“Ilf and Petrov have recently left active reading, as it seems to me, for two reasons. The first is that the older generation knows them by heart, and we are reluctant to re-read books that we know by heart. For the same reason, we rarely reread, for example, “Eugene Onegin” as adults - and its content completely eludes us, because it can only be understood by people over twenty, like the author. As for Ilf and Petrov, re-reading them from a new angle in post-Soviet reality can be especially useful. But since we already speak in quotes from them, we return to them very rarely...”