Chapter 17 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with the members of the artist colonies in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico. A letter of introduction from John Dos Passos to the poet Witter (Hal) Bynner gave the writers entrée into the community of New Mexico moderns, but they learned little about it. This was among the great lost opportunities of the trip. Bynner was a literary trickster of the sort that the two Soviet funnymen would have appreciated. Following the poet’s advice about where “to go to see Indians,” they chanced to meet Alexandra Fechin, the former wife of the Russian émigré painter Nicolai Fechin. They quickly classified her as another unhappy immigrant. That she moved in the same American modernist circles as “the famous American poet” Witter Bynner does not seem to have crossed their minds.