The Twelve Chairs

3 ideas

1. The last chair's treasure built a club

   Ippolit Vorobyaninov learns from his dying mother-in-law that her diamonds are sewn into one of twelve Gambs chairs that the Soviet state confiscated and dispersed. He and the con man Ostap Bender track the chairs across the country. After Vorobyaninov murders Bender with a razor to keep the prize, he finds that the last chair's jewels were discovered long before and paid for the railway workers' club he is standing in, so the private fortune had already become public property.

2. Cons succeed by selling the victim's fantasy

   Bender almost never invents a desire. He finds one the mark already holds and offers to fulfil it. In Stargorod, former aristocrats and merchants pay into the 'Union of the Sword and Plough', a fake monarchist conspiracy, because it confirms their dream that the old order is coming back. The fraud comes from their nostalgia, and their own fear and vanity keep them from checking it.

3. New Vasyuki: world chess capital scam

   In the backwater town of Vasyuki, Bender poses as a chess grandmaster. He persuades the local chess club that an international tournament will turn the town into 'New Moscow', a world capital with airports and skyscrapers. He sells tickets for a simultaneous exhibition, loses almost every game, and escapes by boat with the takings. The episode shows how a promise scaled to a community's provincial vanity overrides basic scepticism.

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