13 - The Road

Summary

Chapter 13 investigates the road as a literary device, a metaphor (the “road to communism”), and a material reality. It argues that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue can be read as a picaresque; the time–space of the road structured the chance meetings, incidents, and accidents that occasioned the collective narrator’s satirical survey of the world. Although Odnoetazhnaia Amerika deviated from the traditional picaresque, turning its gaze on the Other, rather than the rogue’s own society, it nonetheless offered an implicit critique of the Soviet “road to communism.” This was nowhere clearer than in the writers’ description of American highways; for readers familiar with Soviet roads, the contrast with the Soviet Union’s obviously inferior network of roads and roadside amenities would have been obvious.