When the moon rose and cast its minty light on the miniature bust of Zhukovsky'': ''Zhukovsky code'' in Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs

In the article the perception of V.A. Zhukovsky's social and literary works by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, the authors of the satiric novel The Twelve Chairs, is examined. The episode with Zhukovsky's bust in the chapter ''Madame Petukhov's Demise'' opens a sequence of ''sculptural'' motif structures and plot lines in the novel. The first ideological purpose of the bust gallery, which included Zhukovsky's monument, is to symbolize the end of the imperial era. Thus, a good narrative example of the Empire's decline as the two authors saw it was the sequence of busts of Alexander I, Alexander III, Napoleon and, finally, of the cooperative shop proprietor - a comic character whose neighboring position to the Russian emperors obviously was to make readers laugh at all of them. The two versions of the novel (censored and published in 1927) and uncensored (which has recently been published) are analysed. The latter presents a broader associative and inter-textual field referring to the Romanov's Empire as compared to the former. Although on the authors' way from the more comprehensive initial version to the second the novel suffered multiple reductions, there was a group of episodes left untouched - first of all, the number of times Zhukovsky's bust was mentioned. The poet's monument as well as Zhukovsky's image itself correlates with one of the two main characters in the novel - Ippolit Vorobyaninov. Walking around the monument Ippolit plans his adventure. Ostap calls him ''person close to the emperor'' and suspects that he can suddenly start singing ''God save the Tzar''. The nocturnal romantic atmosphere, which surrounds Zhukovsky's bust, determines the ballad-like parody fragments of the novel, e.g., the gallop in The House of the Peoples, the image of the ballad composer Trubetskoi-Lapis. Ilf and Petrov's purpose was not only to juxtapose the Soviet ''big'' narrative to the old imperial one, but to discredit both of them symbolically pleasing the two types of the early-Soviet reader: pro- and anti-Soviet. In this respect ''Zhukovsky'' motifs seem to be elements of the wider semantic field of imperial culture (including the classical literature of the 19th century and its typical dualism of the monarch and the poet), which is already gone forever. On the contrary, the Soviet discourse of The Twelve Chairs corresponds with the social and ideological tendencies (e.g., general democratization of culture and a new type of its interaction with the authorities), which replaced the imperial paradigm. Monuments (literary, which form the novel's inter-textual background, and sculptural, which create historical and geographical orientation) became the brightest representation of the two discourses. When describing monuments, the authors emphasize the tendency subversive to the very idea of a sculptural artifact, which serves to immortalize the past, to provide its eternal existence; for Ilf and Petrov it is crucial to show the conflict triggered by the Revolution of this ''preservation'' aim with the early-Soviet attempts to recreate and alter the past. In this sense the status of old monuments, as well as the entire monument-building, became radically problematic. Deliberately destroyed monuments, monuments with obliterated historical meaning became a widespread phenomenon in the 1920s. This very phenomenon attracted the authors' attention systematically.

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