About this audiobook
Ostap Bender has a new plan for obtaining the wealth he believes will make life easier. His attention falls on Alexander Koreiko, a man whose modest public appearance conceals substantial resources. Persuading such a person to part with money requires more than a clever speech, and Bender gathers companions whose talents and limitations complicate the pursuit.
Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov build a comic journey through a society full of contradictory ambitions and improvised arrangements. Official language, entrepreneurial ingenuity and private appetite continually collide. The characters' schemes expose the distance between the roles people perform and the desires they prefer to keep hidden.
The novel explores money, status and the imagination through which an apparently simple promise of success becomes increasingly elaborate. Its humour grows from memorable encounters and the resourcefulness of a protagonist whose confidence makes him an acute observer of others while leaving his own assumptions open to question.
