Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov as Coauthors of Ilf & Petrov Novels

The purpose of the article is to identify the “author’s prints” of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov in the novels “Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev” (“The twelve chairs”) and “Zolotoy telenok” (“Golden calf”) through highlighting the both writers’ contribution to the fusion of inspiration and jokes. A detailed comparison of Petrov’s “pre-Ilf” and Ilf’s “pre-Petrov” works with their co-written texts demonstrates that the co-authors definitely used accumulated literary material in creating the novels: the “common cauldron” contained their previous plots and images. The article is based on a textual analysis of Ilf’s and Petrov’s stories and feuilletons published in the Moscow press before they started writing together, as well as the texts written in the process of creating the dilogy. In previous research on the Ilf and Petrov’s work, the links between their early texts and the co-written dilogy were either unsystematically presented, or tried to track the path of the “literary evolution” of Ilf and Pertov, who had been gradually honing their idiostyle and writing technique. It was often done without following rigid structure and not representing proper arguments. The article offers a classification of identified borrowings and references from Ilf and Petrov’s early texts. It contains systematized examples of various types and scales – from a single detail to a large fragment of the narrative. The catalog of “auto-references” confirms the regular character of borrowings: during the creation of “Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev” (“The twelve chairs”) and “Zolotoy telenok” (“Golden calf”), coauthors often used “previously formulated” phrase and motifs from works, which had been written separately. However, passages from feuilletons, as a rule, were transferred by writers to new novels not mechanically: in the novels “old” images were selected and developed by both authors.