Petrov is a writer biography. Petrov, brother of Kataev

Years of life: from 17.11.1903 to 02.07.1942

Soviet satirist, journalist, screenwriter. The most famous and significant works: "Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf", co-authored with.

Born in Odessa in the family of a history teacher. The real surname is Evgeny Petrovich Kataev (the pseudonym is taken by the patronymic). Famous children's writer Valentin Kataev is the elder brother of E. Petrov. He graduated from the 5th Odessa classical gymnasium (1920), after graduation he worked as a correspondent for the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency, then served as an inspector of the criminal investigation department.

In 1923, E. Petrov moved to Moscow and became an employee of the Red Pepper magazine. Petrov's talent as a feuilletonist quickly manifested itself, and the satirical genre became the main one for the writer. In 1925 in the editorial office of the newspaper "Gudok" there was an acquaintance of E. Petrov and. According to some sources, the idea of ​​co-authorship was suggested by E. Petrov's brother, Valentin Kataev. Ilf and Petrov jointly write feuilletons, come up with drawings, etc. The first major work, written in co-authorship, was the novel "The Twelve Chairs", which immediately brought fame to the writers. Despite significant censorship edits (up to a third of the book was cut) and the cool attitude of critics, "The Twelve Chairs" gained immense popularity among readers. In 1931, Ilf and Petrov wrote a sequel, the novel The Golden Calf, which also won success.

In 1935-1936, Ilf and Petrov made a trip to the United States, based on the results of which they wrote the book "One-Story America", which became the last joint work. In 1937, Ilya Ilf dies of tuberculosis. E. Petrov continues to work as a journalist, begins the book of memoirs "My friend Ilf" and the novel "Journey to the country of communism." With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, E. Petrov became a war correspondent and on July 2, 1942, the plane on which he was returning to Moscow from Sevastopol was shot down by a German fighter over the territory of the Rostov region, near the village of Mankovo. A monument has been erected at the site of the plane's crash.

There are disagreements regarding the year of birth of E. Petrov. For a long time, literary encyclopedias indicated 1902, but the writer's relatives claimed that he was born in 1903, and in the end the date was changed.

While working in the criminal investigation department, E. Petrov personally detained his former classmate and colleague, Alexander Kozachinsky, who became the leader of the gang. The court sentenced Kozachinsky to be shot, but E. Petrov achieved a revision of the sentence and replacement of the execution by imprisonment in a camp. After the release of Kozachinsky from the camp in 1925, E. Petrov got him a job at the "Gudok". In 1938, Kozachinsky, at the insistence of the same Petrov, wrote the story "Green Van".

According to the initial idea of ​​Ilf and Petrov, Ostap Bender was to become a minor character.

In the perception of the readership, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov turned out to be inseparable. They themselves joked about this: “ Ilf and Petrov are tormented by doubts - whether they will be credited to the allowance as one person».

E. Petrov had two sons: Pyotr Kataev, a famous cameraman ("Three Poplars on Plyushchikha", "Seventeen Moments of Spring", etc.) and Ilya Kataev, who became a composer ("I Stand at a Half-Station", etc.).

Bibliography

Works of art
"" (1928) in collaboration with I. Ilf
"" (1931) in collaboration with I. Ilf
"" (1936) in collaboration with I. Ilf
"A journey to the land of communism", unfinished, publ. 1965

Screenplays
"Black Barrack" (1933) in collaboration with I. Ilf
"Once in the Summer" (1936) in collaboration with I. Ilf
"A Musical History" (1940)
"Anton Ivanovich is angry" (1941)
"Air Carrier" (1942)

In addition, E. Petrov, independently and in collaboration with Ilya Ilf, wrote a huge number of feuilletons, essays and notes that were published in periodicals during the writer's lifetime.

Screen adaptations of works, theatrical performances

The works of E Petrov, co-authored with I. Ilf, have been filmed many times both in the USSR (Russia) and abroad. The most frequently screened work is the novel "The Twelve Chairs", the adaptations of which are included in the "golden fund" of Russian cinema.
The most famous film adaptations:
The Golden Calf (1968, USSR) dir. Mikhail Schweitzer
12 chairs (1971, USSR) dir. Leonid Gaidai
12 chairs (1976, USSR) dir. Mark Zakharov

On December 13 (November 30, old style), 1902, the satirist, journalist and screenwriter Yevgeny Petrov (pseudonym Yevgeny Petrovich Kataev) was born. In collaboration with I.A. Ilf (Iekhiel-Leib Arievich Fainzilberg) created the world famous novels "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf", a number of feuilletons and satirical stories; in co-authorship with G. Moonblit - scripts of the Soviet films "Anton Ivanovich is Angry" and "Musical History". Father of cameraman Pyotr Kataev ("Seventeen Moments of Spring") and composer Ilya Kataev ("Standing at a Half-Stop").

early years

Little is known about the early years and childhood of Evgeny Petrov (Kataev). There was confusion in the Kataev family for a long time, even with the year of his birth. It was believed that Eugene was six years younger than his older brother Valentine, and therefore had to be born in 1903. This date appears to this day in a number of literary and cinematic reference books. But quite recently, Odessa local historians discovered documents that indisputably testify: the year of birth of Yevgeny Kataev is 1902. The confusion was most likely due to the fact that Yevgeny was born at the end of the year (December), and his older brother Valentin in January 1897.

The father of the Kataev brothers - Pyotr Vasilievich Kataev - served as a teacher at the diocesan school in Odessa. Mother - Evgenia Ivanovna Bachey - daughter of General Ivan Eliseevich Bachey, from a Poltava noble family. Subsequently, V. Kataev gave the name of his father and the surname of his mother to the main, in many respects autobiographical, hero of the story "The Lonely Sail Whitens" Petya Bachey. Evgeny, of course, was the prototype of Pavlik's younger brother, the victim of the first expropriation of the future revolutionary.

As it turned out later, during the revolution and the Civil War, the Kataev brothers did not participate in the revolutionary movement. On the contrary, in Odessa in 1920, Valentin was in the officer's underground, the purpose of which was to prepare a meeting of the probable Wrangel landing from the Crimea. In August 1919, Odessa had already been liberated from the Reds once by a simultaneous strike by a white airborne detachment and an uprising of underground officers' organizations. The main task of the underground group was to seize the Odessa lighthouse, so in the Cheka the conspiracy was called "the Wrangel conspiracy at the lighthouse." According to one of the versions, the idea of ​​a conspiracy could have been planted on the conspirators by a provocateur, since the Cheka knew about the conspiracy from the very beginning. The Chekists led the group for several weeks, and then arrested all of its members. Along with Valentin Kataev, his younger brother Yevgeny was arrested, a schoolboy who most likely had nothing to do with the conspiracy.

The brothers spent six months in prison, but were released, thanks to a fluke. From Moscow or from Kharkov to Odessa, a certain superior came with an inspection, whom V. Kataev called Yakov Belsky in his stories to his son. Most likely, this "pseudonym" was hiding V. I. Narbut - a poet, a prominent Bolshevik, the head of UKROST in Kharkov. Subsequently, he provided patronage to V. Kataev in Moscow, but in the 1930s he was repressed, and his name was no longer mentioned in famous literary memoirs. Be that as it may, this high-ranking figure remembered Kataev Sr. for his speeches at the Bolshevik rallies in Odessa. The patron, of course, knew nothing about the voluntary service of the future writer with Denikin and his participation in the officer's underground, and therefore managed to convince the Chekists of the innocence of both Kataev brothers. The rest of the participants in the "conspiracy in the lighthouse" were shot at the end of 1920.

From the "Double Biography", written together with Ilya Ilf, it is known that E. Petrov graduated from a classical gymnasium in 1920. In the same year he became a correspondent for the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency (UKROSTA). After that, for three years he served as an inspector of the criminal investigation department. His first "literary work" was the protocol of the examination of the corpse of an unknown man.

While studying at the gymnasium, Yevgeny's classmate and close friend was Alexander Kozachinsky, a nobleman on his father's side, who later wrote the adventure story "The Green Van". The prototype of the main character of the story - the head of the district police department of Odessa Volodya Patrikeyev - was Yevgeny Petrov.

Sasha and Zhenya have been friends since childhood, and later fate brought their lives together in the most bizarre way.

Kozachinsky, a man of an adventurous disposition and great charm, also went to serve in the police, but soon gave up detective work. He led a gang of raiders operating in Odessa and the surrounding area. Ironically, it was Yevgeny Kataev, then an officer of the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department, who arrested him in 1922. After a chase with a shootout, Kozachinsky hid in the attic of one of the houses, where he was discovered by a classmate. Evgeny had the opportunity to shoot an armed bandit during his arrest, but he did not. Subsequently, Kataev achieved a review of the criminal case and replacement of A. Kozachinsky's exceptional punishment (execution) with imprisonment in a camp. In the fall of 1925, Kozachinsky was amnestied. At the exit from prison he was met by his mother and faithful friend, Yevgeny Kataev.

Vadim Lebedev, a journalist for the Top Secret newspaper, concludes his essay Green Van with an amazing fact that once again emphasizes the inexplicability and even supernaturalness of the connection that existed between these people: “1941 separated them. Petrov goes to the front as a war correspondent. For health reasons, Kozachinsky was evacuated to Siberia. In the fall of 1942, having received news of the death of a friend, Kozachinsky fell ill, and a few months later, on January 9, 1943, a modest obituary appeared in the newspaper "Soviet Siberia": "Soviet writer Alexander Kozachinsky died.".

That is, over the years that have passed since Kozachinsky was released from prison, he managed to become a “Soviet writer”. Which, by the way, was also facilitated by E. Petrov. Throughout his life, he felt responsible for the fate of this person: he insisted on moving him to Moscow, introduced him to the literary environment, gave him the opportunity to realize his talent as a journalist and writer. In 1926 he arranged for A. Kozachinsky as a journalist in the same editorial office of the newspaper "Gudok". And in 1938, E. Petrov persuaded his friend, with whom they had once read Mein Reed, to write the adventure story "The Green Van" (in 1983, it was interestingly filmed). Now we also understand what is behind the last lines of the "Green Van": "Each of us considers ourselves to be indebted to the other: I am - for the fact that he did not shoot at me once from a Mannlicher, and he - for the fact that I am his planted on time. "

Evgeny Petrov

In 1923, the future Evgeny Petrov came to Moscow, where he was going to continue his education and begin literary work. But initially he managed to get a job only as a warden in Butyrka prison. Subsequently, V. Ardov recalled his first meeting with Kataev Jr. as follows:

“In the summer of 1923, V. P. Kataev, with whom I had known for a year, - very, however, distantly,” once said to me during a street meeting:

Meet my brother ...

Next to Kataev there was a young - very young - man somewhat similar to him. Evgeny Petrovich was then twenty years old. He seemed unsure of himself, which was natural for a provincial who had recently arrived in the capital. Slanting, brilliant black large eyes looked at me with some disbelief. Petrov was youthfully thin and, compared to his brother in the capital, poorly dressed ... "

It's no secret that a significant, even decisive influence on the fate of the aspiring journalist was exerted by his older brother, the writer Valentin Kataev. He introduced Eugene to the literary environment of Moscow, got him a job at the editorial office of the "Red Pepper" magazine, and then at the "Gudok" newspaper. V. Kataev's wife recalled: “I have never seen such affection between brothers as between Vali and Zhenya. Actually, Valya made his brother write. Every morning he started with a call to him - Zhenya got up late, began to swear that he was awakened ... "Okay, swear further," Valya said and hung up. "

Soon, Kataev Jr. no longer gave the impression of a confused provincial. In the editorial office, he showed himself to be a talented organizer, began to write feuilletons, give themes for cartoons. He signed his things either with the "Gogol" pseudonym "Foreigner Fedorov", or with the surname in which he turned his patronymic - "Petrov". Two writers Kataevs "Bolivar of Russian Literature" simply could not stand it, confusion, suspicion of plagiarism, etc. would inevitably arise.

"ILFIPETROV"

Yevgeny Petrov met IA Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg) in the same edition of Gudok in 1926. E. Petrov did not have any special impressions from the first meeting with the future co-author. The journalists just worked together in the editorial office, and their close literary cooperation began a year later - in 1927, when Valentin Kataev literally "threw" the plot of "Twelve Chairs" to the authors. He wanted young people, with their characteristic enthusiasm and remarkable imagination, to write a satirical novel, which he would then “correct” and become a co-author. In modern terms, the eminent writer found himself literary "blacks" to do all the main work for him. But it turned out differently.

In some modern publications in the media and on the Internet resources, Yevgeny Petrov sometimes appears as a "minor figure", "assistant" and almost secretary-copyist of texts I. Ilf. There is even an opinion that V. Kataev, who already then managed to discern great potential in the modest Ilf, deliberately "slipped" his not too talented brother into his co-authors, so that he would share the future literary glory in two. In our opinion, these statements are not just unfair, but have no basis under them, except for the deep, convinced ignorance of the authors of such statements themselves.

The process of joint creativity of these two outstanding authors - I. Ilf and E. Petrov - has been described more than once by themselves, their contemporaries and close people who saw the writers directly at work. Everything, to the last detail, to each plot move, to the name of the minor of the minor characters - everything was agreed upon and discussed by the authors jointly several times. And the fact that Petrov usually wrote in the process of creativity, and Ilf walked from corner to corner, conducting a dialogue with him or a monologue with himself - Evgeny Petrov explained by the absence of a typewriter at first and by the fact that his handwriting was better than Ilf's illegible handwriting ...

But why did V. Kataev offer two authors to write a novel at once? And there is an explanation for this.

Valentin Petrovich Kataev himself, despite his Odessa past, was a romantic author, socialist realist and lyricist at the same time, had an extraordinary sense of humor, but ... he did not get the talent of a humorist-satirist. Everything written by VP Kataev during his long literary life does not fit well into the term "southwest" proposed by the literary critic V. Shklovsky. Shklovsky's article "South-West" appeared in the first issue of "Literaturnaya Gazeta" in 1933 and immediately caused heated discussions in the literary environment. Shklovsky named Odessa as the center of the southwestern literary school, which gave rise to the name of the South-Russian school, and then simply Odessa. Shklovsky borrowed the title for the article from Bagritsky - this was the title of his poetry collection of 1928. But the term "Southwest" was used before. In Kiev, for example, at the beginning of the century the magazine Yugo-Zapadnaya Nedelya was published.

Literary historians are still arguing about whether or not there was a special "Odessa" literary school and where to look for its roots. Nevertheless, such authors as I. Babel, L. Slavin, I. Ilf and E. Petrov, Yu. Olesha, V. Kataev, E. Bagritsky and, to some extent, from Kiev M.A. Bulgakov, for many years determined the main directions of Soviet literature.

Undoubtedly, in 1927 I. A. Ilf was a more experienced author than the novice E. Petrov. Kataev Sr. could not help but see in Ilf a good teacher and mentor for his brother - still the author of the literature of the "small" genre - magazine humores and topical feuilletons in the "south-west" style. Ilf's literary talent lay in the same plane as the talent of Kataev Jr., who could show his abilities much more clearly in a creative tandem. According to the recollections of contemporaries, Eugene often created his first feuilletons in "Red Pepper" and "Gudok" in collaboration with the same Kozachinsky or other members of the editorial board.

In addition, in terms of personality and character, the duet members Ilf and Petrov complemented each other remarkably.

According to the memoirs of B. Efimov, “Petrov was an expansive and enthusiastic person, able to easily ignite and ignite others. Ilf was of a different kind - restrained, slightly withdrawn, Chekhov's shy. However, he was also capable of sharp outbursts when vulgarity, untruth, indifference, and rudeness infuriated him. And then, with all the strength of his stormy temperament, Petrov supported him. Their community was extremely solid and organic. It pleased not only with its literary brilliance, but also with its noble moral character - it was a wonderful union of two pure, incorruptibly honest, deeply principled people ... "(Bor.Efimov "Moscow, Paris, the crater of Vesuvius ..." // Collection of memoirs about Ilf and Petrov)

The literary community of Ilf and Petrov lasted ten years. Initially, according to E. Petrov, not everything went as smoothly as it seemed from the outside:

“It was very difficult for us to write. We worked in the newspaper and in humorous magazines very conscientiously. We knew from childhood what work is. But we never imagined how difficult it is to write a novel. If I was not afraid to seem banal, I would say that we wrote in blood. We left the Palace of Labor at two or three in the morning, dazed, almost suffocated from cigarette smoke. We were returning home through the wet and empty Moscow lanes, lit by greenish gas lamps, unable to utter a word. Sometimes we were overcome with despair ... "

In the book "My Diamond Crown" V. Kataev mentions that the contract with the editorial board of the magazine "30 Days", where the novel "Twelve Chairs" was to be published, was concluded on his behalf, and initially there were three authors planned. But when the literary "master" read seven sheets of the first part of the novel, he immediately admitted that before him were not literary "negros", but real, established writers. Later V. Kataev deliberately refused any interference in the creative process of the Ilf Petrov tandem, and the novel was written by the authors completely independently.

"Twelve Chairs"

The novel "Twelve Chairs" was published in 1928 - first in the magazine "30 Days", and then as a separate book. And immediately became extremely popular. The story of the adventures of the charming adventurer and swindler Ostap Bender and his companion, the former leader of the nobility, Kisa Vorobyaninov, captured with brilliant dialogues, vivid characters, subtle satire on Soviet reality and philistine life. Laughter was the authors' weapon against vulgarity, stupidity and idiotic pathos. The book quickly sold out in quotes:

"All contraband is done in Odessa, on Malaya Arnautskaya Street,"

"Dusya, I am a man worn out by Narzan",

"A sultry woman is a poet's dream",

"Bargaining is inappropriate here"

"Money in the morning - chairs in the evening"

"To whom the mare has a bride,"

"Only cats will be born quickly",

"The giant of thought, the father of Russian democracy"

and many, many others. Unforgettable is Ellochka the ogre's dictionary with her interjections and other remarks that have come into our lives - "darkness!", "Horror!" ”,“ Don't teach me how to live! ”,“ Ho-ho ”. In fact, it can be argued without exaggeration that the entire book about Bender consists of immortal aphorisms that are constantly quoted by readers and moviegoers.

It is worth saying a few words about the possible prototypes of the heroes of this work. According to the authors themselves, Ostap Bender was conceived by them as a minor character. For him, Ilf and Petrov had prepared only one phrase about "the key to the apartment where the money is." Writers accidentally heard this expression from a familiar billiard player.

“But Bender gradually began to bulge out of the framework prepared for him. Soon we could no longer cope with him. Towards the end of the novel, we treated him like a living person and were often angry with him for the insolence with which he crawled through almost every chapter. (E. Petrov "From memories of Ilf").

One of Bender's prototypes is considered the Odessa friend of the Kataev brothers, Osip Benyaminovich Shor, the brother of the famous futurist poet Nathan Fioletov in Odessa. Kataev in his book "My Diamond Crown" writes: “The brother of the futurist was Ostap, whose appearance the authors preserved in the novel almost completely intact: athletic build and romantic, purely Black Sea character. He had nothing to do with literature and served in the criminal investigation department to combat rampant banditry. He was a brilliant operative. "

Like this! It is not for nothing that literary Ostap Bender sacredly reveres the criminal code.

The main character of the novel "The Twelve Chairs" was supposed to be Kisa Vorobyaninov - the county leader of the nobility, "a giant of thought and the father of Russian democracy", very similar in glasses to the leader of the Cadet party Milyukov. Most researchers agree that Kise was given the features of the Kataevs' great-uncle, but there is an opinion that the writer I.A.Bunin, the future Nobel laureate, served to some extent as the external prototype of this character. The Kataev family was also well acquainted with Bunin during his stay in Odessa (1918-1919), and V. Kataev always called him his literary teacher and mentor. Recently, another version was born, which has not yet been confirmed by any documentary data. The prototype of Vorobyaninov was ND Stakheev, a famous Elabuga merchant and philanthropist. In the mid-1920s, he returned from emigration in order to find the treasures hidden in his former house, but was detained by the OGPU. Subsequently (according to legend) he handed over the treasure to the state, for which he was awarded a life-long Soviet pension.

In Russian literary criticism, there is a strong opinion that the official criticism of the novel "The Twelve Chairs" did not notice at all. The first reviews and responses appeared only a year and a half after its publication. This causes bewilderment: well-known critics should have written about the novel, published in the capital's monthly, about the most popular book of the season, literally immediately "disassembled into quotes". Their articles were supposed to appear in major metropolitan literary magazines (October, Krasnaya Nov ', etc.), but did not appear. It turns out that a boycott was announced behind the scenes to the Twelve Chairs. The silence was very loud. Not even silence - silence. Modern researchers believe that the deathly silence of criticism after the release of the novel is due solely to political reasons. In 1928, there was a desperate struggle for power in the country's leadership. Stalin had already dealt with Trotsky and almost toppled his former ally N.I. Bukharin. And the "favorite of the party" Bukharin was one of the first to praise the work of Ilf and Petrov. The cautious critics were waiting for the outcome: to praise or scold the book approved by Bukharin? When it became clear that it was necessary to scold, the "spitting" turned out to be somehow lethargic and did not frighten anyone. And although the old edition of "Gudok" was dispersed, the editor of the magazine "30 days" V.I. Narbut was arrested - a longtime patron of the Kataev brothers, Ilf and Petrov acquired a literary name, continued to work successfully in other satirical publications and, since 1929, they were preparing for publication your new romance.

"Golden calf"

The second novel about the adventures of the great schemer Bender was published in 1931 in the magazine "30 days". However, the transition from magazine publication to book publication proved to be much more difficult than in the case of "The Twelve Chairs." The preface to the first edition of The Golden Calf, written by A. V. Lunacharsky, was published in 30 Days in August 1931 (before the end of the publication of the novel). But the first edition of the book turned out to be not Russian, but American. In the same 1931, fourteen chapters of The Golden Calf were reprinted in Paris in the émigré magazine Satyricon. The novel has already been published in Germany, Austria, the USA, England, and the Soviet edition never took place either in 1931 or in 1932. Why?

Formally, in The Golden Calf, healthy Soviet reality, of course, triumphed over the commander, but Ostap Bender was still the moral winner in the novel. It is this circumstance that was constantly reproached with the authors. This, in all likelihood, was the main reason for the difficulties that arose during the publication of the novel. Immediately after the publication of the magazine version, talk began about the dangerous sympathy of the authors for Ostap Bender (as we know, Lunacharsky wrote about the same). According to one of his contemporaries, in those days "Petrov walked gloomy and complained that the" great schemer "did not understand, that they did not intend to poeticize him."

Not having received permission to print the book in the USSR, Ilf and Petrov turned to A.A. Fadeev as one of the leaders of the RAPP. He replied that their satire, despite the wit, "is still superficial", that the phenomena described by them "are characteristic mainly of the period of restoration" - "for all these reasons, Glavlit does not agree to publish it as a separate book." Two years later, at the First Congress of Writers, M. Koltsov recalled (referring to the witnesses present) that “at one of the last meetings of the late RAPP, almost a month before its liquidation, I had to prove the right to exist in Soviet literature by writers of this kind, like Ilf and Petrov, and personally them ... ". The RAPP was liquidated in April 1932, and back in February 1932 a group of employees of the Krokodil magazine stated that Ilf and Petrov "are in the process of wandering and, having failed to find the correct orientation, they are idling." The co-authors were contrasted in this respect with V. Kataev and M. Zoshchenko, who are "conscientiously trying to reorganize." V. Ardov later recalled (with reference to Ilf) that the publication of the Golden Calf was helped by M. Gorky, who, “having learned about the difficulties, turned to the then People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR A. S. Bubnov and expressed his disagreement with the persecutors of the novel. Bubnov, it seems, was very angry, but did not dare to disobey, the novel was immediately accepted for publication. "

The main plot of The Golden Calf is similar to the plot of The Twelve Chairs: the pursuit of treasure, meaningless under Soviet conditions. This time, the resurrected Ostap earned wealth, but money did not bring him happiness. The plot and denouement of the novel changed in the course of its writing: first, it was about receiving the inheritance of an American soldier belonging to his Soviet daughter; then the underground Soviet millionaire Koreiko became the source of the extracted wealth. The ending also changed: in the original version, Ostap gave up useless money and married the girl Zosya Sinitskaya, who he left for the pursuit of the treasure. Already during the publication in the magazine, Ilf and Petrov came up with a new ending: Ostap runs across the border with treasures, but he is robbed and chased back by the Romanian border guards.

The years when The Golden Calf was written are referred to in Soviet history as the years of the “great turning point”. This is the time of complete collectivization, dispossession and industrialization. In the cities, the "great turning point" was expressed in periodic and massive cleansing of the Soviet apparatus, in the processes of pests (Shakhtinskoye affair in 1928, the process of the Industrial Party in 1930). The "years of the great turning point" were years of universal repentance and dissociation from previous views, from once close people, from their past.

The problem of the intelligentsia acquired a completely new meaning in 1929-1932. In the pre-revolutionary and early post-revolutionary years, the intelligentsia was most often viewed as a subject of history - it can “make” or “not make” a revolution, recognize it or not recognize it. Now intellectuals, like other citizens, have become part of Soviet society. From an imaginary subject of history, the intelligentsia has become its object. "Bourgeois intellectuals" educated before the revolution, or their descendants, were suspected of hidden ideological vices and secret ill-will. Intelligent engineers were the main heroes of wrecking processes, more and more ideological campaigns were organized against intellectuals, writers and scientists.

Subsequent critics, attacking Ilf and Petrov for their mockery of the bourgeois intelligentsia in the person of Vasisualy Lokhankin, unfortunately, did not always understand the subtle irony contained in this grotesque caricatured image. Lokhankin, with all the loud words about the "rebellion of individuality" and reflections on the fate of the Russian intelligentsia, is just a parody of the ignorance and inertia of a typical Soviet man in the street, an inhabitant of a sort of "crow settlement." He is completely apolitical, and the entire revolt of his personality is directed at his wife, who goes to a prosperous engineer, depriving her parasite husband of his livelihood. Lokhankin is not an oppositionist, but, on the contrary, a convinced conformist, and the position of this non-serving intellectual, in essence, corresponds to the universal cliche of his bureaucratic brother Polykhaev, who in advance accepts everything "that is needed in the future."

Indeed, this position has been taken by Russian intellectuals more than once. When creating Lokhankina, Ilf and Petrov probably did not think about either the Vekhi people or the Smena Vekhi people. But the steadfast "Hegelianism", the readiness to recognize the rationality of everything in the world and of any change in the social climate, has arisen among the Russian intelligentsia throughout its history all the time ("probably this is necessary, this is necessary ..."). Ultimately, for yesterday's "conscience of the nation" everything ended in universal repentance, renunciation of one's past and ourselves, inevitable and largely predictable death.

As for the "crow settlement", its description exactly reproduces the atmosphere of the Moscow "communal apartment" of the 1930s, where the family of E. Petrov lived. There was also a "Georgian prince", and "nobody's grandmother" and other characters of the "Golden Calf". E.I. Kataeva (granddaughter of E. Petrov) in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta suggested that her grandmother, Valentina Leontyevna Grunzaid, could serve as a real prototype for Vasisualia Lokhankin. She came from a wealthy family of former tea merchants, in her youth she was friends with Y. Olesha (the fairy tale "Three Fat Men" is dedicated to her), and then she married Yevgeny Kataev. Valentina Leontyevna never worked or served anywhere, loved to talk about the fate of the Russian intelligentsia and constantly forgot to turn off the lights in public places. In order not to bring the matter to hand-to-hand kitchen fights and to ensure the safety of his beloved wife, E. Petrov alone paid for electricity for all the residents of the "crow settlement".

Ilf and Petrov became famous writers during their lifetime. Their novels were translated into different languages, published and republished both in the USSR and abroad. Even the complete collected works were published. From 1927 to 1937, in addition to two novels, the duet Ilf and Petrov wrote numerous feuilletons, the story "The Bright Personality", a cycle of short stories about the city of Kolokolamsk and fairy tales of New Scheherazade. Essays about his stay in the United States in 1935 made up the book "One-Story America". American impressions gave Ilf and Petrov material for yet another work - the big story "Tonya".

The end of the duet

In 1937, Ilya Ilf died of tuberculosis. The death of I. Ilf was a deep trauma for E. Petrov: both personal and creative. He never came to terms with the loss of a friend until the last day of his life. But he overcame the creative crisis with the perseverance and persistence of a man of great soul and great talent. He made a lot of efforts to publish his friend's notebooks, he conceived a great work "My friend Ilf". In 1939-1942 he worked on the novel "A Journey to the Land of Communism", in which he described the USSR in the near future, in 1963 (excerpts were published posthumously in 1965).

It turned out to be impossible to finish what had been begun together with Ilf alone, although not long before Ilf's death, the co-authors had already tried to work separately - on “One-Story America”. But then, working in different parts of Moscow and even seeing each other not every day, the writers continued to live a common creative life. Each thought was the fruit of mutual disputes and discussions, each image, each remark had to go through the judgment of a comrade. With the death of Ilf, the writer "Ilf and Petrov" was gone.

E. Petrov in the book "My friend Ilf" intended to tell about the time and about himself. About myself - in this case it would mean: about Ilf and about myself. His idea went far beyond the personal. Here the era, already captured in their joint works, had to be reflected anew, in different features and with the involvement of different material. Reflections on literature, on the laws of creativity, on humor and satire. From the articles that were published by E. Petrov under the title "From Memories of Ilf", as well as from the plans and sketches found in his archive, it is clear that the book would be richly saturated with humor. Unfortunately, Yevgeny Petrovich did not have time to complete his work, and most of the archive was lost after his death, so today it is not possible to restore the text of the book about the most famous creative duet of the 20th century.

As a Pravda correspondent, E. Petrov had to travel a lot around the country. In 1937 he was in the Far East. The impressions of this trip were reflected in the essays "Young patriots", "Old paramedic". At this time, Petrov also wrote literary and critical articles, and was engaged in a lot of organizational work. He was the deputy editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, became editor of the Ogonyok magazine in 1940, and introduced a genuine creative passion into his editorial work.

According to contemporaries, the semi-official magazine, which had already decayed by that time, seemed to have found a second life under the leadership of Petrov. It became interesting to read it again.

In 1940-1941, E. Petrov turned to the genre of comedy films. He wrote five scenarios: "Air Carrier", "Quiet Ukrainian Night", "Restless Man", "Musical History" and "Anton Ivanovich is Angry" - the last three in co-authorship with G. Moonblit.

"Musical Story", "Anton Ivanovich is Angry" and "Air Carrier" were successfully filmed.

War correspondent

From the first days of the Great Patriotic War, Yevgeny Petrov became a correspondent for the Sovinformburo. His frontline sketches appeared in Pravda, Izvestia, Ogonyok, Krasnaya Zvezda. He sent telegraph correspondence to the United States. He knew America well and knew how to talk to ordinary Americans, but he did a lot during the war years to convey to the American people the truth about the heroic deed of the Soviet people.

In the fall of 1941, these were essays about the defenders of Moscow. E. Petrov was on the front line, appeared in the liberated villages, when the ashes were still smoking there, talked with the prisoners.

When the fascists were driven away from Moscow, E. Petrov went to the Karelian front. In his correspondence, he spoke about the heroism and courage of the defenders of the Soviet Arctic. Here his paths crossed with the no less well-known later front-line correspondent K.M. Simonov. The latter left interesting memories of a personal meeting with Petrov, in which the author of The Golden Calf and The Twelve Chairs appears as a sociable, cheerful, very attentive to people, intelligent person.

E. Petrov obtained permission to go to besieged Sevastopol with difficulty. The city was blocked from the air and from the sea. But our ships went there and planes flew, delivering ammunition, taking out the wounded and residents. The leader of the destroyers "Tashkent" (it was also called the "blue cruiser"), on which E. Petrov was, successfully reached the target, but on the way back he was hit by a German bomb. All the time, while the ships that came to the rescue were shooting the wounded, children and women, "Tashkent" was under fire from enemy aircraft.

Petrov refused to leave the ship. He stayed with the crew until he arrived at port, being on deck and helping the crew fight to save the ship.

“When on the day of departure I entered the veranda on which Petrov slept in the morning,” said Admiral I.S. Isakov, - the entire veranda and all the furniture on it were covered with sheets of paper covered with writing. Each was carefully crushed by a pebble. It was Evgeny Petrov's recordings that were dried, which, together with his field bag, fell into the water during the battle. "

On July 2, 1942, the plane on which the front-line journalist E. Petrov was returning to Moscow from Sevastopol was shot down by a German fighter over the territory of the Rostov region, near the village of Mankovo. The crew members and several passengers survived, but E. Petrov died. He was not even 40 years old.

In memory of Yevgeny Petrov, Konstantin Simonov dedicated the poem "It's not true, a friend does not die ..."

Evgeny Petrov was awarded the Order of Lenin and a medal. In Odessa, where the satirical writers were born and began their creative career, there is Ilf and Petrov Street.

Persecutions and prohibitions affected the works of Ilf and Petrov after their death. In 1948, the publishing house "Soviet Writer" published the novels "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf" in seventy-five thousand copies in the prestigious series "Selected Works of Soviet Literature: 1917-1947". But he paid immediately. By a special resolution of the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers of November 15, 1948, the publication was recognized as a "gross political mistake", and the published book - "slander against Soviet society." On November 17, Secretary General of the Union of Soviet Writers A.A. Fadeev sent to the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), Comrade I.V. Stalin and comrade G.M. Malenkov this resolution, which described the reasons for the publication of the "harmful book" and the measures taken by the Secretariat of the USSR.

It must be admitted that the writers' leadership was not "vigilant" of their own free will. He was forced by employees of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, "pointing out the erroneousness of the publication." In other words, Agitprop officially notified the SSP Secretariat that the Sovetsky Pisatel publishing house, which is directly subordinate to it, made an unforgivable blunder, in connection with which now it is necessary to look for the guilty, give explanations, etc. Because it was not possible to find the perpetrators - both authors were no longer alive, the case was actually "hushed up" (the planned devastating article in Literaturka never appeared, no one was actually imprisoned, the head of the publishing house "Soviet Writer" was only dismissed from his post). But until Khrushchev's "thaw", the works of Ilf and Petrov were not reprinted and were considered "ideologically harmful".

"Rehabilitation" and, one might say, "canonization" of the authors took place only in the second half of the 1950s, when "Twelve Chairs" and "Golden Calf" were claimed by Khrushchev propaganda as "the best examples of Soviet satire."

Nevertheless, the "canonization" of Ilf and Petrov as classics demanded considerable efforts from the liberals of that time: the novels clearly did not correspond to the Soviet ideological guidelines, even of such a relatively liberal era. Traces of controversy can be found, for example, in the preface written by K.M. Simonov for the reprint of the dilogy in 1956. Literally in the second paragraph, he considered it necessary to specifically stipulate that "Twelve Chairs" and "Golden Calf" were created by "people who deeply believed in the victory of the bright and reasonable world of socialism over the ugly and decrepit world of capitalism."

Clauses of this kind were used in the 1960s as well. Domestic researchers were forced to constantly explain to readers that Ilf and Petrov were not opponents of the political regime of the USSR, "internal emigrants" or dissidents. Throughout the entire period of the domination of communist ideology, Soviet writers Ilf and Petrov needed justification and protection, because the special space they created on the pages of novels was completely free of any ideological attitudes. And this freedom ran counter to the inner lack of freedom of critics, delighting and attracting new generations of readers.

Unfortunately, today's young reader, brought up on the works of Donetsk "blacks" and low-quality imitations of Western fantasy, is unable to appreciate either the peculiarities of the humor of that distant time, or the high literary skill of the creators of the novels who, in spite of everything, survived their harsh era.

"Envelope"

There is another sensational story all over the world associated with the name of Evgeny Petrov.

During his lifetime, the writer had a very unusual hobby - he collected envelopes from his own letters sent to a non-existent address and returned by mail to the sender. Obviously, he was attracted by the opportunity to get back the envelope, decorated with rare foreign stamps and postmarks from different countries.

According to a widely circulated legend, in April 1939, Evgeny Petrov allegedly sent a letter to New Zealand, to the fictional city of Hydebirdville, Reitbeach Street, house 7. The addressee was a certain Merrill Bruce Weisley (a completely fictional character by Petrov). In the letter, the sender condoled with the death of Uncle Pete and asked to kiss Meryl's daughter Hortense. Two months later, the writer received back not his envelope, but a reply letter. It contained gratitude for the condolences and a photograph in which a man of strong physique hugged Petrov. The picture was dated October 9, 1938 (on that day, the writer went to the hospital with severe pneumonia and was unconscious).

After the death of the writer, his widow received a second letter, where a New Zealand friend asked Petrov to be careful, explaining that when Petrov was staying with them, they dissuaded him from swimming in the lake - the water was cold. Petrov answered them that he was not destined to drown, but was destined to crash on an airplane.

I must say that the above legend does not have a single reliable source. The letters and photographs, of course, have not survived. And if you call on common sense for help, then it is worth remembering that in the 1930s and 1940s free correspondence between Soviet citizens and foreign correspondents was simply impossible. A strange "hobby" of the writer would inevitably have attracted the attention of the NKVD to him, and this institution, by the nature of its occupation, was not inclined either to jokes or to practical jokes in the style of E. Petrov himself.

Today, this story can be perceived as a joke or an entertaining hoax by the author of The Twelve Chairs. And it is not surprising that it was she who served as the basis for the script for the short feature film "Envelope", filmed in 2012 in the United States.

Lurie Ya. S. In the land of unafraid idiots. Book about Ilf and Petrov. - SPb., 2005. - 129 p.

"Each of us considers ourselves to be obliged to the other ..."

Let's eat observation: this person opens up to us mainly in tandems. Every reader knows the famous pair of co-authors, sounding as a whole, inseparably: Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. This writing duet remained in Russian literature, first of all, as the creator of the incredibly popular, witty, satirically grotesque, adventurous aphoristic novels "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf". In the miniature "Double Biography" Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov wrote in 1929: "It is rather difficult to compose an autobiography of the author of" The Twelve Chairs "...

Much fewer people, even those who read, know about the other pair - Evgeny Petrov and Valentin Kataev. The fact is that the famous Petrov, being the younger brother of the author, already well-known at that time, Valentin Kataev, took a pseudonym for his own patronymic, rightly assuming that the two Kataevs "Bolivar of Native Literature" would not stand up, there would be confusion.

Evgeny Petrovich Kataev was born on December 13, 1903. Of course, in Odessa. It was this city that gave its readers a galaxy of the so-called "southwestern" writing school. These are world-class writers - Valentin Kataev, Isaak Babel, Yuri Olesha, Eduard Bagritsky, Evgeny Petrov, Ilya Ilf, Semyon Kirsanov, Vera Inber. The term "southwest" in the literary sense was introduced in the article of the same name in 1933 by the famous literary critic, critic, writer, journalist, screenwriter and film theorist V. Shklovsky. However, the same was the name of the first poetry collection by E. Bagritsky, published in 1928.

Evgeny Petrovich Kataev, aka Evgeny Petrov

Literary critics are still debating whether this is a school or, perhaps, a number of independent talents, but the facts are inexorable: many of the above-mentioned writers, having moved to Moscow and worked in the editorial office of the newspaper "Gudok" (where, by the way, Mikhail Bulgakov from Kiev also worked), became known Soviet writers.

In Odessa, the Kataevs lived on Kanatnaya Street, and by 1920 Yevgeny graduated from the 5th Odessa classical gymnasium. During his studies, his classmate was Alexander Kozachinsky, a nobleman by his father, who later wrote the adventure story "Green Van", the prototype of the main character of which - the head of the Odessa district police department Volodya Patrikeyev - was Evgeny Petrov.

It should be said about this, the third, pair, in which Evgeny Petrov is convincingly represented. Only a few fans of the Russian adventure genre know about it. This story is romantically enchanting, dramatic, with a criminal plot, even with the blood oath of brotherhood, which Zhenya and Sasha made to each other during their school years. And in fact, their friendship-brotherly ties were preserved throughout their lives, although they were subjected to serious tests.

Correspondent of the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency Evgeny Petrov

The fact is that fate brought two friends together in a bizarre way: Alexander Kozachinsky, a man of an adventurous warehouse and great charm, from the age of 19, having abandoned detective work in the Bolshevik criminal investigation department, led a gang of raiders operating in Odessa and the surrounding area. Ironically, it was Yevgeny Kataev, then an officer of the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department, who arrested him in 1922. Kozachinsky, after a chase with a firefight, hid in the attic of one of the houses, where he was discovered by a classmate. Subsequently, Yevgeny achieved a review of the criminal case and replacement of Kozachinsky with an exceptional measure of punishment, execution - by imprisonment in a camp. Moreover, in the fall of 1925, Kozachinsky was amnestied. At the exit from prison he was met by his mother and faithful friend, Evgeny Kataev ...

Vadim Lebedev, a columnist for the Top Secret newspaper, concludes his essay “The Green Van” with surprising facts that emphasize the inexplicable, supernatural connection that existed between these people: “1941 separated them. Petrov goes to the front as a war correspondent. For health reasons, Kozachinsky was evacuated to Siberia. In the fall of 1942, having received news of the death of a friend, Kozachinsky fell ill, and a few months later, on January 9, 1943, a modest obituary appeared in the newspaper "Soviet Siberia": "The Soviet writer Alexander Kozachinsky died."

That is, over the years that have passed since Kozachinsky was released from prison, he managed to become a “Soviet writer”. Which, by the way, was also facilitated by Evgeny Petrov. In 1926, he arranged for Kozachinsky as a journalist in the same editorial office of the Gudok newspaper. And in 1938, Petrov persuaded his friend, with whom they had once read Mein Reed, to write the adventure story "The Green Van" (in 1983 it was interestingly filmed, some echoes of the biography of Alexander Kozachinsky are also visible in the image of the leader of the gang in Nikita Mikhalkov's 1974 film "At home among strangers, a stranger among our own"). But now we also understand what is behind the last lines of the "Green Van": "Each of us considers ourselves to be obliged to the other: I am for the fact that he did not once shoot at me with a Mannlicher, and he - for the fact that I planted him on time. "

Alexander Kozachinsky

In the biography of Petrov, we note his work as a correspondent for the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency, as well as his service for three years as an inspector of the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department. Ironically, in the style known to us, this page of life is reflected in the autobiography of Ilf and Petrov (1929): "His first literary work was the protocol of the examination of the corpse of an unknown man."

Reference books report that in 1923 Petrov arrived in Moscow, where he became an employee of the Red Pepper magazine. Evgeny was significantly influenced by his older brother Valentin Kataev (1897-1986). Kataev's wife recalled: “I have never seen such affection between brothers as Vali and Zhenya had. Actually, Valya made his brother write. Every morning he started with a call to him - Zhenya got up late, began to swear that he was awakened ... "Okay, swear further," Valya said and hung up. "

In 1927, with the joint work on the novel "The Twelve Chairs" (1928), the creative collaboration of two citizens of Odessa - Yevgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf - began. Subsequently, in co-authorship with Ilya Ilf, he wrote the novel "The Golden Calf" (1931), the short stories "Extraordinary Stories from the Life of the City of Kolokolamsk" (1928), the fantastic story "The Bright Personality" (filmed), the short stories "1001 Days, or New Scheherazade "(1929) and others.

Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov

The books of Ilf and Petrov were repeatedly staged and filmed. The creative collaboration of the writers was interrupted by the death of Ilf in Moscow on April 13, 1937.

Ilf and Petrov, while living in Odessa, attended the literary circle "The Collective of Poets", in which Kataev, Olesha, Bagritsky began, but they met already in the Moscow "Gudok", where the entire 4th page of the newspaper was assigned to satire. In the story “My Diamond Crown,” Valentin Kataev wrote: “My younger brother, who served in the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department, came to Moscow and got a job as a warden in Butyrka. I was horrified and made him write. Soon he began to make a decent living in feuilleton. I offered him and my friend (Ilf. - Author) a story about the search for diamonds hidden in the upholstery of chairs. My co-authors not only perfectly developed the plot, but also invented a new character - Ostap Bender. "

Ilf and Petrov wrote with enthusiasm, after the end of the working day in the editorial office, they returned home at two in the morning. In 1928, the novel "The Twelve Chairs" was published - first in a magazine, and then as a separate book. And immediately became extremely popular. The story of the adventures of the charming adventurer and swindler Ostap Bender and his companion, the former leader of the nobility, Kisa Vorobyaninov, captured with brilliant dialogues, vivid characters, subtle satire on Soviet reality and philistine life. Laughter was the authors' weapon against vulgarity, stupidity and idiotic pathos.

Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov

The book quickly sold out into quotes: "All contraband is done in Odessa, on Malaya Arnautskaya Street", "Dusya, I am a man tormented by narzan", "A sultry woman, a poet's dream", "Bargaining is inappropriate here", "Money in the morning - chairs in the evening" , "To whom the mare has a bride", "Only cats will be born quickly", "The giant of thought, the father of Russian democracy" and many, many others. Unforgettable is Ellochka the ogre's dictionary with her interjections and other remarks that have come into our lives - "darkness!", "Horror!" ”,“ Don't teach me how to live! ”,“ Ho-ho ”. In fact, it can be argued without exaggeration that the entire book about Bender consists of immortal aphorisms that are constantly quoted by readers and moviegoers.

The prototype of the great schemer Ostap Bender was the Odessa friend of the writers - Osip Shor, an adventurer with a special sense of humor and a wonderful storyteller, episodes of whose adventures are included in the book (marriage to Madame Gritsatsuyeva, arrival in the province under the guise of a famous artist).

Odessa was present in "The Twelve Chairs" in the character and humor of Bender, and in the next book "The Golden Calf" (the famous phrase "golden calf" is amusingly parodied in the title) it becomes a scene of action, recognizable in the port city of Chernomorsk, where Ostap and Panikovsky and Balaganov on the "Wildebeest". And again, a lot of quotes that have gone to the people: "The ice has broken, gentlemen of the jury!" "," Distribution of elephants "," Do not make a cult out of food "," I will command the parade. "

Monument to Ellochka the Cannibal on Petrovsky Street in Kharkov. The prototype is the actress Elena Shanina, who played the role of Ellochka in the film by Mark Zakharov

Evgeny Petrov remarked about the main character of his roguish novel: “Ostap Bender was conceived as a minor figure, almost an episodic person. For him, we had prepared a phrase that we heard from one of our acquaintances, a billiard player: "The key to the apartment where the money is." But Bender gradually began to bulge out of the frames prepared for him. Soon we could no longer cope with him. Towards the end of the novel, we treated him like a living person and were often angry with him for the insolence with which he crawled through almost every chapter.

Ilf and Petrov were at the peak of popularity: their feuilletons were successfully printed in the newspaper Pravda, collections of their short stories were published, and after a trip to the United States in 1932-1935, the story One-Story America (1937) was published. “How do we write together? Yes, and we write together. Like the Goncourt brothers. Edmond runs around the editorial offices, and Jules guards the manuscript so that acquaintances do not steal it, ”the co-authors joked.

As Valentin Kataev predicted, two novels by Ilf and Petrov have become classics of humor and satire, translated into many world languages. They became even more popular after cult adaptations with favorite Soviet actors: The Golden Calf with Sergei Yursky, Zinovy ​​Gerdt and Leonid Kuravlev, The Twelve Chairs with Andrei Mironov and Anatoly Papanov. In Odessa there is a monument to the Chair, a monument to Ostap Bender and Kisa Vorobyaninov (in the City Garden). A monument to Ilf and Petrov was opened in the Sculpture Garden of the Literary Museum.

Monument to Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov in Odessa

One of the streets of Odessa is named after the writers. There are monuments to Kisa, Osa and Ellochka the man-eater in Kharkiv, near the Rio cafe. And the monument to Father Fyodor, who ran out in Kharkov for boiling water, is installed on the platform of the Kharkov South Station. “Kharkov is a noisy city, the center of the Ukrainian republic. After the provinces, it seems as if he has gone abroad, ”wrote Fr. Fedor to his wife.

In 1937, Ilya Ilf died of tuberculosis. Petrov made a lot of efforts to publish his friend's notebooks, he conceived a great work "My friend Ilf". In 1939-1942 he worked on the novel "A Journey to the Land of Communism", in which he described the USSR in the near future, in 1963 (excerpts were published posthumously in 1965).

The writer Yevgeny Petrov has two wonderful sons. We know the cameraman Pyotr Kataev (1930-1986), who shot the main films of Tatiana Lioznova. These are the well-known to us "Seventeen Moments of Spring", "Three Poplars on Plyushchikha", "We, the undersigned", "Carnival". And we know the composer Ilya Kataev (1939-2009) from the song “I’m Standing at a Half-Station” from the Soviet television series “Day by Day”. Ilya Kataev is the author of music for Sergei Gerasimov's films "By the Lake" and "To Love a Man".

Monument to Ostap Bender in Kharkov. Opened on August 22, 2005 on Petrovsky Street. Sculptor Eduard Gurbanov. Prototype - actor Sergei Yursky

Let us not disregard the mystical page in the life of an extraordinary person Yevgeny Petrov, which, according to the existing legend, completes his earthly fate.

They say that the writer had a strange and rare hobby: all his life he collected envelopes ... from his own letters! He sent a letter to some country, but he invented everything except the name of the state - the city, street, house number, the name of the addressee. Therefore, after a month and a half, the envelope was returned to Petrov, but already decorated with multi-colored foreign stamps, with the indication "The addressee is incorrect."

But in April 1939, the writer sent a letter to New Zealand, inventing a town called Hydebirdville, 7 Reitbeach Street, and Merrill Ogin Waysley's addressee. In the letter itself, Petrov wrote in English: “Dear Merrill! Please accept our sincere condolences on the passing of Uncle Pete. Be strong, old man. Forgive me for not writing for a long time. Hope Ingrid is okay. Kiss my daughter for me. She's probably already quite big. Your Eugene. "

Monument to Father Fyodor on the first platform of the Southern Railway Station in Kharkov. year 2001. The inscription on the granite: "The first capital of Ukraine - to Father Fedor"

The story goes that by August he unexpectedly received not his own envelope, as usual, but the real answer, in the return address was: "New Zealand, Hydebirdville, 7 Reitbeach, Merrill Ogin Weisley." And - the blue postmark "New Zealand, Hydebirdville Post."

The content of the letter horrified Petrov: “Dear Evgeny! Thanks for the condolences. Uncle Pete's ridiculous death unsettled us for six months. I hope you will forgive the delay in the letter. Ingrid and I often remember those two days that you were with us. Gloria is very big and will go to the 2nd grade in the fall. She still keeps the bear that you brought her from Russia. " Petrov, who had never traveled to New Zealand, was completely amazed that in the photograph he saw a strong build man who hugged ... himself, Petrov! On the reverse side of the picture was written: "October 9, 1938" ...

Amazingly, it was on the day indicated in the photo that the writer was admitted to the hospital unconscious, with severe pneumonia. Then, for several days, doctors fought for his life, believing that he had almost no chance of survival. Petrov wrote another letter to New Zealand, but did not receive an answer: the Second World War began. From the first days of the war, the writer became a war correspondent for Pravda and Informburo. Colleagues did not recognize him - he became withdrawn, thoughtful, and stopped joking altogether ...

Evgeny Petrov on the leader "Tashkent" broke through to the besieged Sevastopol. From left to right - Yevgeny Petrov and the commander of the "Tashkent" Vasily. Eroshenko

Here is the documentary truth: on July 2, 1942, the plane on which the front-line journalist Yevgeny Petrov was returning to Moscow from Sevastopol was shot down by a German fighter over the territory of the Rostov region, near the village of Mankovo ​​...

But an amazing story has added the finishing touches: they say that on the day the news of the disappearance of the plane was received, a letter from Merrill Weisley arrived at Petrov's Moscow address. Weisley admired the courage of the Soviet people and expressed concern for the life of Yevgeny himself. In particular, he wrote: “I got scared when you started swimming in the lake. The water was very cold. But you said you were destined to crash on a plane, not drown. Please, be careful - fly as little as possible "...

A monument was erected at the crash site ...

Angelina DEMYANOK, "One Motherland"

His father, Peter Vasilievich Kataev, was the son of a priest from the city of Vyatka, a teacher in the diocesan and cadet schools in the city of Odessa. Pyotr Vasilyevich was a very educated person, he studied at the Vyatka Theological Seminary, graduated with a silver medal from the Faculty of History and Philology of Novorossiysk University and was a student of the renowned Byzantine academician Kondakov. Mother Evgenia Ivanovna was a Ukrainian from Poltava, nee named Bachey. Evgenia Ivanovna's father was a retired general, a hereditary military man and came from an ancient family of Zaporozhye Cossacks. There is also a legend according to which the Poltava Bacheys were related to the Gogols.

When Eugene was born, one son was already growing up in the family - Valentin, who at the time of Eugene's birth was six years old. The Kataevs had a very happy marriage, but soon after the birth of their youngest son, Evgenia Ivanovna died, and the sister of Evgenia Ivanovna helped Peter Vasilyevich to raise the children. She was not yet thirty years old when, giving up her personal life, she moved to the Kataevs to replace the mother for the orphaned children.

The Kataevs had an extensive family library, where the twelve-volume History of the Russian State by Karamzin, complete collections of works by Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Leskov, Goncharov, the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia were kept as the greatest treasures. There was even a Petri atlas among the books - a book with which systematic geographic education in Russia began in those years. It cost a lot, but Pyotr Vasilyevich Kataev, who dreamed of raising his sons as educated people, having reduced some expenses, bought this atlas. Later, he gave his sons a small steam engine as a visual aid in physics.

The brothers studied at the 5th Odessa classical gymnasium. At the time, it was the most prestigious gymnasium in the city. At the same desk with Eugene sat the son of an impoverished nobleman, Alexander Kozachinsky. The boys were friends, considered themselves brothers, and even gave each other a "blood oath", cutting their fingers with a shard of glass and touching wounds. Perhaps it was this incident many years later that saved both of them lives.

Valentin Kataev decided from an early age that he would be a writer. He attended the literary circle "Green Lamp", filled with poetry, stories and even novels not only notebooks, but also free pages of textbooks. He published his first story at the age of thirteen, inspired by this event, ran around the editorial offices and took his younger brother with him everywhere. Later Evgeniy wrote: “I remember that once he ... took me around the editorial offices. "Zhenya, let's go to the editorial office!" I roared. He took me because he was afraid to go alone. " But the younger did not want to be a writer for anything, and even essays in the gymnasium did not work out very well for him. Classical literature, with which the shelves in his parents' house were lined, did not appeal to him. Eugene read books by Emard, Stevenson and Nat Pinkerton. He dreamed of becoming a detective, his idol was Sherlock Holmes. Adventure lured him.

One summer, twelve-year-old Yevgeny disappeared from home for a whole day and returned in a badly rumpled gymnasium suit, without a cap and belt. Valentin Kataev recalled: "He was stubbornly silent on all questions, and a timid and at the same time proud smile slid across his blue lips, and in his brown eyes there was an expression of a strange numbness that occurs in a person who has met face to face with death." And only a few years later, the younger brother told the elder what had happened. Three school friends rented a fishing scow with a sail and a plugged board keel for a ruble and a half. Instead of an anchor, she had a stone on a rope. At first, the guys just wanted to ride, but as soon as they were in the sea, someone came up with the idea to make a trip to Ochakov. Several hundred miles did not seem to them a serious obstacle, and they set off. Suddenly a wind blew and a storm began. The rudder of the scow broke, the sail was torn. There was no fun. Shalanda, having lost control, rushed at the behest of the storm. In the middle of the night they saw the lights of a steamer passing by. But behind the roar of the wind and waves, no one heard their cries. At dawn they were rescued by fishermen. Valentin Kataev recalled: “I never had to experience such adventures on the high seas. I am describing this adventure from the words of my brother; even not so much from words as I imagine the whole picture by the expression of his eyes, which somehow immediately changed very much after this incident, matured and seemed to know something that no one but him knows anymore, as if it was in during this storm the fate of his whole life was accomplished ... I cannot forget the amber-brown eyes of my brother Zhenya, when he told me this story, his lilac lips and the lowered shoulders of a doomed man. "

After the revolution, difficult times came in Odessa - power in the city passed from hand to hand fourteen times over the course of three years. Every few months, Odessa residents changed their money and documents. Sometimes two or three authorities acted in the city at the same time - and it was divided by borders with border posts and customs. Communication with a gymnasium friend Alexander Kozachinsky was cut off. Sometimes, living in the same city, they ended up in different republics. Part of Odessa with Sofievskaya Street, where the Kozachinsky lived, was captured by the Denikin army and declared the territory of the Odessa Republic. Kanatnaya Street, where the Kataev family lived, was part of independent Ukraine, because Petliura's army was stationed on it. It was impossible to get from one part of the city to another without special permission.

In February 1920, the Red Army entered Odessa. In the same year, Yevgeny graduated from high school and began to earn a living on his own. At first, he worked as a correspondent for YugROST, and then began serving in the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department. In the questionnaire, when asked why he decided to join the ranks of the police, eighteen-year-old Yevgeny Kataev replied: "Interest in the case." Many enthusiasts came to the Odessa police in those years. For some time, Eduard Bagritsky also worked in the Odessa criminal investigation department. Evgeny Kataev's childhood dream of becoming a detective has come true. Later, in a double autobiography, he wrote about this period of his life: "His first literary work was the protocol of the examination of the corpse of an unknown man." His personal file has been preserved - this is a large track record, many thanks for the successfully solved cases. For the liquidation of a dangerous gang in the Nikolaev province, he was awarded a rare award for those times - a personal watch. An unprecedented riot of banditry reigned in Odessa. Of the 200 thousand people of the city's population, almost 40 thousand participated in gangs in one way or another. Police reports of those years recorded five to eight raids a day, 20 to 30 thefts and robberies, from 5 to 15 murders. In the 1930s, Evgeny Petrov wrote about this time as follows: “I have always been an honest boy. When I worked in the criminal investigation department, I was offered bribes, and I did not take them. It was the influence of my father, a teacher ... I thought that I had three, four days to live, well, a maximum of a week. I got used to this thought and never made any plans. I had no doubt that at all costs I must perish for the happiness of future generations. I have experienced war, civil war, many coups, famine. I stepped over the corpses of people who died of hunger and made inquiries about seventeen murders. I conducted investigations, as there were no court investigators. Things went straight to the tribunal. There were no codes, and they were judged simply - "in the name of the revolution ..." I firmly knew that very soon I should perish, that I could not but perish. I was a very honest boy. "

In 1921, Peter Vasilievich Kataev died. At about the same time, Valentin Kataev left for Kharkov, and then for Moscow, and the younger brother remained all alone in Odessa. Fate brought him back to Aleksandr Kozachinsky, who by that time had served for some time as a guard, then as a clerk in the district militia, and also began to work in the criminal investigation department. But it so happened that soon Kozachinsky, who was then 18 years old, having left his service in the police, he himself became the leader of a gang of raiders. This gang operated for about a year, and on its account were raids on district offices, banks and trains. The best forces of the Odessa militia were looking for Kozachinsky's gang.

In June 1921, Yevgeny Kataev was sent as an agent of the criminal investigation department to the German colony of Mannheim, located 30 kilometers from Odessa. The area was teeming with well-armed bandits. In just a month, there were more than 20 murders, an armed raid, and new crimes were added every day. In September 1922, Evgeny Kataev took part in the capture of the gang after another raid. Pursuing one of the bandits, he ran after him into the dark attic. When his eyes got used to the semi-darkness a little, he was stunned. Former friends and classmates, Yevgeny Kataev and Alexander Kozachinsky, stood face to face with revolvers in their hands. Kozachinsky could shoot and hide. But they went outside together and went to the police station, remembering their school years on the way. Almost a year later, in August 1923, the Odgubsud considered this case. There were 23 people in the dock. The indictment contained 36 pages and was read for three and a half hours. Considering that the defendants were accused of counter-revolutionary activities, raids and thefts of state and personal property, no one doubted that the sentence would be the death penalty. Alexander Kozachinsky, taking all the crimes upon himself, wrote the confession in the form of an emotional and even a little humorous essay. The verdict was really harsh - Kozachinsky was sentenced to death. When he was taken out of the hall, he noticed Yevgeny Kataev with his forefinger raised upward, on which there was a scar from their childhood "blood oath". Kozachinsky realized that his friend would not leave him. In September, the Supreme Court overturned the capital punishment for Alexander Kozachinsky, sentencing him to imprisonment, and also ordered a new investigation of the case, starting from the first stage of the preliminary investigation.

Later, in 1938, Alexander Kozachinsky, yielding to the insistent persuasions of his friend Yevgeny Petrov, wrote the story "Green Van", which was based on this story from their youth. Evgeny became the prototype of Volodya Patrikeev, and Kozachinsky himself became the horse thief Handsome. At the end of the story, Patrikeev says the phrase: "Each of us considers ourselves to be very obliged to another: I am - for the fact that he did not shoot at me once from a Mannlicher, and he - for the fact that I planted him on time."

Yevgeny Kataev's service in the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department ended there. He quit his job and went to Moscow with a revolver in his pocket. By his own admission, he arrived in the capital without conquest goals and did not make any plans. Valentin Kataev recalled: “My brother came to me in Mylnikov lane from the south, prompted by my desperate letters. While still almost a boy, he served in the district criminal investigation department, in the department for the fight against banditry, rampant in the south. And what else was there for him? Father died. I went to Moscow. He was left alone, not even having time to finish the gymnasium. A grain of sand in the whirlwind of the revolution. Somewhere in the steppes of Novorossiya, he chased bandits on ordinary horses - the remnants of the defeated Petliura and Makhnovshchina, especially raging in the area of ​​the not yet completely liquidated German colonies. I understood that at any moment he could die from a bullet from a bandit's sawn-off shotgun. My desperate letters finally convinced him. He appeared no longer as a boy, but still not quite ripe young man, a burning brunette, a young man, stretched out, weathered, with a blackened from the Novorossiysk tan, thin, somewhat Mongolian face, in a long, toe-to-toe, peasant scroll, covered over black lamb fur blue rough cloth, in leather boots and a cap of a criminal investigation agent. "

Viktor Ardov recalled their first meeting in the following way: “Next to Kataev stood a young - very young - man somewhat similar to him. Evgeny Petrovich was then twenty years old. He seemed unsure of himself, which was natural for a provincial who had recently arrived in the capital. Slanting, brilliant black large eyes looked at me with some disbelief. Petrov was youthfully thin and, compared to his brother in the capital, poorly dressed. "

Moscow in those years was overflowing with people who came in search of work. Vera Inber wrote about that time: “It happens that one thought takes possession of many minds and many hearts at the same time. In such cases, they say that this thought "is in the air." At that time, people everywhere talked and thought about Moscow. Moscow - it was work, the happiness of life, the fullness of life - everything that people so often dream of and that so rarely comes true ... It was filled with newcomers, it expanded, it accommodated, accommodated. Already settled in sheds and garages - but this was only the beginning. They said: Moscow is overcrowded, but these were just words: no one had any idea about the capacity of human habitation. " Eugene settled with his brother and went to look for work. He had excellent recommendations from the Odessa police and tried to get a job in the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. However, there was no need for police personnel and he was offered a place as a hospital warden in Butyrka prison, which he proudly informed his older brother, adding that he would not be a burden to him. Valentin Kataev recalled: “I was horrified ... My brother, a boy from an intelligent family, the son of a teacher, a silver medalist of the Novorossiysk University, the grandson of a major general and the Vyatka cathedral archpriest, the great-grandson of the hero of the Patriotic War of the twelfth year, who served in the troops of Kutuzov, Bagration, Lanzheron Ataman Platov, who received fourteen wounds during the capture of Dresden and Hamburg - this young man, almost still a boy, will have to serve in Butyrki for twenty rubles a month, opening hospital cells with keys, and wear a metal badge with a number on his chest! "

The elder brother was worried about Eugene, wanted to make him a professional journalist and convinced that "every more or less intelligent, literate person can write something." At that time, Valentin Kataev was writing a fantastic novel "The Lord of Iron", which was published in parts in the newspaper. One day he called his younger brother, said that he needed to leave, and asked him to continue working. The son of Valentin Kataev recalled: “His father told him the plot of a conceived but unwritten novel, introduced him briefly to the characters and events that would take place in the future, put on his coat and left the house, leaving his shocked brother alone. “When I returned a few hours later,” my father recalled, “the passage was so well finished that I took it to the editorial office without editing, and it was published.” Father recalled this with enthusiasm and gaiety, and the story showed great love for his brother and pride in him. "

Soon, at the insistence of his older brother, Yevgeny wrote a feuilleton entitled "The Goose and the Stolen Planks", which was based on real events from his criminal practice. The feuilleton was published in Literary Week, an appendix to the Nakanune newspaper. The fee was one and a half times more than the supervisor's monthly salary. Valentin Kataev recalled: “My brother turned out to be a smart and diligent boy, so two months later, having climbed the editorial offices of all humorous magazines in Moscow, cheerful, sociable and charming, he began to earn very decent money, without giving up any genres: he wrote feuilletons in prose and, to my surprise, even in poetry, he gave themes for cartoons, made signatures under them, made friends with all the humorists of the capital, visited the "Gudok", handed over the state revolver to the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, dressed well, got a little plump, shaved and had a haircut in a hairdresser's with cologne, made some pleasant acquaintances, found a separate room for myself. "

Life has changed dramatically - the civil war, hunger, deprivation and work, associated with a constant risk to life, were left behind, they began to search for their own path in literature, their own style. Evgeny Kataev worked as an executive secretary in the magazine "Red Pepper" and very quickly became an excellent editorial organizer, mastered both the printing technique and editorial editing. He published feuilletons and gave themes for cartoons, signing with the pseudonyms "Foreigner Fedorov" or "Shiloh in a sack." He did not want another writer with the surname Kataev to appear. Soon he turned his middle name into a pseudonym and since then readers have known as Evgeny Petrov. For many years he considered his pseudonym unsuccessful - inexpressive, unsonic, but still he did not change it.

He invited Alyaksandr Kozachinsky, who had been released under the amnesty, to work as a reporter for the Krasny Pepper magazine. Viktor Ardov recalled: “Yevgeny Petrovich wrote then cheerfully, with a huge comic imagination, which eventually blossomed so much in his famous novels. I remember one time I happened to be present when Yevgeny Petrovich was composing another feuilleton, sitting at his desk as the editorial secretary. He was not alone in composing it; if my memory serves me correctly, the writer A. Kozachinsky was his co-author ... But the co-author laughed more and nodded his head, and Petrov alone came up with almost everything. This scene still stands before my eyes: a young, cheerful, black-haired Petrov, with a characteristic movement of his right hand, bent at the elbow, with a hand set with a rib and a far-out thumb, hits the table in rhythm with phrases, speaks and laughs, laughs. .. ".

Before the start of cooperation with Ilf, Evgeny Petrov published more than fifty humorous and satirical stories in various periodicals and released three independent collections. “Evgeny Petrov had a wonderful gift - he could give birth to a smile,” Ilya Ehrenburg wrote. In 1926, Petrov went to work for the newspaper "Gudok", where, under the pseudonym Old Man Sabbakin, Valentin Kataev began to publish his feuilletons, and where Ilya Ilf was already working at that time. Future co-authors from Odessa, who lived very close to each other and walked along the same streets, met only in Moscow, where Ilf worked as the literary editor of the fourth page of "Gudok", turning the letters of the workers' correspondents into topical caustic feuilletons. On the wall of the editorial room of the fourth page hung the wall newspaper "Snot and Screams" - the place of publication of all kinds of newspaper "lapses" - mediocre headlines, semi-literate phrases, unsuccessful photographs and drawings. Many exhibits for this wall newspaper were collected by Evgeny Petrov, who worked in the professional department of "Gudka". Mikhail Shtikh, who worked at Gudok in those years, recalled: “He entered our room with the comically mysterious grasp of a schoolboy, who carried a rare beetle in his palms folded in a boat. And the "bug" was given to us in a slow, ceremonial manner, in order to thoroughly torment us with anticipation. "

Ilf and Petrov in the "Gudok". 1929 year.

Petrov was amazed that in the room of the fourth page they really started to work only in the middle of the day, but the notes were written with lightning speed. Mikhail Shtikh wrote about it this way: “It cannot be said that Gudkov's satirists were not sufficiently loaded with editorial work. But she walked with them so cheerfully and easily that it seemed that the capacity of time doubled. There was enough time for everything. They had time to pass the material on time, had time to laugh with the so-called healthy laugh. All sorts of funny stories were told, humorous improvisations were composed, in which Evgeny Petrov and Olesha were excellent masters ... The dark, characteristic face of Evgeny Petrov, his youthful ardor, which accompanied him until the end of his days, and his expressive, slightly angular arms in movement, appear especially clearly ... And nearby, from behind the table, the glasses of Ilf's pince-nez gleam ironically - he watches the boiling of literary passions and prepares to shoot his arrow into the thick of the fight ... ".

In the summer of 1927, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov made a joint trip to the Crimea and the Caucasus, visited Odessa, the native city for both of them. It is with this journey that their first joint creation is associated. Undoubtedly, the palm belongs to the novel "The Twelve Chairs". But still, there was a joint travel diary even earlier. They wrote it in one common notebook, but each wrote down his own observations there. This diary contained surprisingly funny notes, interesting drawings, and funny labels. It was then that their ability to look together began to take shape. Later, the impressions of this trip were included in the novel "The Twelve Chairs". Valentin Kataev in the novel "My Diamond Crown" described the beginning of the collaboration between Ilf and Petrov: "After reading gossip somewhere that the author of" The Three Musketeers "wrote his numerous novels not one, but hired several talented literary partners who embodied his ideas on paper, I decided one day, too, to become something like Dumas-pe'r and command a bunch of literary mercenaries. Fortunately, at this time my imagination was boiling, and I decidedly did not know what to do with the plots that came into my head every minute. Among them there was a story about diamonds hidden during the revolution in one of the twelve chairs of the living room set. " Valentin Kataev presented his idea to his brother and Ilya Ilf, inviting them to develop the proposed theme and clothe it in the form of a satirical novel. He himself promised to go over the text with the hand of a master at the end of the work. The novel was to be published under three surnames, and the name of Valentin Kataev could help speed up the publication of the novel.

Kataev left for Crimea to rest, and the co-authors got down to work. And unexpectedly for them, it turned out to be difficult to write. Years of experience in a newspaper and a humorous magazine turned out to be inapplicable to writing a novel "in four hands." Several years later, they nevertheless, with their inherent humor, talked about how they write: “It is very difficult to write together. Presumably, it was easier for the Goncourts. They were brothers, after all. And we are not even relatives. And not even one-year-olds. And even of different nationalities: while one is Russian (a mysterious Slavic soul), the other is a Jew (a mysterious Jewish soul) ... One is healthy, the other is sick. The patient recovered, the healthy one went to the theater. The healthy one returned from the theater, and the sick one, it turns out, arranged a small U-turn for friends, a cold ball with a snack a la buffet table. But finally, the reception was over, and it would be possible to get to work. But then a tooth was pulled out of a healthy man, and he became sick. At the same time, he suffers so violently, as if they pulled out not a tooth, but a leg. This does not prevent him, however, from finishing reading the history of naval battles. It is completely incomprehensible how we write this together. "

The artist Boris Efimov also recalled how the famous co-authorship was born: “I think if less talented writers had taken up the plot proposed by Kataev, then the readers would have received quite, perhaps, an amusing, but insignificant and quickly forgotten“ detective ”agenda. After all, replacing pearls with diamonds, and plaster busts with chairs is, in general, a simple matter. But under the pen of Ilf and Petrov, a huge panorama of the life of people, amazing in its expressiveness and brightness, arose. "

Viktor Ardov wrote: “I can testify that our friends always wrote together in the most laborious way ... written until both agree with this piece of text, with this phrase, with this word. Often such disagreements caused violent quarrels and shouts (especially from the ardent Yevgeny Petrovich), but what was written turned out like a cast piece of a metal pattern - to such an extent everything was finished and finished. "

Co-authors wrote at night in the editorial office - they simply did not have other working conditions. The novel grew and became completely different from what the authors imagined it to be. The minor character Ostap Bender gradually came to the fore in the narrative. Evgeny Petrov later wrote that by the end of the writing of the novel they treated Bender like a living person and were angry with him for "the impudence with which he crawled through every chapter." And they even argued about whether to keep the character who became the main character alive. The fate of the great schemer was decided by lot. “Subsequently, we were very annoyed at this frivolity, which could only be explained by youth and too much fun,” wrote Petrov. The co-authors were in a hurry, working all night long - the issue of publication was resolved and the deadlines for submitting chapters to the editorial office were rigidly determined. But finishing writing the first part of the novel, they could not understand how well or badly it was written, and they would not be surprised if Dumas the father, aka Old Man Sabbakin, aka Valentin Kataev, told them that the novel should not be printed. They prepared for the worst. But after ten minutes of reading, Valentin Kataev realized that the co-authors not only perfectly developed the plot moves given to them and perfectly portrayed Kisa Vorobyaninov, but also introduced a completely new character into the novel, who became the main character, the strongest spring. And with the words: “Your Ostap Bender finished me off,” Kataev invited them to continue working on the novel themselves and said that the book would be a success.

The novel was published during the first half of 1928 in the monthly literary magazine 30 Days. He immediately became popular. Almost simultaneously, it began to be translated into many European languages, and soon it was published in almost every major country in Europe. At first, criticism did not pay attention to him at all, which upset the authors a little. But the appearance of the first serious reviews was not at all happy, later writers described it as "a blow to the highs with a broadsword." The book was called "an easy-to-read toy", the authors were accused of "passing by real life - it was not reflected in their observations." A. Lunacharsky and M. Koltsov advocated the book. The novel was thoroughly censored, as a result of which it was reduced by almost a third, but, fortunately, this did not affect the co-authors in any way. Beginning with the first edition, all editions of The Twelve Chairs began with a dedication to Valentin Petrovich Kataev - the co-authors did not forget to whom they owe the idea of ​​the famous novel.

The completion of work on the first novel marked the beginning of a joint work that lasted ten years. Every day they met at the writing table, thinking together every word, every phrase. Yevgeny Petrov wrote: “It was not a simple addition of forces, but a continuous struggle between two forces, an exhausting and at the same time fruitful struggle. We gave each other all our life experience, our literary taste, our entire stock of thoughts and observations. But they gave it away with a struggle. In this struggle, life experience was questioned. Literary taste was sometimes laughed at, thoughts were considered stupid, and observations were superficial. We constantly subjected each other to the most severe criticism, all the more offensive because it was presented in a humorous form. At the writing table, we forgot about pity ... This is how we developed a single literary style and a single literary taste. "

In Mylnikov Lane opposite the house where Valentin Kataev lived, a beautiful girl often sat by the window. The girl read Andersen's fairy tales, and next to her was a huge talking doll, which her father gave her. It was Valentina Grunzaid, the daughter of a former tea supplier to the imperial court. Yuri Olesha met her when Valentina was only thirteen years old. The romantic Olesha promised that he would write a beautiful fairy tale in her honor. The book "Three Fat Men" was soon ready, but it was not published for another 5 years. All these years Olesha told his friends that he was raising a wife for himself. Once he introduced her to Yevgeny Petrov. It was difficult not to fall in love with her - she was a beautiful and educated woman. She liked Evgeny Petrov - cheerful, light, witty. Less than a year after they met, they got married. As Viktor Ardov recalled, Valentina was still too young then, and the newlyweds had to deceive the registrar in the registry office, adding a little to the bride's age. A year later, Evgeny Petrov wrote down in Korney Chukovsky's handwritten almanac "Chukokkala": "My wife Valentina at the age of six learned your" Crocodile "and still remembers it by heart." To which Yuri Olesha ironically replied with a line below: “Evgeny Petrov is silent that his wife, Valentina, when she was a thirteen-year-old girl, was devoted to the novel“ Three Fat Men ”. She grew up and married someone else. "

Evgeny Petrov idolized his wife. His granddaughter Yekaterina Kataeva told in an interview with the Fakty newspaper: “My dad liked to tell a story, how once his mother, being pregnant, in the midst of some important editorial meeting, called the newspaper where Yevgeny Petrov worked, asked the secretary to call her husband and said him that he feels terrible and is probably about to give birth. He dropped everything, rushed home and saw his wife, calmly sitting on the bed and eating chocolates. Of course, he flared up and went back to work. However, his act testifies: his wife was always in the first place, for her sake he was ready for anything! "

They lived in a small room in a communal apartment on Kropotkinsky Lane. Subsequently, this apartment was very accurately described in the "Golden Calf" under the name "Crow Slobodka". Evgeny Petrovich actually called his dwelling that way, and only then he transferred this name into the novel. There was in reality both "nobody's grandmother", who lived on the mezzanine, and "the former highland prince, and now a toiler of the East." Valentina Leontyevna was a sensitive and impractical woman. When visiting common areas, she often forgot to turn off the lights, which caused a storm of indignation from neighbors. Then Evgeny Petrovich, in order to save his wife from attacks, began to pay for electricity for the entire apartment. According to Ekaterina Kataeva, it was Valentina Leontyevna who was the prototype of Vasisualiy Lokhankin in The Golden Calf.

The Kataevs had two sons. The elder, Peter Kataev, became a famous cameraman. Among his works were the films "Seventeen Moments of Spring", "Three Poplars on Plyushchikha", "A Dog Was Walking on the Piano". The youngest, Ilya Kataev, became a composer and wrote music for the films By the Lake, Loving a Man, A Million in a Marriage Basket, and the TV series Day by Day.

In 1928 the illustrated satirical weekly "Smekhach" was transferred from Leningrad to Moscow, and in 1929 it was named "Chudak". Ilf and Petrov collaborated with this publication. There was born a common pseudonym for co-authors F. Tolstoyevsky. They put this signature under a cycle of satirical short stories from the life of the city of Kolokolamsk invented by them. When later some of them were published as a separate book, the editorial board of the literary newspaper received a letter from an angry reader accusing the co-authors of stealing the works of the writer Tolstoyevsky, whom he knew from the Chudak magazine. Their other common pseudonyms in the magazine were Don Buzilio, Copernicus, Vitaly Pseldonimov and Franz Baken-Bardov. They were not only authors, but also active contributors to the journal. Ilf was in charge of the reviews department, and Evgeny Petrov was in charge of the page of the humorous mixture "Laughing Gas". A series of satirical tales "1001 days, or New Scheherazade" was published in "The Eccentric". Evgeny Petrov wrote about this time: “We feel that we need to write something different. But what?".

The next novel, The Golden Calf, published in 1930, was a continuation of the adventures of Ostap Bender. To do this, the co-authors had to resurrect the main character, who, according to their plan, was killed in The Twelve Chairs. The new novel was published in installments in the monthly "30 Days", and publishing it as a separate book was an even more difficult story than it happened with the first novel. One of the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers Alexander Fadeev wrote to co-authors: “The adventures of Ostap Bender in the form and content as you depicted are hardly conceivable now ... It is also bad that the most likable person in your story is Ostap Bender. But he's a son of a bitch. Naturally, for all these reasons, Glavlit does not agree to publish it as a separate book. " It was possible to print The Golden Calf only after the intervention of Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexei Gorky. And again, unflattering reviews appeared in the newspapers, calling the novel a book for an easy afternoon rest and predicting its early oblivion.

In September 1931, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were sent to the exercises of the Red Army in the Belarusian military district. Based on the materials of the trip, the essay “A Difficult Topic” was published in the magazine “30 Days”, and in 1932 the co-authors decided to write a third satirical novel called “The Scoundrel”. “We dreamed about the same thing,” wrote Evgeny Petrov. "Write a very big novel, very serious, very intelligent, very funny and very touching." The Thirty Days magazine announced the Scoundrel novel, promising to publish it soon, but the novel never appeared in print. In 1934, Yevgeny Petrov wrote about the novel: "The idea was clear to us, but the plot hardly moved." It was about this time that Evgeny Petrov wrote: "Humor is a very valuable metal, and our mines have already been devastated." And Viktor Ardov recalled the words of Evgeny Petrov: “In our two novels, we drove so many observations, thoughts and inventions that would be enough for ten more books. We are so uneconomical ... ".

Ilf and Petrov on Gogolevsky Boulevard. Winter 1932.

Since 1932, Ilf and Petrov began to publish in the Pravda newspaper. In 1932 - 1933, their temporary pseudonyms gradually disappeared. Don Busillo, Pseldonimov, Copernicus have disappeared. Kholodny philosopher and F. Tolstoyevsky began to appear less and less in print. They were ousted by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov - novelists, feuilletonists and screenwriters. They were allowed, as part of a group of writers, journalists, artists, to take part in the overseas voyage of a squadron of the Black Sea Fleet. In October 1933, Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov and artist Boris Efimov boarded the flagship Krasny Kavkaz. The route ran through Turkey, Greece and Italy. The Soviet squadron was greeted hospitably, welcoming speeches sounded. Boris Efimov recalled: “Zhenya Petrov then made us laugh for a long time, hilariously parodying these speeches, something like this: bind our friendly peoples with genuine friendly ties, etc. "

Boris Efimov recalled: “Aren't you ashamed to sleep, you are such a sloth! - Petrov exclaimed with his characteristic melodious intonations. - By God, Borya, I'm just surprised at you. We are in Greece, do you understand? In Hellas! Themistocles! Pericles! Finally, the same Heraclitus! " Petrov was interested not only in history, but also in the modern life of Athens. He tirelessly searched for interesting corners, colorful markets, talked with passers-by, fantastically mixing Russian, English and Greek words. He wrote in a notebook: “The antique style is very much in modern Athens. Either the architects have strong traditions, or the very place, where everything breathes with the Acropolis and the temples of Jupiter and Theseus, are conducive to this, but the city has a very impressive and noble appearance. " In a letter to his wife from Italy, he wrote: “Today we came to Naples and for a long time saluted in the middle of the bay with cannon shots. They made noise, smoke and shine. "

From Naples, the Soviet ships went back to Sevastopol, and Ilf and Petrov went to Rome, Venice, Vienna, Paris and on the way back stayed in Warsaw. From Italy, he wrote to his wife: “I went to the lively Via Roma and almost got hit by a car, reading and rereading your family and beloved lines. I am glad that you and Petenka are safe and sound. To such an extent I want to see you that I'm ready to give up this fabulous journey, which I dreamed about so much, and fly to you, my dearly beloved wives and children. Only the thought that such a trip, perhaps, will never be repeated in my life, stops me ... I love you like five years ago, like on the first day when you appeared in my room in Troitsky Lane in a red dress - pale and excited .... "

The co-authors traveled to Vienna, hoping to collect royalties for the novel Twelve Chairs published there. Evgeny Petrovich wrote to his wife from Vienna: “We live in Vienna quietly and calmly. We examine the city. We are sitting in a cafe. Go to the cinema. In between these pleasant activities we squeeze money out of the publisher. " The Austrian publishing house paid quite a bit and they went to Paris, as Ilf said to G. Munblit, “on copper money”.

In Paris, Evgeny Petrov's notebook was replenished with new entries: “Louvre (19th November). In painters, sculptors and other masters of art of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, in addition to genius and inspired skill, inhuman workability is unusually striking. A modern painter will need 100 lives to write (at least technically) as many canvases as Rubens, or Michelangelo, or Van Dyck wrote ... Paris is so good that you don't want to think about leaving. So a person, realizing that he will die, repels the thought of death from himself .... I suddenly felt a sign of such happiness, which I experienced only once in my life - when for the first time I felt that I was in love with Valichka. This state of intoxication is worth a lifetime. "

In Paris, they dined in a small, cozy restaurant. Boris Efimov recalled: “Zhenya Petrov with a truly boyish passion got carried away with unusual French cuisine, encouraging Ilf and me to taste all kinds of oysters with a spicy sauce, snails fried in a pan, sea shell soup, sea urchins and other wonders. Especially successful was the Marseilles "bouillabes" recommended by Zhenya - a spicy soup like a villager, thickly flavored with pieces of various exotic molluscs, not excluding the tentacles of small octopuses. " Petrov himself noted this in his notebook: “In the evening - lunch in a Spanish restaurant. He ate reptiles. Wow. Decent bastards. In Paris, food is taken very seriously. Food is, of course, ahead of everything else. " The co-authors quickly settled in Paris and even wrote a script for a French film studio about a man who won a million francs, but this script did not become a film. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote that no matter how hard Ilf and Petrov tried, the script did not testify to an excellent knowledge of French life and the film was never shot.

In Warsaw, they were shown the film "Twelve Chairs" - a joint work of Polish and Czech filmmakers. During the entire session, laughter did not stop in the hall, and after the film was over, the co-authors were called on the stage many times. The audience gave a standing ovation. In a notebook where Evgeny Petrov wrote down his impressions of a foreign trip, the following lines appeared: “As soon as you get abroad, time starts to run terribly fast. It is already impossible to hold him. Impressions that have acquired volume, color and smell jump with record speed. They float away never to return. " The result of a long trip abroad was the essays "The Beginning of the Campaign", "A Day in Athens", "The Black Sea Language" and "Five Languages".

Contemporaries claimed that Yevgeny Petrov was cheerful, active and charming. He very easily got along with all sorts of people. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote: “He was an extremely kind person; he wanted people to live better, he noticed everything that could make their life easier or beautify. He was, it seems, the most optimistic person I have met in my life: he really wanted everything to be better than it really was. He spoke of one notorious scoundrel: “Yes, maybe it’s not so? You never know what they say ... ".

Viktor Ardov wrote that in Petrov the interlocutor, first of all, saw a harmonious, gifted person with an extraordinary human charm. “He evoked a smile of sympathy at the first glance at his kind, affectionate face ... Everything about Yevgeny Petrovich seemed sweet - even the manner of cautiously turning his right ear towards the speaker (he did not hear well in his left ear) ... And Petrov was polite and amiable , as they say, with all their being. This is from love for people, from the desire to do good. "

He was a very observant and very caring person. G. Ryklin, who worked with Ilf and Petrov in Pravda and Krokodil, recalled the story told to him by Yevgeny Petrov: “Once I was sitting in the opera, in a box above the orchestra. I sit and, out of habit, carefully observe what is happening under me, in the orchestra pit. And now I see - a drummer, a kind of brave man in big glasses, playing checkers with a free orchestra player. He plays - well, let him, I think, play. But then the moment comes when, as I know, in a minute or two, you definitely need to hit the cymbals. I remember exactly that this is where cymbals are supposed to clink. And he was carried away by checkers. A minute passes. I break out in a cold sweat. He will certainly miss the moment, he will definitely miss because of these stupid checkers, damn them! I'm losing my temper. I jump up from my seat. I was about to shout to the drummer to ... But at that moment he calmly rises from his seat, hits the cymbals twice and sits down at the checkers again. Funny story, isn't it? But the funny thing is that this story cost me a lot of health ... ".

Actor Igor Ilyinsky wrote: “Evgeny Petrovich is a lively and active person - as it seemed to me, he was a businesslike and representative beginning of the“ Ilf and Petrov ”community. A business conversation with Yevgeny Petrovich began, concerning the organizational aspect of our business ... It seemed that Petrov had seized the creative initiative, excelled in invention, fantasized more boldly, proposing more and more new options. Ilf was not so active. But either in further meetings, or at the end of the first one, I realized that the writers are one inseparable whole. Ilf invariably directed Petrov's irrepressible fantasy in the right direction, cutting off everything secondary and less important, and the extraordinary subtlety that he brought into their work, and those little things that he added from himself, illuminated and enriched the conceived scene with extraordinary light. Petrov, for his part, unconditionally accepted Ilf's magnificent amendments and additions, and he himself was inspired by these findings in new impulses of his imagination. "

Their many years of co-authorship have made them close friends. Viktor Ardov recalled that Ilf, who did not like to speak in public himself, was very worried when Evgeny Petrov had to do it: “It always happened to him when Petrov read their common works. We even joked: Petrov is reading the manuscript, and Ilf is drinking water on the podium ... as if it’s with him, and not with Petrov, the throat is dry from reading ”. In the 1920s and 1930s, they were even often mentioned in the singular. One could often hear the phrase: "The writer Ilf-Petrov wrote ..." The co-authors themselves willingly supported jokes on this topic. Ilf even joked in his notebook: "Ilf and Petrov are tormented by doubts: no matter how they are put on allowance as one person." Later, Evgeny Petrov wrote that he and Ilf even had a “conversation that it would be nice to die together during some catastrophe. At least the survivor would not have to suffer. "

Ilf and Petrov meet Ilya Ehrenburg at the Belorussky railway station, who has returned from Paris. June 17, 1934.

In September 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were sent by the Pravda newspaper to the United States of America. For three and a half months, two writers, accompanied by two Americans, in a small gray car without heating (and it was winter) drove sixteen thousand kilometers along the route they had worked out. It was a very interesting, eventful, but difficult journey. Twenty-five states, hundreds of cities, deserts and prairies, the Rocky Mountains were left behind - they crossed the country twice and began work on a new book. Petrov missed his family very much and wrote to his wife in Moscow: “I want to go home, to Moscow. It's cold there, snow, wife, son, nice guests come, they call from the editorial office. There I read newspapers every day, drank good tea, ate caviar and salmon. And the cutlets! Ordinary chopped cutlets! You can go crazy! Or, for example, cabbage soup with sour cream, or beef stroganoffs. Well, I was dreaming! .. "

In America, the co-authors worked on the script for the satirical comedy based on The Twelve Chairs, which was to be filmed in Hollywood. They were given ten days to work. They wrote the libretto - twenty-two typewritten pages. According to Petrov, they worked “like animals” to finish earlier, because Hollywood “was completely and irrevocably disgusted with it. At first glance, it is incomprehensible: how it can suddenly become disgusting for a clean city with one of the most stable climates on the globe. It was not clear to me. And now I understand. Everything here is somehow lifeless, like a decoration ... I'm waiting, I can't wait to leave. " And again he wrote to his wife in Moscow: “No, no, it's time to go home! My curiosity dwindled, my nerves dull. I am so full of impressions that I am afraid to sneeze - lest something pop out. And around a lot of interesting things. ... We already know so much about America that a traveler cannot learn more. Home! Home!".

Ilya Ilf, Boris Levin and Evgeny Petrov.

The first version of One-Story America was published in Pravda - seven travel essays. Then Ogonyok published a series of photographs by Ilya Ilf with detailed signatures of the authors - eleven photo essays. One-Story America was the first book in ten years that the co-authors decided to write separately. Ilf was seriously ill - a long journey caused an exacerbation of tuberculosis, at that time they lived far from each other, so it was not always convenient to write together. Ilf and Petrov never told who and what chapters of "One-Story America" ​​were written. Yevgeny Petrov wrote that one "extremely intelligent, sharp and knowledgeable critic" analyzed "One-Story America" ​​in the firm belief that he could easily determine who wrote which chapter, but could not do it. “Obviously, the style that Ilf and I developed was an expression of the spiritual and physical characteristics of both of us. Obviously, when Ilf wrote separately from me or I separately from Ilf, we expressed not only each of ourselves, but both together. " Despite the success of its publications in Pravda and Ogonyok, the publication of One-Storied America as a separate book was coldly received by critics. The review in the Izvestia newspaper was called “Sprawling Skyscrapers” and contained political reproaches.

Having become world famous writers, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov continued to work in newspapers and magazines. G. Ryklin recalled: “They worked hard. They loved to work. They passionately loved their genre, but at the same time they did not shy away from any rough work in the magazine. They were already respected and readable writers, but if it was necessary to edit the reader's letter, they willingly did it. Write a ten-line note? Please! A playful two-line dialogue? With pleasure! Funny caption under the caricature? Let's come here! They never played in the venerable. "

Evgeny Petrov wrote: “Almost nothing was written about Ilf and I during our ten-year work (the first five years - not a single line). We were received by the reader, so to speak, directly ... It was of great benefit to us, although it did take a few bitter minutes. We always relied only on our own strength and knew well that the reader would not do us any favors, that we need to write in full force, we need to work on every word, we need to avoid cliches, we need to wake up every morning with the thought that you have not done anything, that there is Flaubert and Tolstoy, Gogol and Dickens. The most important thing is to remember about the unusually high level of world literature and not make allowances for oneself for youth, for poor education, for “fame” and for the low literary taste of most critics ”.

One of the best films by Grigory Alexandrov, the comedy film "Circus", was released without the names of the scriptwriters in the credits. But this does not mean that they did not exist at all. The film was based on a script by Ilya Ilf, Yevgeny Petrov and Valentin Kataev, based on the play Under the Circus Dome. The script was accepted and work on the film began. Over time, the co-authors began to notice that the director was making amendments with which they could not agree. The film from a funny lyrical comedy movie with funny reprises, musical numbers and circus tricks gradually began to turn into a pompous, personal melodrama. Later Evgeny Petrov wrote: “It was painful. Is it worth joking, writing funny things. It is very difficult, but it is met with hostility. "

In 1937, the health of a patient with tuberculosis Ilf was greatly shaken, and when Ilf was gone, Yevgeny Petrov uttered the phrase: "I am attending my own funeral." It really was not just the death of a co-author - the writer Ilf and Petrov died. Soon Petrov told Ilya Ehrenburg: "I have to start all over again."

Evgeny Petrov was appointed executive editor of the Ogonyok magazine. At that time it was not a very popular publication, but when Evgeny Petrov took up it, the situation changed dramatically. Viktor Ardov recalled: “It turned out that in Moscow there are enough writers, journalists, artists, photographers to fill up more than one weekly with good material. It was only necessary to be able to attract these people and not to look at any manuscript as an insidious trick for the editor ... Petrov redrawn the entire look of Ogonyok in his own way. He started new, interesting departments, beautiful fonts, witty headings, original layout. "Ogonyok" began to enjoy success, they chased after him, tried not to miss the next issue. Evgeny Petrovich's activity as editor of Ogonyok was genuine creativity. He put into the magazine all his invention, erudition, experience and taste of a mature, talented writer. "

Petrov did a lot to perpetuate the memory of his friend Ilya Ilf. In 1939 he published his "Notebooks", and later conceived to write a novel called "My friend Ilf" or "My friend Ilya". But he didn't have time. Only a few sketches and detailed versions of the plan have survived. Lev Slavin recalled: “And suddenly, five years later, I saw that Ilf was not all dead. Petrov, who, in my opinion, had never been comforted after Ilf's death, somehow kept and carried Ilf in himself. And this carefully preserved Ilf sometimes suddenly sounded from Petrov with his “Ilf” words and even intonations, which at the same time were the words and intonations of Petrov. This merger was amazing. "

Evgeny Petrov has always been very attentive to novice writers. The author of the story about the civil war in Ukraine "The Old Fortress" Vladimir Belyaev recalled that when only the first part of the book was published, he began to think about its continuation. Several chapters were written, but the director of the publishing house informed him that the publication of the first part was a mistake. Full of despair, the author wrote a letter to Evgeny Petrov, with whom he was unfamiliar, and asked for advice. He soon received an answer. Evgeny Petrov wrote: “It seems to me that you attach too much importance to such things as the silence of criticism or an unpleasant conversation with the director of the publishing house (obviously not a very smart person). The silence of criticism is a very unpleasant thing, striking at pride. But remember one thing - no cursing criticism could, cannot and will never be able to destroy a truly talented work; no praise critics could, cannot and will never be able to preserve a mediocre work in literature ... Any talented (this is a prerequisite) book will find a reader and glorify the author. At the same time, you can fill a hundred newspaper pages with enthusiastic reviews about a bad book, and the reader will not even remember the name of its author. "

Over time, Evgeny Petrov was still able to write alone, but he began to work in areas other than those in which he was engaged with Ilf. He wrote a pamphlet play "The Island of Peace", critical articles and essays, traveled to the Far East and published a series of essays in the newspaper Pravda based on the materials of the trip. In collaboration with G. Moonblit, he independently wrote several screenplays. Some of them were filmed - "A Musical Story" and "Anton Ivanovich is Angry." He began writing a novel, A Journey to the Land of Communism, in which he described the USSR in 1963. His fantasy was limitless. Viktor Ardov recalled: “When Yevgeny Petrovich began to fantasize out loud, composing something, it gave me pure pleasure: it was so easy, clear, cheerful and colic funny he invented right there, in front of your eyes ... there was a grip! What a sense of the genre! What Petrov was suggesting for a comedy smelled like a ramp; his feuilleton idea was fervent and clear from the journalist point of view at the moment of his birth; the plot twist in the story is original. How he was able to pick up on the fly the embryo of someone else's thought, sometimes indistinctly timidly proposed ... when discussing the plot of his future play, script or story, instantly identify all the positive and negative possibilities of this plan, somehow immediately an unspoken thought was revealed to its very core ... It seemed to you that the solution had been found, but Petrov was still fantasizing - with incredible extravagance that only real talent can afford. He discards everything that he has already invented, and composes more and more, looking for the most difficult solution - when everything is invented exactly within the boundaries of the genre, but the very solution is fresh, unexpected and independent. "

When the war began, Yevgeny Petrov became a war correspondent in the Soviet Information Bureau, wrote for the Soviet and foreign press, and often spent a long time at the front. Once he returned from near Maloyaroslavets, shell-shocked by a blast wave. He hid his condition, although he could even talk with difficulty. But as soon as it became a little easier, he immediately began to write about the battles for Maloyaroslavets. Konstantin Simonov, who happened to be with Petrov on one of the longest front-line trips to the Northern Front, recalled that they had to cover long distances on foot. On the climbs, Petrov gasped - a not very healthy heart made itself felt. The younger Simonov offered to carry his bag, but Petrov flatly refused and was glad when they reached the headquarters: “That's all right, and I got there and didn't lag behind. And it is very correct. And then everyone got used to the West by cars and cars. And here he is a pawn, but still it comes out "- in these words one could feel the pleasure that neither fifteen years of difference, nor a sick heart, nor the absence of this kind of training could prevent him from walking and climbing on a par with the young." In dangerous situations, when Petrov was advised to take cover, he replied: “Why were we going? We went for this ”.

Simonov recalled the incident with the front-line photojournalist. Petrov worried that he only filmed war and did not film life. The photojournalist explained this by the fact that the editors were reluctant to print everyday pictures from the war. Petrov got excited: “So you will prove that this is correct — this is your duty. And if they don't print it in the newspapers, I will print a page in my "Ogonyok" - no, I will print a whole spread of photographs about military life. Let me make them. I know why you don't want to film everyday life. You are afraid that if you bring a lot of everyday pictures, they will say that you were sitting in the rear. And you shouldn't care what they say about you, you should do your own thing. I'll come and write specifically about everyday life, and let them think what they want - I saw in the rear or not in the rear. And I will write, since I think it is correct. "

Igor Ilyinsky recalled: “In his front-line correspondence, I was amazed by the wonderful, clever lines that in this war it is not Hitler’s stupid and precise plan of war that wins and will win, but a plan and order, drawn up taking into account the chaos and surprises of disorder in military events. I heard here developed and generalized Tolstoy's thoughts about the Battle of Austerlitz and the absurdity of accurate accounting of events on the battlefield ... And it became clear to me that even without Ilf, Petrov remains a great and intelligent writer who will delight us with his work for a long time to come. "

Many famous composers, writers, literary critics, translators, filmmakers and their families were evacuated to Tashkent. Petrov's family was also in Tashkent, and he wrote to his wife: “I want you to be safe ... I know it's difficult for you so far. But get used to the idea that you have now become independent and must learn to fight for the lives of your children and your own. Understand that I am at the front all the time ... I cannot become a deserter ... for the reason that they went with their families, but I did not go !! My heart breaks to pieces when I think about you, Petenka or poor sick Ilyushenka. Since I received your first telegram, my already difficult life has turned into hell. What should I do? How can I help you? ... Endure suffering steadfastly ... It is better to live badly than to have a villainous husband. "

In 1942, having heard about the amazing exploits of the defenders of Sevastopol, Yevgeny Petrov was eager to immediately fly to Krasnodar and further make his way to besieged Sevastopol. His notebooks, brought from the Northern Front, were full of unrealized plans. But the idea to write about the defenders of Sevastopol completely captured him. He was discouraged - but to no avail. At all costs, he tried to see with his own eyes the breakthrough of the blockade. And when on June 26, 1942, the destroyer "Tashkent" left Novorossiysk with reinforcements, loaded to the limit with ammunition and food for the defenders of Sevastopol, Petrov was on board. Each breakthrough of "Tashkent" into besieged Sevastopol meant saving hundreds of lives of civilians, whom it took to the "mainland". For many hours Petrov had the opportunity to observe the terrible and majestic picture of the general assault on the besieged fortress. He postponed the duties of a correspondent for a while, becoming a volunteer orderly. Petrov was with the wounded all the time, and from them he learned more about Sevastopol than he could have seen himself.

The ship took on board more than two thousand people and 86 surviving fragments of the Roubaud panorama "Defense of Sevastopol" and left Sevastopol at night on June 27, 1942, heading for Novorossiysk. The return journey of the "Tashkent" took place under the continuous bombardment of several German squadrons. A total of 336 bombs were dropped on the ship. "Tashkent" moved forward, avoiding direct hits. Explosions very close to the ship's hull tore several seams, made holes, damaged the foundations of boilers and machines. Submerged into the water to the limit, the half-submerged destroyer advanced at a slow speed. The wounded and evacuees were transferred to the torpedo boats that came out to meet them. Petrov was offered to move from the damaged destroyer, but he flatly refused. Admiral IS Isakov recalled: “Everyone who saw Petrov in the last hours can testify that he was in no hurry to go to Moscow, just as he was in no hurry to use for correspondence the mass of observations and impressions that he had accumulated since going out to sea. Moreover. When, returning to Krasnodar, he learned that the front command was leaving for Novorossiysk to thank the crew of the "Tashkent", Evgeny Petrovich asked to take him with him. The Tashkent people greeted him as an old fighting friend, and for that, the right was worth losing two days. "

When on July 2, 1942, Yevgeny Petrov was returning by plane to Moscow, the pilot, avoiding the bombing, lowered his flight altitude and crashed into a mound. Of the several people on board, only Evgeny Petrov died. He was only 38 years old.

Evgeny Petrov was buried in the Rostov region in the village of Mankovo-Kalitvenskaya.

In 1969, a documentary film "Ilf and Petrov" was shot, the voice-over text of which was read by Vladimir Vysotsky.

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The text was prepared by Elena Pobegailo

Used materials:

Ilf I., Petrov E. Twelve chairs. The first complete version of the novel with comm. M. Odesskiy and D. Feldman
Valentin Kataev "Broken Life, or the Magic Horn of Oberon"
Valentin Kataev "My Diamond Crown"
P.V. Kataev "The doctor told Madeira to drink"
Boris Vladimirsky "A Wreath of Plots"
A.I. Ilf. "The magazine" Chudak "and its eccentrics"
LM Yanovskaya Why do you write funny? About I. Ilf and E. Petrov, their lives and their humor.
Materials of the site www.sovsekretno.ru
Materials of the site www.kp.ua
Site materials www.1001.ru
Materials of the site www.yug.odessa.ua
Materials of the site www.tlt.poetree.ru
Materials of the site www.myslitel.org.ua
Materials of the site www.ruthenia.ru
Site materials www.litmir.net
Materials of the site www.sociodinamika.com
Materials of the site www.segodnya.ua
Materials of the site www.odessitka.net

There are few people in Russia who have not read, not watched, or at least have not heard about such cult works of our literature as "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf", about people with the names Ilf and Petrov. They are usually called always together, and this is quite natural: they have worked shoulder to shoulder for many years. Nevertheless, and in themselves at the same time remained completely integral units. For example, the writer Yevgeny Petrov - what is he like?

Childhood

Evgeny Petrovich Kataev (this is how the real name of the writer sounds) was born on December 13, 1902. His hometown was Odessa. In addition to Eugene, in the family of the teacher Pyotr Vasilyevich and the pianist Evgenia Ivanovna, a six-year-old child was already growing up - the eldest son Valentin (the same Valentin Kataev, who in the future will become the most famous writer - few know about the fact that he and Petrov are brothers). Looking far ahead, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of the pseudonym for the youngest of the brothers: by the time Eugene began to break through in literary circles, he had already begun to conquer this Olympus, and, judging that there are too many Kataevs in literature, the younger brother "lost" to the older real surname, taking for himself a fictitious Petrov - by patronymic (after all, they were Petrovichi).

Just three months after the birth of Eugene, the boys' mother died of illness, and the father was left completely alone with two children. However, the sister of his deceased wife Elizabeth immediately rushed to his aid - abandoning all her affairs, abandoning her own personal life, she devoted all of herself to caring for her nephews. The father of the future writers never married again. Both he and his aunt strove to raise the boys to be educated people, there was a rich library in the house, and Pyotr Vasilyevich never skimped on buying new books. Perhaps that is why the elder decided from a young age that he would write - unlike the younger, who did not want to become a writer for anything, but was forced to follow his brother around all editions - only Valentin was shy and afraid to walk. From the age of thirteen, Valentin’s stories began to be published, and Eugene’s even essays at school were not always successful and barely. He, of course, also loved to read - but not classics, but detective stories and adventures. He adored Sherlock Holmes and dreamed of becoming a great detective himself.

Youth

After the revolution in Odessa, as, indeed, in other cities, hard times came. There were waves of arrests, as the former Tsarist officer was detained and Valentin Kataev. Together with him, Yevgeny went to jail - because he is the closest relative. The arrest did not last long, soon both brothers were released, but, deciding not to spoil Yevgeny's reputation, both of them were silent all their lives that not only the elder, but also the younger of them had been in prison.

Since Yevgeny Petrov dreamed of becoming a detective, he went to work in the criminal investigation department and, according to the documents, was one of the best operatives. Yevgeny Petrov's work in the criminal investigation department began in 1921, and in the same year the brothers' father died - unfortunately, then both of them were not in Odessa, they did not have time to say goodbye to their father. Soon after that, Valentin left his hometown - first he went to Kharkov, then to Moscow, where he waited for his younger brother. He joined the elder two years later. This is how Moscow appeared in the biography of Evgeny Petrov.

The beginning of the way

Arriving in the capital, Eugene began to live with his brother, but, not wanting to be "a burden" to him, he hastily began to look for work. With recommendations from the Odessa Criminal Investigation Department, he went to the Moscow police - but there were no places there, and all they could offer the young man was the post of warden in Butyrka prison. Eugene was going to accept this invitation, but Valentine, having learned about him, prevented such a decision. He wanted his brother to become a journalist. At Valentine's request, Eugene wrote a small feuilleton, which was immediately published in one of the newspapers and the young author was given a fee - much more than a month's earnings in prison. After that, Eugene stopped opposing his brother.

His journalistic career began with "Red Pepper", where he worked as an executive secretary. At the same time, he did not disdain part-time jobs - he ran to various editions, bringing all new feuilletons: fortunately, he had a rich life experience, after work he was in the criminal investigation department. It was during these years that he took his pseudonym for himself. Whatever Petrov did! In addition to feuilletons, he wrote satirical notes, invented cartoons, wrote poetry - in general, he did not give up any genres, which allowed him to start making good money and move out from his brother to a separate room.

Acquaintance with Ilya Ilf

Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov both grew up in Odessa, but it so happened that their paths crossed only in Moscow. At the same time, Ilf, five years older, arrived in the capital at the same time as Petrov was a whim of fate. Their acquaintance happened in the editorial office of the newspaper "Gudok" in 1926 - Petrov then came to work there, and Ilf was already working there. The writers got closer a year later, when they were sent on a joint business trip to the Caucasus and Crimea. After spending a certain amount of time together, they discovered a lot in common and, perhaps, it was then that they decided to write together.

And soon an excuse turned up, and it was not someone who threw it up, but Yevgeny's brother Valentin. He invited his friends to work for him so-called gave the theme of the work on the condition that when it was ready, he would slightly correct it, and there should be three names on the cover: Kataev, Petrov, Ilf. The name Valentine already had weight in literary circles and was supposed to help the future book quickly find its reader. The friends agreed. And the theme proposed by Valentin sounded like this: "There are hidden money in the chairs that need to be found."

"Golden Calf" and "Twelve Chairs"

Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov began to work on the manuscript "On Chairs" in the early autumn of 1927. Valentin then left the capital, and on his return a month later he saw the already finished first part of the novel. After reading it, Kataev did not hesitate to abandon the "laurel wreaths" and his surname on the cover of the future book, giving it to his brother and his friend - he only asked to dedicate this masterpiece to him and buy a gift from the first fee. By January, the work was completed, and almost immediately began its publication - until July, the novel was published in the magazine "Thirty Days".

And the friends have already conceived a sequel - this is evidenced by the notes in the notebooks of both. For a year they nurtured the idea, edited, refined, and in 1929 they began to implement it. Two years later, the continuation of the story about Ostap Bender called "The Golden Calf" was completed. It also began to be published by the magazine Thirty Days, but for political reasons the publication was interrupted, and a separate book could be published only three years later.

"The Twelve Chairs" immediately won the love of readers, and not only of them - the novel began to be translated into other languages. However, it was not without a "fly in the ointment" - firstly, the work of Ilf and Petrov was strongly "cut off" by censorship, and secondly, reviews appeared calling their debut brainchild a "toy" that does not correspond to reality. Of course, this could not but upset the writers, but they could cope with their feelings.

The Golden Calf had a harder time. The character of Ostap Bender was extremely disliked by the ruling elite, which is why they stopped printing the novel, and did not agree to publish it as a separate edition. Reviewers also continued to "throw eggs" the creative union of two friends, believing that their work will soon sink into oblivion. Fortunately, this did not happen, and after Maxim Gorky stood up for Ilf and Petrov, the Golden Calf finally saw the light not only abroad.

Personal life

The wife of Evgeny Petrov's name was Valentina, she was eight years younger than him. They got married when the girl was barely nineteen. The marriage was happy, two sons were born in it - Peter (in honor of his father) and Ilya (in honor of a friend). According to the recollections of the writer's granddaughter, her grandmother, until her death (in 1991), continued to love her husband and never took off the ring he had donated from her finger.

The eldest son of Evgeny and Valentina became a cameraman, shot many famous Soviet films. The youngest, Ilya, worked as a composer, wrote music for several films and TV series.

Ilf and Petrov

After working on The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov did not run away. Their tandem lasted for many years - until Ilf's death. The result of their labors was numerous feuilletons and stories, stories and screenplays, essays, short stories, vaudeville, and even a "double biography". They traveled a lot together, bringing unique impressions from these trips, which were subsequently processed and published in the form of a literary work.

Having become close friends, they even wanted to die together - then, in their own words, the other "would not have to suffer." It did not work out - Ilf left first, five years earlier than his friend. He suffered from tuberculosis, which worsened in 1937. Soon he was gone, just as the tandem Ilf and Petrov was gone.

"One-story America"

A year before the death of Ilya Ilf, friends visited America - they were sent there as correspondents of the Pravda newspaper. In more than three months, they visited more than twenty different states, met many interesting people, including the writer Ernest Hemingway, and brought a tremendous baggage of impressions. All of them are reflected in the book of essays "One-Story America". This work was the first - and the only one that the friends wrote separately (due to Ilf's illness): they drew up a plan in advance, distributed the parts among themselves and began to create. Despite this type of work, even those who knew friends closely could not subsequently determine what was written by Ilya and what was written by Eugene. By the way, the essays were accompanied by photographs taken by Ilf - he was very fond of this kind of art.

Evgeny Petrov after Ilya Ilf

After the death of a friend, the work of Evgeny Petrov abruptly failed. For some time he did not write, because it was difficult to start all over again - and already alone. But gradually he returned to work. The writer Yevgeny Petrov became the executive editor of the Ogonyok magazine, wrote several plays and essays. But he was not used to working alone, and therefore began to cooperate with Georgy Moonblit. Together they created several screenplays.

In addition, Evgeny Petrov did not forget about his untimely deceased friend. He organized the publication of his "Notebooks", was going to write a novel about Ilf - but did not have time. Their mutual acquaintances recalled much later that Ilf's features were preserved in Petrov until his death.

With the outbreak of the war, having sent his family to evacuation, Yevgeny Petrov began to work as a war correspondent along with his older brother. He wrote for the press of both our country and foreign ones, often flew to the front line, even survived a shell shock.

Doom

The exact circumstances of the tragic death of E. Petrov are still unknown. In 1942, the writer Yevgeny Petrov was sent on another business trip - to Sevastopol. In addition to the Crimean city, he also visited Novorossiysk and Krasnodar, from the latter he flew to Moscow. According to some eyewitnesses who were on board the same plane, Evgeny, in violation of the instructions, went into the cockpit of the pilots on some issue. Perhaps he asked to increase the speed - he was in a hurry to get to the capital. The pilot was distracted by the conversation and did not have time to notice the hill that suddenly appeared in front of him. Despite the fact that the height from which the plane fell was small, about twenty meters, Petrov was killed, the only one of all.

There is another version of the tragedy, which, incidentally, was supported by the writer's brother Valentin - supposedly the plane was pursued by German "Messerschmitts", and the plane crashed while escaping the pursuit. The writer was buried in the Rostov region.

The writer Yevgeny Petrov lived a short, but very bright and eventful life. He left behind a rich legacy, enormous creativity. He did not have much time, but he did enough too. So, his life was not lived in vain.