About the book: 2014 / The wild success that befell Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov after the publication of “The Twelve Chairs” (1928) prompted the co-authors “resurrect” his hero, the resilient and charming swindler Ostap Bender, and set about creating the novel “The Golden Calf” (1931). However, both the completion and publication of the second novel were constantly postponed due to high-profile political processes. In 1948, the next multi-thousand edition of the dilogy was recognized as an ideological mistake, but with the onset of Khrushchev’s “thaw,” novels about the great schemer were again in demand and recognized as classics of Russian literature. In this edition, the novel “The Golden Calf” is published in the author’s full version, reconstructed from archival materials M. Odessky and D. Feldman. The introductory article tells about the history of the creation and fate of the dilogy; The appendix contains the original versions of the final chapter and the first part of “The Golden Calf”».