Yevgeny Petrov

Yevgeny Petrov, born Yevgeni Petrovich Katayev, was a popular Soviet author of the 1920s and 1930s, known for satirical novels written in Russian. His name is mainly linked to his long collaboration with Ilya Ilf, with whom he produced some of the most widely read books of the Soviet period. Some sources give 1902 as his birth year, but 1903 is the date most often cited, and his birthplace is Odessa.

The son of a schoolteacher, he moved to Moscow at around the age of twenty and became a writer for Gudok, the newspaper of the railway workers, where he met Ilf. Together they wrote The Twelve Chairs, published in 1928, and its sequel, The Little Golden Calf, published in 1931. Both books mock the everyday life and bureaucracy of the new Soviet society with a sharp, playful humour. In 1935 the two men travelled across the United States, spending about two months driving from New York to California, and the trip inspired a travel book.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Petrov worked as a war correspondent. He died in 1942 in a plane crash while returning from besieged Sevastopol. His brisk prose and ironic eye for Soviet manners place him among the leading satirists of his era. His legacy lives on mainly in the continued popularity of his novels, which are still read and have been adapted for film and television.