Ah, it’s hard to write about such a classic, one that has been known to everyone for many decades. But I still decided to give it a try.
The thing is, Monday Starts on Saturday was the very first book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that I ever read. And that was back in my distant childhood. I remember laughing out loud at some episodes, trying hard not to show it, since I had to read some of them in a clinic while waiting my turn for physiotherapy.
Since then, the book has retained a sense of eternal joy and a smile for me, and that is why in my adult years I was very afraid to reread the story: what if I perceived it completely differently, and those childhood impressions faded? Nevertheless, the second time I also enjoyed it, and now I have read it for the third time. But this time I had a specific goal — to think about what had changed in my feelings and perception of the story compared to childhood, and also after so many years separating the everyday life of the book’s characters from today’s realities.
The book tells about the work of a programmer in an institute of sorcery and magic. Nothing less. Complete with all the trappings of Soviet research institutes of the 1960s–70s.
I’ll start by saying that it is completely wrong to consider this book a single, unified work. Yes, it is one novella. But it is divided into three parts — more like separate short stories — connected by the same characters. Because I don’t get a sense of wholeness from the novella. There is no single storyline, no single narrative. And the book, frankly, ends with nothing. Even the story of the Umklaydet sofa was left hanging in the air — and what a fuss there was around it!
In terms of how it feels, Monday Starts on Saturday is closest for me to Kir Bulychev’s cycle about Great Guslyar. There too we have one town, the same characters, and plenty of magic and mysticism.
But if we return to Monday Starts on Saturday, here even the separate stories differ very strongly from one another.
The first part is practically a humorous sketch built on the idea of “what if all fairy tales weren’t really fairy tales?” A cat with sclerosis, Baba Yaga as the caretaker of a house-museum… In fact, it’s wonderful, and the forgetful cat with his “Let’s say, mm-eh… Poluekt…” is one of my favorite characters in this section. And the experiments with the inexhaustible coin are excellent (in our childhood we had inexhaustible “two-kopeck coins” to call our parents from payphones).
The second part is a satire on pseudo-scientists who live off demagoguery and attracting public attention. Professor Vybegallo in the novella is a typical representative of such would-be scholars. He doesn’t care about inventions or whether they actually work — he creates them not for that, but to become famous. And most of the work is done by his submissive assistants, while he prefers to pose in front of press cameras. And if you dare to refuse him — he’ll immediately appeal to state slogans, twist your words upside down, and in the end brand you a traitor to the ideals of the Party and the Motherland. There are still plenty of such slick operators today, even awarded academic titles, honors, and huge grants for fraudulent or, at best, useless discoveries.
The third part is the one closest to classic science fiction. Yes, the setting is the same. But the story itself becomes much more serious. The main characters suddenly decide to look into the strange behavior of their director, Janus Poluektovich, which they had previously taken for granted without a second thought. Here we get an intriguing hypothesis about the nature of time, and even a psychological drama. The characters’ guesses are never directly confirmed, but they look damn logical. And if they are true, you don’t even know by the end whether it is a gift for Janus — or a curse.
The only element that felt very alien to me in this part was the main character’s journey into the “described future.” Formally, it can be seen as a connecting bridge to the characters’ conjecture about the involvement of time, but the journey itself felt more like an attempt to parody the many books of that era about the future — their predictability and sameness. Perhaps it was interesting in its own time, but many years later it now feels like a kind of vestige that has lost its relevance.
It is also worth noting the interesting idea of the afterword, where supposedly the real programmer Privalov describes what the authors of the book embellished.
After finishing the book, I discussed it with other readers who also knew it from childhood. And in the course of the discussion quite a few interesting questions were raised — ones you never even think about as a child.
- Almost all of the main characters in the book are young people who don’t really need anything yet. They are the generation of those who sang “How wonderful that we are all gathered here today” and then headed en masse to build the BAM in some remote backwater. Probably for this reason, almost none of them have families. They live for the joy of their work; it is more interesting for them to spend New Year’s with colleagues solving scientific puzzles than to celebrate with friends.
- What’s more, most of them don’t even really want families. For family life and friends they leave behind their doubles — soulless clones created to carry out the tasks assigned to them. And somehow nobody is bothered by this problem. But what about the feelings of those friends, of family? This question remains unasked. Just like the friends of Alexander Privalov, whom he abandons with inexplicable ease in the first part of the book, deciding to stay and work at NIICHAVO. Yesterday they were friends, and today they are people he no longer cares about.
- Vybegallo is portrayed as a dishonest charlatan. But you could also look at him another way — he’s an excellent PR man, and it’s largely thanks to him that people in the city know about the institute at all. It’s clear that all those scientists don’t particularly need fame among ordinary folks. But perhaps if all that energy of Vybegallo’s were directed to good use, he wouldn’t be such a despised scoundrel? He could promote the institute’s work (even if he claimed the credit for himself).
- It is also interesting that the institute’s residents have a skewed sense of evil. Yes, they keep Koschei the Deathless locked up in a cage for eternity. Yet Professor Junta, once a cruel inquisitor who made a stuffed trophy out of his enemy, is quite a respected member of society.
- And what touched me most: all these wizards live incomparably long lives — for centuries, even millennia. So how do they build relationships with their loved ones? How do they cope with losing those they love? Or is that precisely why they don’t even try to form attachments to ordinary people? That is a sad thought.
Well, rereading it after many years has not taken away my love for this book. Although it is now perceived completely differently than back when I was a pioneer and believed that the Soviet Union was the best country in the world. Now you notice other nuances in it. But still, for me this is, while a good book, by no means the best work of the Strugatskys anymore. Different times — different problems concern us.
My rating: 4/5
