Monday Begins on Saturday

This book will help you look at the story by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Monday Begins on Saturday, in a new light. The authors themselves have repeatedly stated that they wrote only a capustnik, a collection of funny little jokes.... However, before us is not just an original work that has managed to combine the realities of a Soviet research institute and fairy-tale folklore, not only a work in the fantasy genre at a time when such a term did not even exist in Soviet literature, but a picture of a whole era, marked by a single word: the sixties, portraits of people of that time—naive and strange sixties intellectuals. Dozens, hundreds of little details—hobbies, clothing, fashion, communication manners, the realities of a Soviet research institute with its special culture, work, and relationships at work and outside of it are almost casually woven into the text. Here are the cafeteria menu, the assortment of store shelves, the trade union, the wall newspaper, modest salaries, and absurd expenses on unnecessary departments and topics, application forms for job placement, a world where despite all the talents and even the genius of scientists, administrative laws, due to their specific inflexibility, prove to be more effective than natural and magical laws. And besides the characteristic attributes of the time, the dreams of these very sixties intellectuals are embedded in the text: a new cheap tape recorder twice cheaper than the real one, fashionable clothes, a rich computing machine, Aldan, which fundamentally did not exist and does not exist in nature, instead of the already existing military complex Aldan. And books, books, books—true treasures of that time. Echoes of discoveries made in the 20th century, recently released films, and the inspiration of the era of the first flights into space create a special background for this bright book.