the vivarium is staffed by Alfred, a vampire. The novel is remarkable for its colorful characters. For example, Cristóbal Josevich Junta was formerly a Grand Inquisitor, and is now the head of the Department of the Meaning of Life. He is also a talented taxidermist. It is rumored that his collection includes a Standartenführer of the SS, an erstwhile friend of Junta's and also a taxidermist. Cristóbal Josevich, so goes the rumor, was equally skilled, only faster. 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. Modest Matveevich Kamnoedov (whose surname translates to "stone-eater") is an archetypal administrator and bureaucrat 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. For example, the archetypically rude Viktor Korneev (usually called Vitka) claims to have left his clone to work in his lab, which Privalov recognizes to be Korneev himself, because clones never sing or show any emotion. 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. In his quest for an "ideal man" he creates a model of "partially satisfied man" (allusion to Soviet dogma that under Communism all people will be perfect and will have all their needs satisfied, and that Soviet socialism is an intermediate state on the path to full Communism) which eats inordinate amounts of raw offal achieving ever shortening periods of lethargic "full satisfaction", until it begins eating without ever stopping and eventually bursts, literally. On a New Year's Day Vybegallo hatches up his ultimate creation, a "model of a completely satisfied man" who can instantly satisfy all of his wants. 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. Vybegallo is modeled in large part on Trofim Lysenko, the charlatan and politico responsible for many setbacks in the science of genetics in