Yevgeny Petrov

Evgeny Petrovich Petrov (real surname Kataev) was a Russian Soviet writer, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, and war correspondent. He was a coauthor of Ilya Ilf and, together with him, wrote the novels The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, the book Little Golden America, as well as a number of screenplays, novellas, essays, and vaudevilles.

He was born in Odessa into a teacher’s family. In 1920 he graduated from a classical gymnasium and became a correspondent for the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency.

After that, for three years he served as an inspector in the criminal investigation department (in Ilf and Petrov’s autobiography (1929), this period of his life is described as follows: “His first literary work was the report on the inspection of the body of an unknown man”).

In 1923 Petrov came to Moscow, where he became a contributor to the magazine Red Pepper, and in 1926 he joined the newspaper Gudok.

In 1927 the creative partnership of Evgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf began with their joint work on the novel The Twelve Chairs (Ilf also worked for Gudok).

Evgeny Petrov contributed much to the Ilf-Petrov partnership. He was a wonderful friend and a calm coauthor. He helped Ilf’s talent unfold to the fullest, while at the same time refining his own style.

The writers’ creative collaboration was interrupted by Ilf’s death in Moscow on April 13, 1937. Petrov made great efforts to publish Ilf’s notebooks and conceived a major work, My Friend Ilf. Petrov was devastated by Ilf’s death; after that event, life was never the same again. Their collaboration contained their soul.

During the Great Patriotic War, Petrov became a frontline correspondent. He died on July 2, 1942 — the plane on which he was returning to Moscow from Sevastopol was shot down by a German fighter over the Rostov Oblast. A monument has been erected at the crash site.