There’s an old cliché: The more things change, the more they stay the same. As with all clichés, they reflect a grain of truth. And nothing could be clearer to me after reading Ilf and Petrov’s American Roadtrip. Our country’s changes since 1935 seem to be primarily cosmetic.
Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov were popular Soviet satirists who came to America to report back to the people of the former Union about our culture. Soviet interest in American business and culture was very strong in this pre-World War II period, before the onset of Stalin’s Great Terror and the Cold War. Ilf and Petrov rented a car in New York and drove across the United States to California. Along the way, they documented their trip with words and photographs.
Much of the book is a fond, amusing description of our country and its people. The two authors belong to that typical Russian strain of satire found in many modern novels, such as in the works of Mikhail Bulgakov and my personal favorite, Vladimir Voinovich’s The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Chonkin.
The travelogue shows an America that is not much changed from today. I was struck by the existence of car culture even at a time when the automobile was so new to the world. Billboards advertising gasoline and oil spotted the highways. Each town and city had a commercial downtown area, to which shoppers drove from their suburban homes. The authors also comment on conformity of the towns, each with a Main Street and similar drugstores and garages. Does this sound familiar???
The two Soviet writers are particularly critical of American advertising and film culture. Their descriptions of Hollywood and its creations show a culture obsessed with money-making over art. The two authors were also very critical in their observations of the treatment of Blacks and Native Americans. They also observed class differences among the people of the U.S., an aspect of our culture that perhaps even today we try to deny.
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Nice review--sounds like a fascinating book.