The Twelve Chairs mentions a haughty Vanderbilt lady from a French fashion magazine

The Twelve Chairs mentions a haughty Vanderbilt lady from a French fashion magazine. “The glossy photograph showed the daughter of the American billionaire Vanderbilt in an evening gown. There were furs and feathers, silk and pearls, a cut of extraordinary lightness and a dizzying coiffure.” In other photographs the Vanderbilt lady wore a diamond star on her brow, or a ball dress: cascades of jewels and a little silk.

Many in the Vanderbilt family might fit the description, but hardly any of them had so remarkable a gown as Alice Claypoole Gwynne, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt. The “Electric Light” dress by Charles Frederick Worth, in yellow and gold satin, is trimmed with pearls, beads and embroidered flashes of lightning, and comes with a weighty accessory: a lamp lit by batteries built into the hem. The costume is a tribute to Edison's invention.

Yet Ilf and Petrov cannot have had Alice Vanderbilt in mind: she appeared in her electric light in 1883, while the events of the novel belong to 1927. The dress is kept in a museum in New York.

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The Twelve Chairs mentions a haughty Vanderbilt lady from a French fashion magazine

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At the close of the Strugatskys' "Roadside Picnic" the Golden Sphere is asked for this: "Happiness for everybody, free, and let nobody go away unsatisfied!" I do not promise to leave no one aggrieved, but the digest really does come free

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