The Twelve Chairs

The Twelve Chairs is a satirical picaresque novel by the Soviet writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, published in 1928, in which a former nobleman learns on his mother-in-law's deathbed that she hid the family's remaining jewels inside one of twelve dining chairs before the 1917 Revolution scattered the family's possessions. Joining forces with the resourceful, endlessly improvising con man Ostap Bender, he sets off across the Soviet Union tracking down the twelve now-dispersed chairs one by one, encountering a wide cross-section of early Soviet society along the way as their search repeatedly comes to nothing until its final ironic turn. The novel's satire of Soviet bureaucracy, opportunism and the persistence of old bourgeois habits under the new system made it an immediate popular success, and Ostap Bender proved lasting enough as a character to return in the authors' 1931 sequel The Little Golden Calf. The novel has since been adapted repeatedly for film, stage and television both within Russia and internationally.