The wild success that befell Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov after the publication of The Twelve Chairs (1928) prompted the co-authors to 'resurrect' their hero, the cheerful and charming con man Ostap Bender, and to begin writing the novel The Golden Calf (1931). This time, the 'great schemer' devises an operation to extort money from the underground millionaire Koreiko. The sparkling humor, unexpected plot twists, aphoristic style, and other virtues of the dilogy leave no one indifferent. The Ostap Bender novels are among the golden treasures of Russian literature.