Monday Begins on Saturday

Monday Begins on Saturday (Russian: Понедельник начинается в субботу) is a 1965 satirical science fantasy novel by Soviet writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, with illustrations by Yevgeniy Migunov.

After the two find out that he is a programmer, they convince him to stay in Solovets and work together with them in the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry (abbreviated NIIChaVo in Russian, which sounds very close to "Ничего", the word for "nothing").

The book contains a large number of references to well-known Russian fairy tales and children's stories: Baba Yaga makes an appearance as do Zmey Gorynych and the Learned Cat from Pushkin's "Ruslan and Lyudmila", who turns out to be a slightly demented bard.

Fyodor Simeonovich Kivrin, the head of the Department of Linear Happiness, is a stuttering big guy, an eternal optimist, an apprentice programmer, a fan of Erle Stanley Gardner, and a mentor of sorts to Privalov.

Much of the action centers on the laboratory of Amvrosiy Ambroisovich Vybegallo (roughly "one who runs out", a fictional surname based on ancient Polish-Lithuanian names like Jagiello), a professor whose gargantuan experiments are spectacularly wasteful and crowd-pleasing but utterly unscientific.

Immediately upon hatching the model attempts to consume the whole universe, but Roman Oyra-Oyra manages to stop him by throwing at him a genie in a bottle, clear allusion to a Molotov cocktail.