Monday Begins on Saturday: Encyclopedia II - Monday Begins on Saturday - Characters and Events

Monday Begins on Saturday - Characters and Events

The novel is written from the point of view of a young programmer from Leningrad, Aleksandr Ivanovich Privalov, who picks up two hitchhikers during a road trip. After the two find out that he is a programmer, they manipulate him to stay in Solovets and work in the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry.

The book contains a number of colorful characters. Modest Matveevich Kamnoedov (whose surname translates to "stone-eater") is an utterly idiotic administrator who does not understand the "Monday begins on Saturday" work ethic. On New Year's Eve, he directs Privalov to turn off the lights and lock all doors, but Privalov soon finds out that everyone is still at the institute and research continues. The archetypically rude Vitka Korneev claims to leave a "double" working in his lab, though Privalov figures out that this double is Vitka himself, because doubles never sing or show any emotion.

Much of the action centers on the laboratory of Amvrosiy Ambroisovich Vybegallo (roughly "one who runs out"), a professor whose spectacular experiments please the public but accomplish little in the way of science. On New Year's Day, he "hatches" a "model consumer" who desires everything and can take whatever he wants. This would lead to disaster, but resourceful Roman Oyra-Oyra brings a bottle with a genie in order to destroy the consumer, called a "cadaver" in the institute's jargon.

The final part of the book concerns the mystery of Yanus Poluektovich Nevstruev, the director of the institute, who is known to be one man in two copies, called A-Yanus and U-Yanus. This is a fact that is generally not questioned, until, due to a number of peculiar events, the main characters find out that U-Yanus is a future version of A-Yanus who has turned himself back in time so that at the midnight of each day he goes to the previous day instead of the next one.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Characters and Events", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki