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1 results

  • 8 - The Business of Pleasure

  • from Part II - New York and the Eastern States
  • Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, West Chester University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists
    Published online:
    18 January 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024, pp 77-90

  • Summary

    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.”