Yevgeni Petrov was born Evgeni Petrovich Kataev on November 30, 1902, in Odessa, Russian Empire (Now Odesa, Ukraine). His father, named Petr Kataev, was a teacher. Petrov graduated from Classical Gymnasium in 1920, and became a news correspondent for the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency. From 1921-1923 he was a criminologist and homicide inspector in Odessa. In 1923 Petrov moved to Moscow and became a journalist in a Soviet magazine "Krasny Perets" (Red Pepper). With the help from his brother, Valentin Kataev, who was already a popular writer, Petrov made connections in the Moscow literary milieu.

In 1925 he met Ilya Ilf and a year later they started writing together. Their first novel titled 'Dvenadtsat Stulev' (Twelve Chairs) was published in 1928. It's main character, named Ostap Bender, became a popular synonym for a charming and smooth criminal. The book had instant success with the general public, but was bashed by the Soviet critics, because it satirized the loss of civility and degradation of cultural values in the Soviet Union. The book was praised by such writers as Vladimir Mayakovsky and later by Vladimir Nabokov. Their second novel by Ilf and Petrov was 'Zolotoi Telenok' (Golden Calf), published in 1931, in a magazine, then in 1933, as a book. Both novels became bestsellers in the Soviet Union. Several film and TV adaptations were made in the Soviet Union by such directors as Leonid Gaidai and Mark Zakharov, among others. In 1970, an American adaptation was made by director Mel Brooks starring Frank Langella as Ostap Bender. The character of Ostap Bender was portrayed by such renown Russian actors as Sergey Yurskiy, Archil Gomiashvili, Andrey Mironov, and Oleg Menshikov.

In 1933-1934 Ilf and Petrov traveled across Europe. In 1935 they made a journey by car about the United States, which gave them material for a popular book 'Odnoetazhnaya Amerika' (The One-Storey America 1937). Ilya Ilf died of tuberculosis on April 13, 1937. His partner, Yevgeni Petrov, died in a plane crash on July 2, 1942, on a flight from Sevastopol to Moscow.

In 1948 Andrei Zhdanov attacked many Soviet intellectuals and banned the books of Ilf and Petrov among others. The Communist Party ordered their books banned and removed from all public libraries across the Soviet Union. Eight years later the ban was lifted during the political "Thaw" initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956.

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Yevgeni Petrov

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