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The nine chapters in Part III track Ilf and Petrov as they traveled Route 66 from Chicago to the desert Southwest. Their journey through low-rise America allowed them to experience American highways, sample American road food, and interact with hitchhikers they picked up along the way. In Arizona and New Mexico, they visited Native American villages and national parks that appear today much as Ilf and Petrov would have seen them. Retracing their journey raises in particularly acute form the basic questions of historical research: How and to what extent can we understand people separated from us by identity, ideology, language – and time?
Chapter 18 analyzes Ilf and Petrov’s encounter with the Agapito Pino in the pueblo of San Ildefonso. It compares the accounts of the meeting in Ilf’s notebook, the pair’s photo essay, and the book Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, as well as contemporary work by American anthropologists to consider whether the Soviet funnymen understood that the Pueblo clown Pino was having a little fun with them when he claimed to know nothing of life beyond the reservation. The question of whether Ilf and Petrov got the joke goes to the core of their efforts to understand America. Were they able to recognize and laugh at their own desire to find unspoiled American Indians, who had only the vaguest notion of the existence of jazz, moving pictures, and a place called New York City?
