SUMMARY:

Using the example of the humorous science fiction novel Monday Begins on Saturday by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (1964), the article discusses how intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain, almost simultaneously, identified a crisis of faith in a fundamentally different future. Later called “postmodern” and the period of “cynical reason” (Peter Sloterdijk), a new era was characterized by a radically different perception of historical temporality. For several reasons, postwar mass culture and social sciences were isolated from theoretical physics that developed novel hypotheses, relying instead on outdated concepts of time. As a result, the popular and academic discussions of society promoted a cynical disbelief in the possibility of a truly unprecedented future and a fixation on the past and present as the only reality.
The article argues that the Strugatsky brothers wrote the novel as a rebuttal to The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960), an archetypal text for New Age mysticism and modern conspiracy theories. Originally intended as a satire on mysticism and a manifesto of a humanist version of the communist future, eventually the Strugatskys found themselves in the same trap of presentism and identified their main target as crypto-Stalinists and cynics. They could not have been acquainted with Peter Sloterdijk’s later influential treatise Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), which helps clarify, retrospectively, their take on the new age of cynicism. Surprisingly, despite its earlier creation, the Strugatskys’ novel also sheds new light on Sloterdijk’s work, resolving its major logical inconsistency. The novel also contains a potential solution to the predicament of “cynical reason.”