Plot
In the Soviet Union in 1927, a former member of the nobility, Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, works as a desk clerk. His mother-in-law reveals on her deathbed that her family jewelry had been hidden from the Bolsheviks in one of the twelve chairs from the family’s dining room set. Those chairs, along with all other personal property, had been expropriated by the government after the Russian Revolution. He becomes a treasure hunter, and after the “smooth operator” and con-man Ostap Bender forces Kisa ("Pussy", Vorobyaninov’s funny childhood nickname, which Bender prefers) to partner with him, they set off to track down the chairs. This ultimately helps Kisa, who doesn’t possess Bender’s charm and is not as street-smart.
The two "comrades" find the chair set which is put up for auction, but fail to buy it and afterwards find out that the set has been split up and sold individually. They are not alone in their quest. Father Fyodor took advantage of the deathbed confession, and has also set off to recover the fortune. In this search for Mme Petukhova’s treasure, he becomes Vorobyaninov’s main rival. While in this enterprise Ostap is in his element, Vorobyaninov is not so happy. He’s steadily abandoning his principles and losing self-esteem.
Through the process of elimination, the two finally discover the location of the 12th and last chair, the one hopefully containing the treasure. To avoid splitting the loot, Vorobyaninov murders Ostap. He then discovers that the jewels have already been found and that they have been spent on erecting a new public building, and as a result goes insane.
The basic idea of the novel (searching for treasure inside of many similar items) is based on the Arthur Conan Doyle short story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, but there are no other similarities between them.
The Twelve Chairs satirizes not only its central characters, but also the people and institutions they encounter: the operations of a Moscow newspaper, student housing, a provincial chess club, and so on. Bender represents values of the old order, egoism and individualism. He knows “four hundred comparatively honest ways of taking money away from the population” (Russian: "Четыреста сравнительно честных способов отъёма денег у населения"), and he has no future in the post revolutionary Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov’s observations on aspects of everyday life are comic, but shrewd.
Read more about this topic: The Twelve Chairs
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)