Line #5 Literature/TaleOfTheTroika


1	The sequel to ''Literature/MondayBeginsOnSaturday'' by the Creator/StrugatskyBrothers. In this novel, the enthusiastic mage-scientists from ''Monday'' have to tackle the [[ObstructiveBureaucrat impenetrable Soviet bureaucracy]], represented by a group of rogue administrators who lord it over a SecretGovernmentWarehouse. The Brothers created two complementary versions of the novel, [[SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism one more idealistic, and the other more cynical]]. This is reflected throughout both works, and their endings. The settings, characters, and the overall plot in each story are all very similar in some ways, and very different in others.
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3	!!Tropes found in the novel:
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5	* ArtifactOfDoom: Vunyukov's Great Round Seal, which is capable of fulfilling '''any''' bureaucratic order. It's also slowly corrupting its possessor and even the people around.
6	* BewareTheNiceOnes: Angry Fyodor Simeonovich is just as scary as [[UsefulNotes/SpanishInquisition Cristobal]] [[MemeticBadass Junta]].
7	* CoolOldGuy: The Great Ancient Squid Spyridon serves as such.
8	* FantasticRacism: Gabby is a Bedbug supremacist, who sees humans as an inferior species.
9	* FourTemperamentEnsemble: Not the protagonists, but the members of the Troika: Vunyukov is phlegmatic, Farfurkis is melancholic, Khlebovvodov is choleric, Vybegallo is sanguine.
10	* FromNobodyToNightmare: In one of the versions of the novel, Lavr Vunyukov originally was a petty inspector who was inspecting the ExtranormalInstitute. He was lost in a Pocket Universe and took it over, becoming one big father of all {{Obstructive Bureaucrat}}s.
11	* GraveHumor: Everything Panurge says in the first edition of the novel.
12	* LastNameBasis: [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] with Farfurkis. No one knows his first name. No one ever wants to know.
13	* ObstructiveBureaucrat: The Troika of Rationalization and Utilization of Unexplained Phenomena, all three [[AlternateContinuity (or four)]] of them.
14	* PublicDomainCharacter: Panurge in the first edition is a character from ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' by François Rabelais.
15	* RealLifeWritesThePlot: The first version read like another section of ''Monday''. The same four young scientists/mages went to a nearby city of Kitezhgrad (frequently mentioned through ''Monday'') to retrieve several inconsequential artifacts from storage, ended up battling the bureaucracy and eventually won by fighting the system from within. Unfortunately by the time the book was finished the censorship became tougher (as part of Brezhnev's removal of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev_Thaw The Thaw]] legacy). The second version featured only Privalov and Amperyan (the younger and weaker guys) sent to the pocket universe to investigate the Troika situation. They tried to confront and subvert Troika in various ways, but ended up [[BecomingTheMask joining them]] and were only saved by DeusExMachina. In this version [[spoiler:sending them was a SecretTestOfCharacter set up by older wizards, and the question was not if they succeed, but [[UnwinnableTrainingSimulation how long will they last]] before succumbing to conformity]].
16	** The whole story was a turning point changing the tone of Strugatskys' works to pessimistic.
17	* WeWillMeetAgain: At the end of the second edition, Vunyukov makes classical villain's "We will meet again!" speech, delivered in his usual bureaucratic manner.
18	* SecretGovernmentWarehouse: And very poorly organized at that...
19	* SmallNameBigEgo: Gabby the talking bedbug takes this trope up to eleven.

Context Literature / TaleOfTheTroika