Maestro Perekatov: The Twelve Chairs by Il'f and Petrov and the History of Chess Journalism in Russia

• In Event: Around and about Nabokov's Defense

Abstract

This paper examines the history of Russian chess journalism as reflected in Il’f and Petrov’s satirical novel The Twelve Chairs (1927). In the first version of the novel (published in “Thirty Days” journals), two prominent chess masters appear on the board of a gigantic orange zeppelin flying above the New Moscow (i.e., old Vasiuki) – maestro Duz-Khotimirskii (a prominent Russian chess player and chess activist) and a mysterious maestro Perekatov. The paper uncovers the real name of the latter, reconstructs his role in the history of Russian / Soviet chess journalism as well as his scandalous literary and political biography of a “literary bedbug” – a maître of Russian satire, who became one of the first and most vicious “golden feathers” of the Bolsheviks,” wrote an unethical essay about his former chief V.D. Nabokov’s death in Berlin, was sentenced by the Soviet court for bourgeois moral depravity (for visiting secret sado-masochistic brothels in Leningrad), published numerous political and moralistic feuilletons in Soviet press (against the British PM Chamberlain, Russian emigrants, Soviet sexual predators, etc.), primarily in Ilf and Petrov’s paper Gudok, and authored highly subjective and provocative memoirs about the history of Russian prerevolutionary journalism. His name was …

Author

• Ilya Vinitsky, Princeton U