I got a new doc this month. It being my fourth fucking intake session of 2014, as well as being run ragged by generating tax scenarios for the haute bourgeoisie and locating logical inconsistencies in episodes of Blossom, I made a very poor first impression--even forgetting to write down the dosages of what I was then on. Not only did I make a bad first impression, but my Russian doc made fun of me in a deadpan manner for it which of course is the worst way to be made fun of.
Anyway, I knew I still had time to restore face so I decided that I'd be "conveniently" engrossed in reading something my doc would recognize from back in the day when they came to get me out of the waiting room. That morning I poured over a shelf in my modest library. Solzhenitsyn? Too prosaic. Mayakovsky? I'd rather not be 5150'd, thanks. Sholokhov? Impossible to pretend to be excited about.
After further deliberations we need not go over for the sake of brevity, I decided to bring Ilf and Petrov. Not only can I easily feign interest in their writing, it being rather amazing, but I could also put to the test all those claims about their prominence one often encounters in reviews or articles written about them in English--though I suppose the fact that Nabokov not only name dropped them in one of his novels, but did so with a joke straight out of their repertoire, should have tipped me off to this being the case.
So I'm in the waiting room ripping through the opening of The Golden Calf (the opening of that book is top fucking shelf, this isn't particularly difficult), jotting down notes in the margins, et cetera, when my doc comes out to get me and makes some quip about tearing me away from something more important. When we get into their office they take the bait and ask me what I'm reading and I show it to them and they're like

I didn't know they'd translated that into English and I'm like

.
Then we had a furious 10 minute discussion about who I'm reading, Sovlit, the difficulties in translating it for an American audience, cabbages, and even a few kings.

Mission success.

Books.

spoiler (click to show/hide)
Then they had to ruin everything by going, "You need to get a new girlfriend." I'm like, "Yo,
Mikhail Bulgakov, we just had a passionate discussion about 20th century Russian language literature that touched upon Pyotr Schmidt, I can't exactly hop on down to Andrew's Descent and pluck a replacement off the street. The closest thing we have to that is where I already live and where I already live is a place where bohemianism consists of walking downstairs from your loft and grabbing something from a taco truck that takes credit cards. And even if we had one, I'm not going to indulge in
Zoshchenkoan behavior k thx."