The Little Golden Calf [Zolotoy telyonok] and crime reports of the late 1920s

Abstract

The article discusses possible inspiration behind I. Ilf and E. Petrov's novel The Little Golden Calf [Zolotoy telyonok] (1931): newspaper crime reports appearing in the late 1920s. The author points out parallels between the book's characters (Ostap Bender, Shura Balaganov, and Aleksandr Ivanovich Koreyko) and the real heroes of crime news. The article describes the adventures of an Aleksandr Serbin, who crossed the USSR from Odessa to Vladivostok alternately posing as a Brazilian industrial worker and a son of the Brazilian consul in China. All the while, Serbin seems to have been closely imitating the novel's plotline of the Lieutenant Schmidt's children. He enjoys free accommodation in hotels and receives payments from various local Soviet authorities. Interestingly, Serbin chronicles his adventures in letters to his girlfriend, thus immediately evoking another literary character — Khlestakov in Gogol's The Government Inspector [Revizor]. The article also draws analogies between crimes that took place in the Crimea in 1928 and the wealth accumulation schemes adopted by yet another of the book's characters, Koreyko.