The blog will be on hiatus for a little while due to vacation, but I thought I would share a short, original translation of the first few paragraphs of Il’f and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs. If you like the surrealism and humor of Master and Margarita, this novel might be for you, and there are multiple official translations available in English. The plot follows a former member of the minor nobility, Ippolit Matveevich, on his quest to recover 12 chairs rumored to have the family diamonds squirreled away inside their legs. When scoundrel Ostap Bender takes him under his wing, Ippolit Matveevich soon finds himself in way over his head. When we first meet him, Ippolit Matveevich is working the very definition of a dead-end job…
In provincial city N, there were so many hairdressing salons and funeral parlors that it seemed the residents of the city were born solely in order to shave, trim and slather their hair in pomade, and then promptly die. In actual fact, in provincial city N, people were born, shaved, and laid to rest relatively infrequently. The life in city N was most quiet. The spring evenings were intoxicating, the muck glistened under the light of the moon like anthracite, and every young man in the city at that time was in love with the secretary of the local collective farm committee, to the point that it interfered with the completion of her duties.
Questions of love and death did not worry Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov even though, due to the nature of his service, he was in charge of these very affairs every day from nine in the morning until five in the evening, with a half-hour pause for breakfast.
In the mornings, having drunk his portion of hot milk from a frosty, streaked glass left out by Claudia Ivanovna, he would exit the half-dark domicile into the spacious street filled with the extraordinary spring light and named for Comrade Gubernsky. It was a most pleasing street, such as you find in these provincial towns. On the left hand side behind wavy, greenish glass, the coffins of the funeral parlor “Nymph” showed silver. On the right, behind small windows with crumbling putty, dusty and boring oak coffins rested sullenly in the funeral parlor of Master Bezenchuk. Further down, “The Hairdressing Masters Pierre and Constantine” promised their customers “nail trimming” and “at-home perms.” Even further down was situated a hotel with a hair salon, and behind it on a large, vacant lot a straw-colored calf gently licked a slightly rusty sign leaning against a propped open gate: “Funeral Office Welcome.”
Although the funeral parlors were numerous, their clientele was not wealthy. “Welcome” had gone out of business fully three years before Ippolit Matveevich arrived in city N, while Master Bezenchuk drank bitterly and had even once tried to pawn off his best floor model coffin.
The people in city N died rarely, and Ippolit Matveevich knew this better than anyone else, because he served in the Registry of Civil Status Acts, where he oversaw the registration of deaths and marriages.
Ippolit Matveevich’s life changes on Friday, April 15, 1927. I hope all of your Friday adventures are delightful, and I will see you after next week.