From ‘sots-romanticism’ to rom-com: The Strugatskiis’ Monday Begins on Saturday as a film comedy

The Strugatskii brothers’ novella Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu (Monday Begins on Saturday; 1965) imagines bright young scientists working at the cutting edge between quantum physics and folktale sorcery in a setting that was undeniably contemporary and local. I argue that the story can be best understood as ‘soc(ialist) romanticism’ – an aesthetic mode that celebrates the possibilities for individual questing and agency in late Soviet socialism. Konstantin Bromberg’s 1982 adaptation of the Strugatskiis’ story abandons both the romanticism and complexity of the novella, but, by incorporating elements of the‘youth film’, it represents a different kind of Soviet rom-com.