In their published work, Ilf and Petrov equated low culture – trashy movies, wrestling, burlesque – with American culture. At the other end of the spectrum, they endeavored to show that American high culture consisted entirely of high-priced European imports that wealthy patrons appreciated only as luxury commodities, not art. Nothing, Ilf and Petrov emphasized, could be further from the situation in the Soviet Union, where the state-supported opera houses and concert halls made high culture available to all. Recovering the encounters with middlebrow culture that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue largely ignored, Chapter 12 argues that Soviet and American cultural producers shared some of the same aims and challenges – even as they operated under different constraints.

Chapter 8 retraces Ilf and Petrov’s businesslike investigation of the New York dreamworld of nightclubs, burlesque theaters, and other entertainments. Their exploration of American consumption and leisure provided them with a series of case studies that probed the line between the wholesome, “cultured” consumption promoted in the Soviet Union and capitalist vulgarity. Applying emerging Soviet understandings to the United States, Ilf and Petrov represented American men as often succumbing to the coarse charms of popular commercial spectacles; they associated American women with the obsessive consumption of vulgar things. Deploring women’s commodification under capitalism did not prevent men on the left, in the Soviet Union no less than in the United States, from representing women as “materialist viragoes.”

Chapter 14 explores Ilf and Petrov’s complicated relationship with American food. By 1935, Soviet promises of plenty were everywhere, but even staple goods remained in short supply. In the United States, the authors found that food was plentiful, efficiently produced and distributed, often attractive to the eye. But they did not rave about American food as they did about American highways, claiming (not always convincingly) that it was tasteless and monotonous. The writers explained this situation as a product not only of capitalism, which put profits ahead of flavor or variety, but of (white) Americans’ inability to appreciate good food.