Gratefully dedicated to Valentin Kataev.

Kind and benevolent sensitivity to someone else’s talent is a rare phenomenon, and talented people themselves probably have it in so far as it is NOT some kind of intellectual ability, but some kind of special FORESIGHT that people usually lack.

“It is not those people who have not reached the goal who are deprived of foresight, but those who HAVE PASSED IT BY!!!”

Francois the Sixth Duke de La Rochefoucauld.

Kataev himself, when asked how he managed to recognize two great literary talents in two young journalists, his younger brother Evgeny Kataev (Petrov) and his friend Ilya Fainzilberg (Ilf), whose equals are difficult to find in the “track record” of world literature, replied that he probably had a “Dog’s nose” for talents.

Here it should be noted that Kataev himself, a capable writer and no more, began to publish using the following as a pseudonym: “Old Man Doggins”

Ilf and Petrov, being journalists, people who, by profession, communicated with many different people, could be noticed by many “influential” authorities in the “administration” and in literature.

And before Kataev, no one noticed their potential as great writers! Kataev alone, by suggesting that they write a novel together, was somehow able to feel it, and his premonition not only came true, but exceeded even his own expectations.

And here I come to the second part of the story.

When Ilf and Petrov became “famous”, an eighteen-year-old boy came to them and offered them to make an operetta out of their novel “The Twelve Chairs”, the music for which he undertook to write!

Ilf and Petrov politely rejected the offer of the young composer, whose name was Nikita Bogoslovsky.

I intend to speak with regret about this failed collaboration, not as an admirer or non-admirer of Bogoslovsky’s music, but as an unconditional admirer of his LITERARY talent.

If Ilf and Petrov hadn’t too hastily rejected the self-confident and talented young man, I think they would have quickly developed a purely LITERARY collaboration, and then connoisseurs of real literature would be pleased with the feuilletons, short stories, and perhaps even the novels of the “Holy Trinity”: Ilf, Petrov, and Bogoslovsky!

His extraordinary literary talent is OBVIOUS! The wit generator! I felt this when, in the reading room of the Library of Congress, I read his “play” “NAMING SURNAMES” in the binder of the Literary Gazette of the early 70s, on the famous sixteenth page (for which I took this binder).

Shine! An extraordinary talent, immediately and indisputably visible!

That’s why I called this article about the “RAREST QUALITY”, which, unfortunately for all connoisseurs of real literature, the great talents themselves did not possess!

This is a huge and irreparable loss for the entire world literature!

Eternal bright memory to Valentin Kataev, already for the fact that he discovered two such great talents, and, no less importantly, supported them with his already existing authority as a professional and RECOGNIZED writer, not allowing them to fade into obscurity, which happens too often in human history.

14 VII 2026

P.S. Micro-remark: In A. Solzhenitsyn’s excellent novel “In the First Circle” there is a sympathetically described episodic hero, radio engineer Valentin Pryanichkov, whom everyone calls “Valentulya”, a kind of affectionately diminutive name.

It may well be that one employee was actually called that in «sharashka», where Solzhenitsyn himself worked.

But friends also called Valentin Kataev “Valentulya”, although his relationship with Solzhenitsyn was not at all friendly. And this was not at all caused by Kataev’s envy of Solzhenitsyn’s literary talent, nor by any dislike for the anti-Soviet (As M. Ardov suggested, it seems: Kataev was a representative of socialist realism, and Solzhenitsyn did not fit into this template!)

Kataev defended Osip Mandelstam, who could not be called a “Socialist Realist” in the Stalinist Soviet. Russia)

I think (this is just my assumption) the real reason is the very “streamlined” morality of the newly–minted “prophet” from Kataev’s own point of view.