Monday Starts on Saturday

Afterword ^{by Boris Strugatsky}

We came up with the idea of a story about wizards, witches, sorcerers, and magicians a long time ago, at the end of the 1950s. To begin with we had no idea of what might happen in it; all we knew was that the heroes would be characters from the fairy tales, legends, myths, and ghost stories of all cultures and times. And that their adventures would take place against the backdrop of a research institute with all its foibles, well known to one of us from his own personal experience, and to the other from the many stories recounted to him by his academic friends. We spent a long time gathering together jokes and nicknames and amusing characteristics for our future characters, and wrote them all down on separate scraps of paper (which, as always happens, were later lost). But no real advance took place; we were never able to think of a story or a plot for the adventure.

For all practical purposes, everything started on a rainy evening at the Kislovodsk high-altitude station, where two colleagues on loan from the Pulkovo Observatory were cordially dying of boredom: junior researcher B. N. Strugatsky and senior engineer Lidia Kamionko. Outside, it was October 1960. I had just finished my task of finding a site for the Large Altazimuth Telescope in the damp and grassy slopes of the northern Caucasus and was waiting for the infinitely varied formalities involved in the transfer of the expedition’s property, the write-off of unused surpluses, the completion of accounts forms, and other tedious activities to be completed. And L. Kamionko, who had come to the high-altitude station to make the final adjustments to some new item of equipment, was despairingly idle because of the emphatic absence of any weather that would allow her to make astronomical observations. And so, out of sheer boredom, we started to write a little story that evening, a tale with no beginning or end, with the same rain in it, the same dim bulb without a shade hanging from the ceiling by a cord, the same damp veranda filled with old furniture and boxes of equipment, the same melancholy boredom, but which was also a story in which the most ridiculous and entirely impossible things took place: strange, clumsy figures appeared out of thin air, making magical gestures, delivering absurd and ridiculous speeches, and the whole four-page surrealist abracadabra finished with the striking words “THE SOFA HAD DISAPPEARED!!!”

I went home via Moscow and stayed with my brother (and coauthor), and there, with his family, we read this sketch out loud, provoking friendly laughter and general approval. And everything stopped there; it never occurred to us that the mysteriously disappearing sofa was a magical sofa-translator, or that the strange people described in the story were wizards chasing said translator. Everything happened as it was supposed to: several years of reflection and adaptation lay ahead of us.

It may seem strange, but the story of how Monday Starts on Saturday came to be written has completely disappeared from my memory. It has vanished to such an extent that now, when I look back over the scattered lines of letters and diaries, I catch myself losing the thread of the conversation.

And so on. Who is Prysh? What happens next? One thing is clear: whether we had something or nothing written by then, the future Monday Starts on Saturday started off looking very different from how it looked at the end.

I strongly suspect that by this time we had something written and stored away in our war chest: the Kislovodsk sketch, rewritten and bulked up to the size of a future chapter of “The Commotion over the Sofa.” And here we are, finally!

Finally! The first part of the future novel had been done, and not even three years had gone by. There was still a while to go before the whole thing was completed. A large number of notes and drafts and jokes and ideas have been preserved from that period.

And so on. It is not yet Monday Starts on Saturday; the authors are only gropingly finding a way toward it, but theirs is the true way. They are working in harmony. And quickly.

Note all this messing about with names. The authors did not yet know what the parts of the new story, or even the story itself, should be called. But at the same time, the title Monday Starts on Saturday did already exist. This is a title with its own fairly amusing history.

It should be said that the beginning of the 1960s was a time of general Hemingway worship. No one is read nowadays with such enjoyment and rapture; no one is discussed so much and so passionately; no one’s books are sought out with such fervor by every single member of the reading public, from the high school student to the college professor. And so once, while I was sitting in my office at the Pulkovo Observatory, a call came through from the city from my old friend Natasha Sventsintskaya, a woman who knew a great deal about, and read a great deal of, Hemingway (at least she did in those days). “Borya,” she said with restrained excitement. “At Dom Knigi they’ve just brought in a new book by Hem, called Monday Starts on Saturday.” My heart leaped and then sweetly repined. It was such a perfect, such an authentic Hemingway title: sad yet restrained, cruelly hopeless, cold, and oh so human all at the same time… Monday starts on Saturday: that means there is no rest in our life, our working days follow on one from another without break, what is gray will remain gray, what is dull will be forever dull… I did not hesitate for a second: “Buy it!” I snapped. “Take as many as they’ve got. At any price!” Angelic laughter down the phone line was the only reply.

It was a successful prank she played on me. And not in vain, as so often happens with jokes. I immediately squirreled away this wonderful invention, sure that it would be a perfect title for a future novel about a love affair both wondrous and hopeless. That novel was never written, nor was it ever even considered as it should have been, but the squirreled-away title lived its own life in my notebooks, waited for its opportunity, and when it came, a couple of years later, took it. True, Arkady and I gave it a completely different, one might almost say contradictory, profoundly optimistic meaning, but we never regretted it for an instant. Natasha did not complain either. In fact, I think she was even rather flattered.

And so historical justice demands that two wonderful women, former colleagues at the Pulkovo Observatory, be given due recognition for their position at the sources of what is evidently the most popular of Arkady and my stories. Stand forward, my dears: Lidia Alexandrovna Kamionko, the coauthor of the famous, plot-creating phrase “THE SOFA HAD DISAPPEARED,” and Natalia Alexandrovna Sventsintskaya, the person who thought up that infinitely sad, or perhaps joyfully optimistic, aphorism “Monday starts on Saturday”!

Overall, Monday Starts on Saturday is to a great extent a comic revue, the result of cheerful collective work.

DO WE REALLY NEED OURSELVES FOR ANYTHING? was a poster that actually did hang in one of the laboratories of, I think, the State Optical Institute.

“Down the road there comes a ZIM, and that’ll be the end of him” is an inspired verse made up by my old friend Yuri Chistakov, a great expert in composing verses in the style of Captain Lebyadkin.

“A summer dacha is my aspiration. / But where to build? Although I try and try…” is a poem from the newspaper For a New Pulkovo.

And so on, and so forth…

To conclude, I cannot keep from mentioning that the censor did not assault this new story too much. It was a funny tale, and the cavils were funny as well. So the censor categorically demanded the excision of any mention of the Zavod imeni Molotova, or Molotov Auto Factory, from the text. (“Down the road there comes a ZIM, and that’ll be the end of him.”) The thing is, at this time Molotov was a marked man, condemned and excluded from the Party, and the auto factory that bore his name was rapidly transformed into the GAZ (Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, or Gorky Auto Factory), just as the ZIS (Zavod imeni Stalina, the Stalin Factory) had already been renamed as the ZIL (Zavod imeni Likhacheva, the Likhachev Factory). Laughing loudly, the two authors suggested that the poem should read, “Down the road there comes a ZIL, / And that’ll be the end of him.” And what do you think happened? To their great surprise, Glavlit[3] eagerly agreed to this ridiculous nonsense. And in this crude form the poem was printed and reprinted several times.

But there were lots of things we were unable to save. “The minister of state security, Malyuta Skuratov,” for example. Or the line from Merlin’s story: “In the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of a hand hardened by toil…” And several other little trifles, which someone thought were harmful…

Everything (or almost everything) that was lost at that time is happily recovered in this present edition, thanks once again to the friendly and self-sacrificing efforts of the ludens[4] who have gone through a heap of all kinds of earlier editions and drafts. Sveta Bondarenko, Volodya Borisov, Vadim Kazakov, Viktor Kurilsky, and Yuri Fleishman: thanks to you all!