Skyscrapers, Consular Territory, and Hell: What Bulgakov and Eizenshtein Learned about Space from Il'f and Petrov's America

The Soviet comic writers Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov traveled across America in late 1935–36, gathering material for the travelogue published upon their return as “Odnoetazhnaia Amerika” (One-Story America) in the journal Znamia and then as a book in 1937, just at the time of Il'f's death. The book was a popular success and remarkably influential: the architectural structures of “One-Story America“—its skyscrapers, staircases, one-story bungalows—reappear in literary and cultural monuments of the 1930s and 1940s, namely Mikhail Bulgakov's novel about the Devil's eventful visit to Moscow, The Master and Margarita, and Sergei Eizenshtein's essays on montage. These works share an interest in the construction of space and perspective: paradoxical spatial constructions, embedded spaces, verticality, the “trick of the skyscraper,” and what Eizenshtein referred to as the “charm” of “acrobatic points of view.“