Ilf and Petrov · 1928 · road

The Soviet Union's favourite comic novel. A former marshal of nobility learns on his mother-in-law's deathbed that she sewed the family diamonds into one of twelve chairs, now scattered by the state - and goes looking for them with a con man called Ostap Bender, across a country the authors are describing with more accuracy than the censors noticed.

1. 1
   Stargorod

   A provincial town Ilf and Petrov assembled out of several - Vorobyaninov comes back to the house he was master of before the revolution to look for twelve walnut chairs, and finds a con man already asleep in the caretaker's room.

2. 2
   Moscow

   The Furniture Museum, the Hostel of the Monk Berthold Schwartz, and the auction where the chairs are sold out from under them because Ostap has spent the deposit - the satire on NEP Moscow that got the book its reputation.

3. 3
   Vasyuki

   A Volga town where Ostap poses as a chess grandmaster, gives a simultaneous display against thirty locals and is chased to the river by all of them - the most quoted chapter in Russian comic fiction.

4. 4
   Stalingrad

   Down the Volga after the Columbus Theatre company, whose props include the chairs - and thrown off the boat at every port for painting a banner badly, which is the running joke of the middle of the book.

5. 5
   Pyatigorsk

   The spa towns of the Caucasus, where Ostap charges tourists for entry to a public park - and Vorobyaninov, a former marshal of nobility, is reduced to begging in three languages on the promenade.

6. 6
   Vladikavkaz

   The Georgian Military Road and the Darial Gorge, where Father Fyodor - the priest who overheard the deathbed confession - has got there first and ends up marooned on a rock, having lost his mind.

7. 7
   Tiflis

   Tbilisi, and the chairs still one step ahead - the pursuit having by now crossed the whole Soviet Union while the two of them get steadily poorer and less able to stand the sight of one another.

8. 8
   Yalta

   Crimea, an earthquake, and the last chair but one - and the realisation that there is exactly one left and they know where it is, which is what finishes the partnership.

9. 9
   Moscow

   The new railway workers' club, and Vorobyaninov cuts Ostap's throat in the night to have the diamonds to himself - and finds the club was built with them, the jewels found and spent on the building he is standing in.