Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

In the mid-1930s, two Soviet satirists, Ilia If and Yevgeny Petrov, embarked on a remarkable road trip across the United States of America.

Immortalised in a famous travelogue, their experience is the subject of a new book by Lisa Kirshenbaum.

She spoke to Danny Bird about why America both repulsed and fascinated the USSR at the time.

And how the two unlikely travellers met the likes of President Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway,

marvelled at automobiles and came face to face with the grim reality of Jim Crow era America.

So I should begin by asking you to introduce Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. Who were they?

They were two of the most beloved Soviet authors. They're, I think, among the few Soviet authors

who people still enjoy reading. They worked as a team. They actually wrote each sentence together,

and they wrote two of the most popular Soviet satirical

novels, one called The Twelve Chairs, where they introduced their hero, Astat Bender, the conman

or smooth operator, and then a follow-up to that novel called The Little Golden Calf, in which

Bender, who had actually had his throat slit at the

end of the first novel, is resurrected to go on an additional caper in the second novel. So they were

big fans of road trips. Both of those novels are, in a sense, road trips, even before they made

their own road trip in the United States.

And I noticed at the start of your book, you mentioned that the original title, as it was in English, was I think one-story America, and you've altered that slightly.

Well, the original title in Russian is one-story America.

And because they're trying to get at the idea of getting a view of

America beyond the skyscrapers of New York, the one-story land of America. The problem I think for

the English translation is that story holds two meanings in English. So it sounds like a single

narrative, possibly, rather than just a single floor of a building. So I translated it when I

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