The book by RSUH teachers M. P. Odessky and D. M. Feldman is about the novels by I. A. Ilf and E. P. Petrov “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf,” which make up a duology about the adventures of the modern rogue Ostap Bender. By “worlds” in the book we mean different levels of text that require different approaches and can be studied as relatively independent ones. The First World is the everyday life of that time, turning the novels of Ilf and Petrov into an “encyclopedia of Soviet life.” Second World - quotes: parodies, polemics, jokes for “their own”, responses to Soviet newspapers. Third World - biographies of co-authors. The Fourth World - textual criticism: an analysis of the creative history of novels, revealing the fascinatingly interesting struggle of Ilf and Petrov with censorship and auto-censorship. Finally, the fifth world is a myth, because A.V. Lunacharsky saw in Bender not just a rogue, but a modern version of a mythological hero.