My education vis-à-vis Russian writers came from the wonderful head writer of Your Show of Shows, Mel Tolkin. His family emigrated from Russia to Canada when he was young, and being a born intellectual, he was well steeped in his Russian literature. Which he generously passed on to me. He said to me, “You’re an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.”
He gave me a copy of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.
Dead Souls was a revelation.
Gogol had two amazing sides to him. One was human, simple, and heartfelt. He had tremendous understanding of the human condition. And the other side was absolute madness. Just madness! Insanity. He would write about a nose that could speak. Gogol was not bound by the rules of reality, and yet he understood how the heart beats, why it beats. What death is. What love is. It’s like he stuck a pen in his heart, and it didn’t even go through his mind on its way to the page. He was my favorite.
Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were two Russians who were best known for writing three books together: The Twelve Chairs （1928, known in a British translation as Diamonds to Sit On）; The Little Golden Calf （1931）， a tale of the tribulations of a Soviet millionaire who is afraid to spend any money lest he be discovered by the police; and One-Storied America （1936, known in a British translation as Little Golden America）， an account of the two writers’ adventures in the land of Wall Street, the Empire State Building, cars, and aspiring capitalists.
The Twelve Chairs, their first glorious novel, was given to me by Julie Green, a charter member of our Chinese Gourmet Society. He said, “Mel, this is a wonderful adventure. Really. It might even make a good movie.”
As far as I was concerned, he was dead on—I was sure it would make a good movie. What a story! The plot of The Twelve Chairs really appealed to me.
It takes place in Russia soon after the revolution. In czarist Russia, there was a rigid class system. At the top were the aristocrats, the upper class—royalty, nobility, and the clergy. Following that came the middle class of professionals, merchants, and bureaucrats. Then came the working class—factory workers, soldiers, sailors, etc. And last, at the bottom were the peasants or the serfs. After the revolution, the aristocrats, royalty, and the peerage had to give up their big fine houses and their silverware and all the other trappings of their wealth. In one of those grand houses lived Vorobyaninov. There was a dining room, with beautiful chairs from London covered in gold cloth brocade. Vorobyaninov is flattened out. He’s no longer an aristocrat. He’s no longer a count. He’s just a plain clerical worker—very sad.
On her deathbed, his mother-in-law shares a secret: She hid her diamonds in one of the family’s chairs that subsequently was appropriated by the Soviet authorities.
“How could you do such a thing? Why didn’t you give them to me?” he asks.
“Why should I have given them to you when you had already squandered away half my daughter’s estate with your parties and your horses!” she replies.
Vorobyaninov explodes. He shouts at her, “Well, why didn’t you take them out? Why did you leave them there?”
“I didn’t have time,” she says. “You remember how quickly we had to flee? They were left in the chair.”
Vorobyaninov moans, “Fifty thousand rubles’ worth of jewelry stuffed in a chair! Heaven knows who may sit on that chair. If it’s still a chair, it may be firewood by now!”
She says, “I know I did wrong. Please forgive me!”
Vorobyaninov relents and hugs her face in forgiveness, completely forgetting that he still has his clerk’s rubber stamp in his hand. When he removes his hands, we see the words “Cancelled—August 17, 1927” stamped on her cheek.
From there the plot of The Twelve Chairs is very straightforward. Vorobyaninov is joined by a young crook named Ostap Bender with whom he forms a partnership, and together they proceed to search for these chairs. The partners have a competitor in a Russian Orthodox priest who has also learned of the secret of the diamonds in a chair from the confession of his dying parishioner, Vorobyaninov’s mother-in-law. The competing treasure hunters travel throughout Russia desperately looking for the chairs, which enables the authors to show us glimpses of little towns, and big cities like Moscow, and also to have the three central characters meet a wide variety of people: Soviet bureaucrats, newspapermen, survivors of the pre-revolutionary propertied classes, provincials, and Muscovites.
Could I write this movie? I said yes. It’s all about greed or love. My kind of movie.