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Ostap Bender (; in "The Twelve Chairs" he called himself Ostap-Suleyman-Berta-Maria-Bender-Bey, in "The Golden Calf" he called himself Bender-Zadunaysky, in later novels he was also called Ostap Ibragimovich Bender) is a fictional con man and the central antiheroic protagonist in the novels "The Twelve Chairs" (1928) and "The Little Golden Calf" (1931) written by Soviet authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov. The novels are examples of a picaresque novel genre, which was previously rare in Russian literature.