There is something more embarrassing than reading the poems you wrote when you were young: discovering your parents' love letters, the intimate details behind a life spent together. The daughter of the Soviet write Ilya Ilf, best-known for his novel The twelve chairs (written with Yevgenni Petrov) has found the correspondence between her father Ilf and her mother Marusya, and has spent a long time browsing through them, in facing up to the man and the woman concealed behind the figures of her parents.