The Twelve Chairs: Dvenadtsat’ Stul'ev

The Twelve Chairs is a classic satirical novel by the Odessan Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, released in 1928. Its main character Ostap Bender, who knows four hundred comparatively honest ways of taking money away from the population and has no future in the post revolutionary Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union in 1927, a former member of the nobility, Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, works as a desk clerk. His mother-in-law reveals on her deathbed that her family jewellery had been hidden from the Bolsheviks in one of the twelve chairs from the family’s dining room set. Bender befriends him as they set out on a wild-goose chase after the missing chairs. The Twelve Chairs satirizes not only its central characters, but also the people and institutions they encounter.