Politics and Philosophy in Russian Social Democracy: Alexander Bogdanov and the Sociotheoretical Foundations of Vpered

Il’f and Petrov’s travel memoir, Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (One-Storied America), is an account of their travels across the United States in the mid-thirties. This work—much edited and censored for changing political climates—was a state-sponsored attempt to reveal the “real” America to the Soviet reader. Although many critics have asserted that Il’f and Petrov’s treatment of America is surprisingly positive, regarding the work as “positive satire” ignores important stylistic and rhetorical devices operational in the text. The authors’ positive assessments of America are invariably about services, behaviours or habits they judge to be potentially useful in the building of socialism. More interesting is how the text reflects on Soviet culture; One-Storied America is an instrument of mythologization of the authors’ native land in the tradition of much travel literature. Their frame of reference for the observations about the exotic, alien world they encounter is their own culture and establishing difference, in this case, entails value judgement: what is svoi is superior. The foreignness of the other (America) is established by Il’f and Petrov through plot structure and through linguistic tropes. Average Americans— those who are not politically conscious—are characterized as limited, prejudiced and lacking taste, and this is reflected in their primitive language. Those who are ideologically sympathetic (either Americans or displaced Russians) speak excellent Russian; their speech is not marked as other. One-Storied America can thus be read as Il’f and Petrov’s attempt to exploit the foreignness of American culture in the service of Soviet cultural construction. They are particularly concerned with the construction of image and perception—and misapprehension and fear of the other are effective tools.