Yevgenii Shvarts: Biography & Literary Criticism

[In 1984 and ’85, I served as  literary advisor for the Off-Off-Broadway StageArts Theater Company in New York City.  My responsibilities included , among other things, establishing a script-reading and -evaluating process, creating a reporting format, and advising and assisting the artistic directors in matters of script selection.

[StageArts had reached a certain level of success in its five years of producing, but it wasn’t attracting the kind of attention the artistic directors wanted—and needed if the company was going to advance in the very competitive and crowded field of professional theater in New York.  The artistic directors wanted my help to find the kinds of scripts that would attract critical and funding interest.  One way to accomplish this, they observed from the theaters like theirs in the city, was to present new plays.  They wanted me to help them start a program for finding and evaluating new scripts for StageArts to produce.

[While the new-play tactic had been effective for some years by this time—it really started with the origins of Off-Off-Broadway in the Greenwich Village of the 1960s—by the ’80s, the New York theater scene was glutted with small companies presenting original plays.  I advised the artistic directors that just doing new plays was not going to get them what they wanted.  What I didn’t say was that the two women, one an actor and one a director, who founded StageArts were partial to somewhat old-fashioned plays, well-made, Realistic  plays with upbeat endings. 

[I broached the idea of finding some older plays that had been forgotten or overlooked because they were unusual.  I pressed this notion while I was soliciting and reading the original scripts the directors wanted and occasionally gave them reports on older plays by authors I thought were noteworthy but ignored—especially foreign authors who weren’t well known on the U.S. and British stages.

[One such writer was a wonderful Soviet-era playwright of whom I’d become a fan (though I’ve only read his plays; I’ve never seen one on stage), Yevgenii Shvarts (whose names are both transcribed many different ways, unfortunately: Eugene Schwartz; Yevgeny Shvarts, Evgenii Shvarts, Evgeny Shvarts, plus, mix-and-match).  He’s the author of 25 plays and the screenplays for three films, plus poems, short stories, ballet libretti, and circus sketches..

[A playwright who flourished briefly in the 1930s and ’40s but was soon blacklisted by the Soviet authorities (he was posthumously rehabilitated in the ’60s during the post-Stalin Thaw), Shvarts (1896-1958) wrote several terrific (in my opinion, of course) plays based on Russian and international fairy tales.  The plays, which are for adults even though they contain a lot of magic, include The Naked King, The Shadow,  and The  Dragon, and I’ve always wanted to persuade someone to produce one.  (Shvarts also wrote realistic plays for both adults and children, but they are of less interest.)

[Most people don’t know Shvarts but I think his plays are wonderful.  They used to get done in U.S. regional theaters, particularly The Dragon, from time to time back in the ’80s, but they never caught on big, to my disappointment.  They’d catch on nicely, I was sure, if presented well at a theater where large audiences and a more widespread press could see them—such as in New York City.. I never did persuade the StageArts leaders to mount one, however.

[Below is a short profile of the playwright, followed on 9 March by the three script reports I prepared for the StageArts artistic directors.]

Yevgenii L’vovich  Shvarts (Russian: Евгений Львович Шварц) was born on 21 (in the modern calendar) October  1896, in Kazan, Russian Empire (510 miles east of Moscow, on the Volga River), to Lev Borisovich Shvarts (1874-1940), a physician, and Maria Fyodorovna Shelkova (1875-1942), an obstetrics student (one source said she was a midwife).  Lev Borisovich was from a bourgeois family of liberal Jews who converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1895, before his marriage.  Maria Fyodorovna’s family was Russian Orthodox.

(At his baptism, Lev Borisovich changed his patronymic to Lev Vasilyevich.  Vasilii, or Basil, is a saint’s name in the Russian Orthodox Church, especially Basil the Blessed, namesake of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square, a symbol of the Russian nation.  Basil the Blessed, c. 1469-1552 or 1557, is buried in the cathedral.  For a brief explanation of Russian patronymics, see my Rick On Theater post “Michael Chekhov, Part 1,” 2 November 2019.)

The Shvarts family was especially gifted and talented. Yevgenii L’vovich’s brother, Valentin L’vovich  (1902-88) became an engineer and his grandson was the poet Andrei Olegovich Kryzhanovsky (1950-94).  His cousin Anton Isaakovich Schwartz (1896-1954), with whom he was close their whole lives, was an Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR – that is, Russia). 

Yevgenii L’vovich’s father was an accomplished surgeon and played the violin superbly and all his Shvarts relatives were musically talented and arranged evenings with recitations and performances.  The Shvartses were renowned as improvisers and wits—loquatious, bright, hot-tempered. 

His Shelkov relatives, restrained and thoughtful, were no less artistic: the whole family played in the amateur theater of Ryazan, a city about 500 miles west of Kazan (where the Shelkovs were from), and Yevgenii L’vovich’s mother, Maria Fyodorovna, was praised in the local press as a commanding actress.

Discovering that their son Zhenya (that’s Russian for ‘Gene’) not only lacked a musical ear, but was also incapable of simple recitation, his parents didn’t hide their disappointment. Without his family’s support, the shy, timid teenager could only resign himself to his certain fate.

Yevgenii L’vovich  described his father as a strong but ordinary man; he enjoyed playing the violin, singing, and taking part in the impromptu performances.  Nevertheless, Lev Vasilyevich was arrested in 1898 for revolutionary agitation among factory-workers in Kazan; he was sent into internal exile in Maykop (nearly 1,100 miles south of Kazan in the northern Caucasus), a town of about 30,000 people at the time.  This is where Yevgenii L’vovich  grew up. 

By the time he was eight, Yevgenii Shvarts knew he wanted to be a writer . . . except that he had terrible penmanship and was embarrassed to turn in completed work.  In diaries Shvarts kept in the 1950s, he wrote that his attempts at writing annoyed his teachers and that his parents, especially his father, “had already decided firmly that nothing would come of me.”  His mother often told him: “People like you grow up as losers and commit suicide.”

Shvarts finished his secondary education in natural sciences and mathematics in Maykop in 1913 and went on to study law at Moscow University from 1914 to 1916.  In Moscow, he was introduced to theater and his interest in poetry and drama sidelined his focus on the law.  Yevgenii L’vovich  began spending all the money his parents sent him on tickets for the circus and the opera—theater seats were impossible to come by, he complained.  By the end of 1916, the money had run out and the impecunious student went home to Maykop.

In the fall of 1916, Shvarts was drafted into the Russian army for the First World War (1914-18); he was destined for the front as a private, but in August 1917, he was sent to a military school for officer training,  Graduating in October, he was promoted to ensign, the army’s lowest ranking officer, a sort of under-lieutenant, established for officers commissioned through a crash course in wartime. 

The Great War was interrupted in the Russian Empire by revolution in 1917: first the February Revolution (so-called because of Russia’s old-style calendar; it actually occurred in March), which overthrew the imperial regime and declared a republic; then the October Revolution, also called the Bolshevik Revolution (November 1917), which established the communist Soviet Union.  The Russian Civil War broke out in November 1917 between the Reds, the forces of the communists, and the Whites, the forces of a coalition of anti-Soviet forces.

By the beginning of 1918, Shvarts had joined the Whites and he ended up in Yekaterinodar, the city in far-west Russia from which his father’s family came (now known as Krasnodar).  In the first major combat between the Red and White Armies, the Battle of Yekaterinodar, part of what was known as “the Ice Campaign,” was fought from 10 to 13 April 1918 and, as a consequences of the severe concussion received in the battle, Shvarts suffered shell-shock, lost several teeth, and acquired a tremor of the hands (which some sources identify as Parkinson’s Disease) that plagued him for the rest of his life. 

After a stay in the hospital, Shvarts was demobilized and in 1919, he enrolled at the university in Rostov-on-Don, where he also began working in the Theater Workshop of young experimental director Pavel Veysbrom (1899-1963; his name is sometimes also transliterated as ‘Weisbrom’ or ‘Weisbrem’), a troupe of amateurs.  In May 1920, he joined the political department of the Caucasus Front of the Red Army as an actor and theater instructor.

Also in 1920, Shvarts married actress Gayane Nikolayevna Khalaidzhieva (1898-1983). The marriage would last a decade and produce a daughter, Natalya Yevgenievna (1929-95), Shvarts’s only child.

Veysbrom’s Theater Workshop (Театральная Мастерская, also translated as Theater Studio) toured the Russian provinces and in October 1921, it moved from Rostov-on-Don to Petrograd (later Leningrad, 1924-91, and then Saint Petersburg, its original name from 1703) in an effort to turn professional.  The troupe gave its first performance in Petrograd on 8 January 1922, Gondla by Nikolai Gumilyov (1886-1921).  In the spring of 1922, however, the Workshop ceased operation, though Shvarts and his wife stayed in Petrograd, performing in sketches in fairground booths. 

The couple lived from hand to mouth on their take of the admission charge.  Shvarts also played in small theaters, but he had little acting talent, so he supplemented his meager earnings by working as a salesman in a bookstore.

During this period, Shvarts met with a group of writers called “The Serapion Brothers” (Серапионовы Братья)—the name’s a reference to a collection of short stories by the German fantasy and Gothic horror author E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822)—and began to write short satirical articles, essays, and reviews under various pseudonyms. 

In 1922 and ’23, he worked as secretary to Korney Chukovsky (1882-1969), one of the most popular children’s poets in Russia, sometimes compared to Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-91).  Shvarts soon became known as a brilliant storyteller and improviser. 

Shvarts left for the Donbass in the Ukraine with his friend, writer and memoirist Mikhail Slonimsky (1897-1972) in the summer of 1923, where he began to write.  Both men were invited to work on the miners’ newspaper All-Russian Stoker (Всероссийская кочегарка), published in the city of Bakhmut (renamed Artemivsk the next year, but returned to its original name in 2016).   

At first, Shvarts just processed readers’ letters, then he began to turn his responses into small stories, which began to gain popularity among readers.  The novice writer published a literary supplement to the newspaper called Slaughter (Забой).  In the editorial office of the newspaper, he met Nikolai Oleynikov (1898-1937), an editor, avant-garde poet, and playwright with whom Shvarts later became a friend and collaborator.

Through Oleynikov, Shvarts became close to the literary group OBERIU (ОБЭРИУ – Объединение Реального Искусства; Union of Real Art), a short-lived collective of avant-garde Surrealist, Absurdist, and Futurist writers, musicians, and artists.  Like the Serapion Brothers, the formalist experiments of the Oberiuty—as the members of the group were called (singular, “Oberiut”)—appealed to Shvarts.

(OBERIU, whose members also included actors, musicians, and filmmakers, was a sort of amalgam of Larry Kramer’s late-1980s ACT UP without the socio-political-sexual agenda and Ken Kesey’s 1960s Merry Pranksters without the drugs.  They were declared “literary hooligans” and deemed “the last Soviet avant-garde.”)

When he returned from the Donbass, from the second half of 1924 to October 1925, Shvarts worked as executive secretary of Leningrad magazine, an illustrated literary magazine published by the Leningrad branch of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP).  Then he went to the Rainbow (Радуга) children’s book publishing house, where he worked until 1928. 

Between 1925 and 1931, Shvarts also worked in the children’s department of the State Publishing House (Госиздат – Gosizdat) under the leadership of Samuil Yakovlevich (S. Y.) Marshak (1887-1964), a poet, playwright, translator, literary critic, and screenwriter who was also the author of popular children’s books.

In 1924, Shvarts’s first children’s book, The Story of the Old Balalaika (Рассказ старой балалайки), a collection of poems, was published in the July issue of Sparrow (Воробей; renamed New Robinson in August 1924), a children’s almanac (an ongoing series of literary, artistic, and/or popular science works, united by any criterion).  

After 1925, Schwartz became a regular contributor to the children’s magazines Hedgehog (Ёж – abbreviation of Ежемесячный Журнал [Monthly Magazine]; ёж is also the word for ‘urchin’) and Chizh (Чиж – ‘siskin,’ a kind of finch; I’ve also seen this title rendered as Canary, a variety of finch), and his first story as a separate book came out.  Later, there were other books for children: The War of Parsley and Shaving-Chisels (Война Петрушки и Стёпки-растрёпки, 1925), Camp (Лагерь, 1925), Balloons (Шарики, 1929), among others.

On 21 September 1929, the Leningrad Youth Theater (Ленинградский Театр Юных Зрителей or ЛенТЮЗ – officially the State Theater for Young Audiences [LenTYUZ]) staged Schwartz’s first play, Underwood (Ундервуд), about a witch who steals a typewriter but whose plan is foiled by a brave little orphan girl.  The audience received the play well, but the responses of Daniil Ivanovich Harms (1905-42), an Oberiut, and Marshak, who was his boss at Golizdat, were cold.  Nonetheless, Shvarts continued to write for the stage and the Leningrad Youth Theater mounted his plays Island 5-K (Остров 5-К, 1932) and The Treasure (Клад, 1933).

While he was associated with LenTYUZ, Shvarts began collaborating with Nikolai Akimov (1901-68), an experimental theatre director and scenic designer, to write contemporary plays based on the folk and fairy tales of Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75).  Among these adaptations are The Princess and the Swineherd (Принцесса и свинопас, 1934 – parts of the story is from “The Swineherd”),The Naked King (Голый Король, 1937 – from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” with elements of “The Princess and the Pea”), The Shadow (Тень, 1940), and The Snow Queen (Снежная Королева, 1948), reworked and adapted to contemporary—often political—reality.  (Shvarts’s stage versions of The Snow Queen and The Shadow were made into movies in 1967 and 1971, respectively.  Akimov was the scenic and costume designer for Shvarts’s 1947 film of Cinderella.)

In 1930, changes took place in the writer’s family life: he left his first wife and their six-month-old daughter and married Yekaterina Ivanovna Zilber (née Obukh, 1904-63), whom he met in May 1928.  They were both married to others at the time they began their liaison, and they divorced their spouses to be together.  Shvarts dedicated the play An Ordinary Miracle (Обыкновенное чудо, published 1956) to Yekaterina Ivanovna, whom he called Katya.  His first wife, Gayane Nikolayevna, became the prototype of the stepmother in the 1947 film Cinderella (Золушка – Zolushka [zola is ‘ash’ or ‘cinder’ in Russian]; written 1945).

In the years after his remarriage, Shvarts wrote a lot and was very successful, composing novels, short stories, poems, plays for children and adults, funny captions for drawings in Hedgehog and Chizh, satirical revues, libretti for ballets, comic sketches for the circus, puppet plays, and movie scripts.

Shvarts attained recognition as a children’s author: on 1 July 1934, he was admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR.  After the magazine Chizh was shut down (for being apolitical and bourgeois), Shvarts wrote mainly plays and screenplays.  Uncharacteristically tough when it came to principles, Shvarts refused to renounce his convicted friend, Oberiut poet Nikolai Oleynikov, in 1931, and helped the family of another friend who’d been arrested, poet Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-58). 

When asked about his literary activities, Shvarts commonly responded: “I am writing everything except denunciations.”  In 1940, he wrote the play The Shadow, which was banned immediately after its première on 12 April at the Leningrad Comedy Theater (Ленинградский Театр Сатиры и Комедии – literally, Leningrad Theater of Satire and Comedy).  The Shadow is anti-Fascist political satire and the Soviet Union had entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany the year before.

The Shadow, based on Andersen’s tale of the same title, tells the story of a young scholar who falls in love with a princess, only to have his Shadow, an evil force, separate itself from him and seek the Princess for itself.  Through various machinations, the Shadow also gains power over government officials and uses them for its own ends.  Then the Scholar begins to wonder if the Shadow could survive if he died.  Told with considerable wit and irony, this fantasy also raises questions about the relationship of power to those being governed.  Could it survive without their acquiescence? 

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the pact was terminated and World War II (1939-45), known as the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная война) in the USSR, came to Russia.  Shvarts tried to join the militia, the reserve of the armed forces convened during the war as a home guard.  The writer hid his shaking hands behind his back, but when Shvarts went to sign the papers, the local military commissar noticed his hand tremor, which precluded him from firing a rifle, and Shvarts was rejected for militia service. 

When Leningrad was besieged by the forces of the Third Reich (from 8 September 1941 until 27 January 1944), Shvarts spoke at recruiting stations and wrote anti-Hitler sketches and plays for the radio.  At night, on the roof of the Writers’ Skyscraper (Писательский небоскрёб – also called the Writers’ House)—where he served as a civil defense warden, he and Yekaterina Ivanovna were on duty: Shvarts made sure all “lighters,” as they called incendiary bombs (зажигалка/zazhigalka is the Russian word for ‘cigarette lighter’), were extinguished and his wife set up an aid station for the wounded. 

Between July and December 1941, Shvarts broadcast from the Radio Center (Радиоцентр) and in August 1941, the Leningrad Comedy Theater premièred Under the Linden Trees of Berlin (Под липами Берлина), an anti-fascist play about the projected capture of Berlin by the Soviet troops Shvarts wrote with Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958). 

On 11 December 1941, the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council decided to evacuate Shvarts and his wife from Leningrad by plane and airlifted them to Kirov, 860 miles east.  For the evacuation, the baggage limit was 22 pounds per person so Shvarts took a typewriter with him, and burned the diaries from his youth and his manuscripts—his entire archive, accumulated over 45 years of life.  After the siege, Shvarts was awarded the Leningrad Defense Medal.

In Kirov, the writer worked for the regional theater until July 1943.  During this period, he wrote the plays Far Land (Далекий край, 1943), about children in an orphanage evacuated from Leningrad, and One Night (Одна ночь, 1944), about the defenders of Leningrad.  He also started working on The Dragon (Дракон, written 1942-44), arguably, his most popular play abroad. 

The Dragon is a political satire aimed at totalitarianism in all forms and was banned from the stage by both Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), the head of the USSR from 1922 till his death, and Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), Soviet leader from 1958 to 1964.  The story of the effort of Lancelot to liberate people in a land suffering under a dragon’s brutal rule, the play wasn’t fully staged in the Soviet Union in Shvarts’s lifetime. 

In 1943, LenTYUZ was evacuated in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan (then officially called the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the city was named Stalinabad until 1962), and Shvarts went there and served as literary manager of the theater. 

In May 1944, he moved to Moscow with LenTYUZ and in August, the première of The Dragon was staged there with Akimov directing and designing the sets and costumes.  Ostensibly, the play was about Hitler and totalitarianism, which wrenched the souls out of people; this was the power of the Dragon after death.  However, any Soviet citizen would have recognized the Dragon as Stalin—and after only three performances of the début production in Moscow, the play was banned.

(The Dragon’s toady, the corrupt Mayor, was seen by Russian audiences as Nikita Khrushchev, one of Stalin’s closest advisers at the end of the Soviet leader’s tenure.  In the play, Heinrich, the Mayor, takes over after the Dragon is slain—there is no true relief from tyranny—and, as if predicting the future, Khrushchev did succeed Stalin as head of the USSR in 1958, following a caretaker premier.)

The Dragon wasn’t properly mounted in the Soviet Union until 1962 (in Leningrad), 18 years after it premièred and four years after Shvarts died (and nine years after Stalin died).  Stalin’s death initiated what became known as the Khrushchev Thaw (Хрущевская Оттепель), a component of the new premier’s de-Stalinization reforms.  (A filmed version of the play, To Kill the Dragon [Убить дракона], was produced in 1988.)

After the war, Shvarts again began to keep diaries.  Along with events of the day and memories, he recorded notes for plays.  From these notes, the writer compiled the Telephone Book (Телефонная Книга) with almost 200 portraits of Shvarts’s contemporaries drawn from his memoirs.  According to Shvarts’s script for the film Cinderella (1947), it was shot from a screenplay based on these notes and character sketches, as was Don Quixote (Дон Кихот, 1957) and others.

In the last period of his life, Shvartz wrote several more plays, among them An Ordinary Miracle, which premièred in January 1956 at Moscow’s Theater Studio of the Film Actor (Театр-Студия Киноактёра) and then played at the Leningrad Comedy Theater in April.  In March 1956, the Main Directorate of Arts of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR (Главное Управление по Делам Искусств Министерства Культуры РСФСР) approved Yevgenii L. Shvarts for membership on the artistic council of the Leningrad Comedy Theater.

After suffering several heart attacks, when the doctors prescribed him bedrest, the writer fell into apathy and stopped working in anticipation of his death, which he called “a day of incredible length.”  He joked darkly that he’d subscribed to the 30-volume collected works of Charles Dickens (1812-70) and wondered on which volume “this will happen.”  It happened at the third, his beloved Pickwick Papers: on 15 January 1958, Yevgenii L’vovich  Shvarts died in Leningrad; he was 61 years old.  His last words were: “Katya, save me!”

Shvarts is a hard fellow to suss out.  He was timid and easily frightened, even avoiding “dangerous” places of novels and stories he was reading.  After he’d read War and Peace as a teenager, for instance,  he didn’t know how the duel between Pierre Bezukhov and Fyodor Dolokhov ended because he’d skipped over it!  Even in his own writing, he avoided despair; in his play One Night, about the Siege of Leningrad, he gives the audience hope. 

Yet he fought in World War I and the Russian Civil War and tried to volunteer for the militia in World War II.  Instead of evacuating the city during the Siege of Leningrad, he served in the fire brigade in his building and stood watch on the roof.

He was committed to anti-totalitarianism, which is why he fought for the Whites against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, but he went to work for the Red Army in Rostov-on-Don, served the Soviet Union in the Siege of Leningrad, and took jobs at Soviet state agencies and on state-controlled journals.  (He also joined writers’ organizations such as RAPP, which were government sanctioned and controlled, but in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, membership in such unions was a requirement in order to work in the profession represented.) 

During the Second World War, Shvarts participated in propaganda activities like his radio broadcasts and even wrote an essentially propagandistic, anti-Hitler play in Under the Linden Trees of Berlin.  Before the war, however, he’d bravely stood up for friends who’d run afoul of Stalin’s authoritarian regime. 

He was an anti-communist—but he was a Russian patriot.  During the war and the Siege of Leningrad. Shvarts wrote a number of other Realistic, patriotic plays.  I’ve mention Under the Linden Trees of Berlin and, earlier, One Night and Far Land, but Brother and Sister (Брат и сестра, 1940) and Our Hospitality (Наше гостеприимство, 1941) also extolled the courage and resourcefulness of the Russian people.

His writing was full of such dichotomies as well, of a more literary nature, to be sure.  He composed eccentric fiction that on one level dramatize fairy tales suitable for children, yet on another, contain political commentary.  He wrote for both adults and children but when he addresses children, adults carefully listen to him and whatever he wrote for adults, regardless of its depth, is accessible to children’s understanding. 

The writer’s dramaturgy also has a split personality.  He mixed startling visual effects, acrobatic movements, contrasting moods, and moments of improvised humorous dialogue like Commedia dell’Arte.  He used a wide variety of literary devices to create his dramas, blending fantasy, irony, parody, lyricism, and lampoon, often one after another but sometimes together in a scene.  Indeed, the action of his plays is marked by swift transitions from one tone to another. 

Shvarts didn’t engage in direct allegory in his fairy tale plays.  He preferred to mix or muddle his sources so as to obscure his intentions.  He generates an ambiguity so engaging that the official censors can’t easily suss out his criticism—at least not as it pertains to the Soviet regime.

In this way, his plays and stories are simultaneously witty and wise adult fairy tales that are straightforward yet evocative socio-political satires, unique fare during the era of strict Socialist Realism.  He took familiar fairy tales and legends and transmuted them into satirical parables about contemporary life.  He used fairy-tale characters and a fantastic environment to comment on the international scene, the Soviet system, or human nature In general.  In Shvarts’s world, fairy-tale heroes and heroines don’t just “come to life” as in a Disney movie.  They meld organically with the real world.  

This was how Shvarts communicated his contemporary themes without literally spelling them out.  One of the playwright’s most unique attributes was that while, in his political commentary, he was ostensibly writing against Fascism and Hitlerian authoritarianism, Russian audiences could see, without being told, that his criticisms simultaneously fit Stalinism and the Soviet state.  It’s part of what compelled the Soviet authorities alternately to ban and permit the publication and production of his work:  They were often unsure what he was up to!

(This always reminds me of the Antigone of French playwright Jean Anouilh, 1910-87.  Staged in 1944, during the German occupation of France in World War II, it was a thinly disguised indictment of the Nazi occupiers and their French enablers—but the German occupiers didn’t twig to Anouilh’s message.  Stalin’s repressors in the Soviet Union often fell for Shvarts’s similar deception.)

One trait of his dramaturgy was his base language, a sort fable-speak reminiscent of Aesop.  (Another practitioner was American humorist James Thurber, 1894-1961, who also wrote short fables—of a more directly humorous vein.)  This somewhat artificial language made Shvarts’s meaning rather elastic—much to the consternation of the official minders. 

The playwright’s socio-political critiques were openly aimed at Hitler and Nazi totalitarianism, but they were equally, though less obviously, applicable to the USSR’s capitalist allies (that is, principally the United Kingdom, France, and—after 1941—the United States), as well as, by implication, to Stalin and his authoritarian regime.

Among Shvarts’s main inspirations were the fabulists Hans Christian Andersen, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Frenchman Charles Perrault (1628-1703; his 1698 version of Cinderella was the basis for Shvarts’s film script); he also drew on indigenous Russian folktales.  He stubbornly revived an interest in fairy tales at a time when they were viewed with skepticism and disapproval by the state for being bourgeois and incompatible with socialist practicality and rationality.

Philosophically, he was influenced by the late-19th-century French symbolists, who believed in the duality in life as expressed in the “correspondences” described by French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67): the pairing of the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible, the material and the mystical.  The Shadow is a study of this “doubleness,” displaying one person’s capacity for both good and evil and honesty and duplicity.

With respect to style, Shvarts borrowed from another great theatrical contemporary and fellow Russian, Yevgenii Vakhtangov (1883-1922), a director and actor who helped found the famed Moscow Art Theater.  The Vakhtangov principal Shvarts’s plays (as well as his poems and stories) adopted was “Fantastic Realism” (Фантастический Реализм), which manifested a joyful theatrical dualism. 

Fantastic Realism can be seen as a blending of Stanislavsky’s psychological Realism with Meyerhold’s extreme stylization.  Vakhtangov saw that Realism is capable of revealing only that part of truth which can be perceived by the five senses, while the more profound aspects of truth are seen in mystery and myth, expressed by chimerical and dreamlike figures rather than the flesh-and-blood characters of the material world.

While Vakhtangov devised Fantastic Realism for stage production, Shvarts adapted the concept for his dramaturgy.  Vakhtangov would add this vision onto a script such as Erik IV by August Strindberg (1849-1912), but Shvarts wove Fantastic Realism into his scripts and screenplays.

Shvarts liked to play with words, twisting them into puns, taking idioms literally, reviving old meanings of words and expressions, and much of the humor in his plays comes from this tactic.  He frequently took a fairy-tale cliché, and adapted its literal meaning to the plot or took an everyday phrase and put it into the mouth of a fairy-tale character. 

Cinderella, the 1947 film, is a model of this practice.  As with all Shvarts’s fairy-tale scripts, familiar fairy-tale stereotypes transform and spectators accept the new conditions of fairy-tale life.  For instance, the Stepmother (the character, you’ll recall, modeled after Shvarts’s first wife, Gayane Nikolayevna) is indignant with the King, scolding him: “And put on the crown!”  Such behavior is more like the old lady from next door, not fairy-tale characters.  The King in Cinderella isn’t a crowned monarch seated majestically on a throne, but an ordinary guy who simply works as a king and talks about his workaday problems:

Here, for example, Puss in Boots.  Nice guy, smart, but when he comes in, he will take off his boots and sleep somewhere by the fireplace.  Or, for example, Tom Thumb [literally, “Finger Boy” – Мальчик-с-Пальчик]. Well, he’s playing hide and seek all the time.  And try to find him.  It’s a shame!

Is this the pathos of a royal personage?  These are just the day-to-day complaints of royal life.  In another scene, the Fairy [Godmother] says, “It’s bad for your health not to go to the ball when you deserve it,” and in another, the Page quips, “I’m not a wizard yet, I am only a pupil.”  Here are some more samples of dialogue from this script (courtesy of IMDb):

King: [to Prince] Why won’t you talk?

Prince: [Smitten by Cinderella] I can’t.

King: [to Cinderella] Don’t believe him, he can talk!  He talks very well.  He even recites poetry.

Cinderella: I have to go!

Prince: [Blocking her way] No, please don’t!  I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided that after the ice-cream was served, I’d tell you that I was in love with you.

(As this snippet from Shvarts’s Cinderella demonstrates, I think, there are considerable echoes of his style and approach in the popular 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress [music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller, and Marshall Barer], based on Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.”  Mattress has a very similar satirical and irreverent take on the fairy tale itself, but lacks Shvarts’s political critique.  Without an extensive search, I haven’t seen any acknowledgement that Rogers, Barer, Thompson, and Fuller deliberately took inspiration from Shvarts—or, indeed, even knew of his work.)

[My evaluation reports on The Shadow, The Naked King, and The Dragon will be posted on Monday, 9 March.  The reports were written in 1984, though I took this opportunity to up-date the history notes, but not the assessments themselves, to include information I didn’t have at the time.]