Ilif and Petrov's American Road Trip!

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

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

In other words, not much has changed! Both writers died shortly after the book was published: Ilf actually died of tuberculosis he contracted in America. Their famous travelogue is now available from Princeton Architectural Press for the first time. For the literary-leaning Borat enthusiast.

Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers