Золотой теленок

The Golden Calf is a novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. Written in 1931. Genre - "picaresque novel", "social satire". Continuation of the novel "The Twelve Chairs". The name plays on the biblical image of the golden calf. In the novel, O. Bender acts as a blackmailer. Having learned from the "son of Lieutenant Schmidt" Shura Balaganov about the existence of the underground millionaire Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko, the great strategist decides to take some of the money from him - after all, he knows "400 relatively honest ways" to do this. But the chosen method does not work (A. Koreiko himself evaluates it as a "pathetic attempt at third-rate blackmail"), after which O. Bender takes the matter seriously - a case is started against A. Koreiko, in which, through hard work, information is collected about a second, underground life millionaire - in order to later sell this business to him for 1,000,000 rubles. Despite the active assistance in the work of the Antelope crew (a car of the Loren-Dietrich brand, although there are many disputes whether the car was of this particular brand, it is described in great detail in the book): Adam Kozlevich, the already mentioned Shura Balaganov and Mikhail Samuelevich Panikovsky, the path to a million will be thorny and long...

Artistic illustrations by the artist E. Shukaev