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Born into a poor Jewish family, Ilf worked at various trades while a youth, becoming a journalist in Odessa at age 18. He went to Moscow in 1923 to begin a career as a professional writer. Petrov, the son of a teacher, began his career as a news-service correspondent, worked briefly as a criminal investigator, and went to Moscow in 1923, where he became a professional journalist. Initially, Ilf...
...awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Others described life in the new Soviet Union with varying degrees of mordant sarcasm; the short stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, the comic novels of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, and the short novel Envy (1927) by Yury Olesha fall into this category. Writing in Russian also flourished in communities of anticommunist exiles in Germany,...
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