The Land Beyond the Horizon

The most famous Russian book about the United States will soon celebrate its centenary. For several generations of Russian readers, Ilya Ilf's and Yevgeny Petrov's "One-Story America" proved to be the main source for learning about the "real" North American United States, as the country was then called.

The second edition-corrected and supplemented with several new chapters and photographs-of Leon Spivak's book "The Land Beyond the Horizon" allows the reader to discover the paths of Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov in the famous "One-Story America", to see the extent of their literary journey, to learn some of the secrets of the book, to reflect on the many convergences and paradoxes in the historical destinies of Russia and the United States. In September 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, correspondents for the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda, crossed the Atlantic on the steamship Normandy. The creators of two famous humorous novels-"The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf"-were to tell the whole truth about the leading country of the capitalist West.

Ilf and Petrov spent almost four months in the United States. During that time, they drove across the country twice, starting from the Atlantic Coast and ending at the Pacific Ocean, and driving back. The result of the trip was an unusual book-a very objective, thoughtful, and paradoxical work by the "coryphees of satire" who suddenly became serious in "One-Story America. It is safe to assume that neither the authors nor the Soviet nomenklatura who bought the book had any idea what the creative result of the overseas trip would be. It is not just a journalistic travelogue, but a literary monument to the period. It dates back to the day when Ilf and Petrov descended from the twenty-seventh floor of the New York's Shelton Hotel and found themselves on the bustling streets of America's city....