Movement, Fraud, and the Economy of Intimacy: The Man without a Biography in The Twelve Chairs and Nights of Cabiria

This preprint offers a structural reinterpretation of The Twelve Chairs (1928) by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, moving beyond its conventional treatment as a satirical panorama of early Soviet life. The analysis focuses on the social conditions that allow deception to function repeatedly and without resistance. Central to this reading is the figure of the “man without a biography,” whose viability depends not on concealment, but on the absence of demands for verification and on a cultural readiness to believe without inquiry. The text argues that mobility in the novel operates as a technique of non-fixation rather than as freedom or aimlessness, preventing the accumulation of accountability, memory, and social audit. Deception is sustained through hope and expectation rather than ignorance, forming what the paper conceptualizes as an economy of intimacy—relationships that convert trust into material and emotional support without requiring duration or exclusivity. A comparative section engages Nights of Cabiria (1957), directed by Federico Fellini, identifying a structural recurrence rather than thematic or historical influence. The shift from irony to tragedy exposes the ethical cost of the same underlying configuration. Read in this way, The Twelve Chairs emerges not as a historical artifact, but as an early diagnosis of a durable social mechanism that remains operative in contemporary environments characterized by circulation, performative identity, and deferred verification.