A Mysterious Nature (Zagadochnaya Natura)

For readers, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov (Katayev) are, first and foremost, the immortal and unsinkable Ostap Bender, the hero of two great works of Soviet literature, about which even the anti-Soviet Vladimir Nabokov said, 'This is good' (though not in those words). Yes, 'The Twelve Chairs' and 'The Golden Calf,' their vast duology, are undoubtedly iconic works, read, reread, parsed into hundreds of quotes, and adapted into films, and so on and so forth. But they began with feuilletons, short stories, and short stories, which were first published in newspapers (for example, in the famous railway press organ 'Gudok,' where everyone from Bulgakov, Olesha, Zoshchenko, Paustovsky, Katayev, and other well-known figures of our well-known literature were published), then in slim collections of the magazines 'Ogonyok' or 'Smekhach,' and then in serious publications and even collected works. The book we present to you contains, albeit brief, quite weighty prose from classic writers—both joint and individual (Ilf separately, Petrov separately). All this represents the golden treasure of Russian literature.