphasized that the radical professor no less than the radical journalists Lincoln Steffens and Albert Rhys Williams, whom they met in Carmel, were surrounded by standard American vacuousness. Yet they still expressed hope in the power of the antifascist Popular Front in America.

The nine chapters in Part III track Ilf and Petrov as they traveled Route 66 from Chicago to the desert Southwest. Their journey through low-rise America allowed them to experience American highways, sample American road food, and interact with hitchhikers they picked up along the way. In Arizona and New Mexico, they visited Native American villages and national parks that appear today much as Ilf and Petrov would have seen them. Retracing their journey raises in particularly acute form the basic questions of historical research: How and to what extent can we understand people separated from us by identity, ideology, language – and time?