Yevgenii Shvarts: Three Script Evaluations

[This is the second part of my post on Soviet playwright Yevgenii Shvarts.  If you haven’t read part one, covering Shvarts’s biography and a little literary criticism, I strongly recommend you go back and do so before reading these script reports.  It will make more sense to you if you have the background provided in the earlier installment.

[These are the three script evaluations I wrote for StageArts (which is now defunct) on Shvarts plays.  I can’t remember for certain by whom I was introduced to these plays; I think it must have been my production dramaturgy professor at NYU, but I’m not sure.  (If so, she probably suggested I read The Shadow and when I found it so engaging, I went on to read the other two.)

[I only noted the sources of the texts of two of the plays—they were all in different anthologies, which is why they each use a different spelling for the author’s name—but I’m sure the books are all out of print now; they may already have been when I read them.  There’s a later edition of all three of these plays in one volume which seems to be available in both used and new copies and may still be in print: Yevgheny Shvarts, The Naked King, The Shadow and The Dragon (London/New York: Boyars, Marion Publishers, 1976).

[I see that only one of the reports is dated—but they were all written at pretty much the same time in 1984, which is when I started working at StageArts.  (I hadn’t devised a reporting form yet, so these were all written up ad hoc.)  The evaluations below are arranged in the order in which I read the plays.  (I have done a little up-dating of some historical details, but I haven’t changed my 1984 assessments.)]

THE SHADOW

Тень (Tyen’, 1940)

by Evgeny Lvovich Shvarts

Plot Synopsis:  a young Scholar, studying in a country where fairy tales come true, hears the story of a mysterious Princess who will return to the throne and rule the country when she marries.  As it turns out, the Princess is hiding out in the apartment across the street, and the Scholar sees and falls in love with her when she appears on her balcony.  The Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, not wanting to lose their positions when a new king and queen mount the throne, intrigue to prevent the marriage. 

The Scholar loses his shadow, which reappears as a rival for the Princess’s hand.  The Shadow conspires with the two ministers, and, having befriended the Scholar, deceives both the young man and the ministers, becomes engaged to the Princess, and assumes control of the country.  The Scholar, who is too innocent and honest to understand the duplicity that has been used to trick him, tries to discover why the Princess left him. 

Annunziata, the daughter of the Scholar’s landlord, has been his friend and has silently loved him since the beginning.  She tells him that his rival is his former Shadow, and tries to convince him not to pursue the Princess.  He does anyway, and the Shadow has him sentenced to death.  He is taken off and beheaded, and the Shadow’s head falls at the moment the Scholar’s is lost off-stage. 

With the help of some magic water, the Scholar is restored to life, and the Shadow, too, regains his head.  The Scholar rejects the Princess, accepts the love of Annunziata who saved his life, and leaves the country.  The Shadow disappears, and the country is left much as it was before.

Theme:  A study in duplicity and fickleness, The Shadow is a satirical comedy on social manners.  Except for the Scholar and Annunziata, all the characters are either out for personal gain or inconstant in their feelings.  Insensitivity and deception are common, and loyalty is nonexistent.

History: The Shadow was written between 1937 and 1940 specifically for the Leningrad Comedy Theater on the suggestion of director-set designer Nikolai Akimov, after The Naked King was banned from being shown in the same theater. 

The première took place on 12 April 1940 and the first edition of the text was released by the publishing house of the Comedy Theater.  The book was illustrated with Akimov’s renderings of costumes for the performance.

Subsequent productions were mounted in 1960 at the Leningrad Comedy Theater, directed and designed by Akimov; 1984 at the Leningrad Academic Theater of Comedy, directed by Yuri Aksyonov and designed by Marina Azizyan; 2003 at the Saint Petersburg Academic Comedy Theater, directed by Tatyana Kazakova and designed by Emil Kapelyush.

There have been many additional productions of The Shadow, including the most recent: in 2018 at the Winter Theater of Orekhovo-Zuevo (near Moscow), directed by Alexander N. Kalinin.  Film versions were produced in 1971 (as The Shadow) by Nadezhda Kosheverova and 1991 (as Shadow, or Maybe It’ll Work Out, a musical film) by Mikhail Kozakov.

Evaluation:  No retelling of the story, however detailed (and mine above is very simplified), could faithfully capture the flavor and style of the script.  Shvarts called the play “A Fairy tale in Three Acts,” and, indeed, it is based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale of a man who lost his shadow.  The Shadow may be his most vivid, most flamboyant, most imaginative, and most profoundly shocking work. 

The fairy-tale trappings and stylized treatment do not mask but point up Shvarts’s condemnation of the petty bureaucratic, self-serving behavior that is common no less today than it was in 1940, and in the U.S. no less than in the USSR.  The charm and off-center treatment in the play make this an irresistible adventure, and an unavoidable statement that is never the wrong time to make.  It is also great fun, and will appeal to adults and, perhaps with a few small edits, children on different levels.

The acting style of the play is far from realistic, and care would have to be taken not to overstep the bounds of the script’s innate character.  Too much buffoonery will destroy the play as fast as too much solemnity.  The play has its own charm, and does not need to be pushed.

Other Considerations:  The large cast requirement (3 Acts; 5 women, 14 men, extras) may present a problem, however, I believe there are extras that can be cut, and some possible doubling and combining of characters.  This may require some scriptual adjustments, but the effort may well prove worth it.

The play describes a number of locations around the city, but since the style is non-realistic, these need only be suggested symbolically.  Imagination is far more necessary than accuracy, and several locations can easily be suggested by the same set.

The most difficult problem in the production would be the magic.  The Scholar actually loses his shadow, a fact which is pointed out in the dialogue.  The Shadow is described as losing his head, quite literally, and regaining it just as miraculously in full view of the audience.  In the end of the play, the Shadow disappears as guards grab for him, leaving only his cape behind.  At this point, I have no idea how these tricks could be accomplished, but I am sure they can be managed with imagination, and some technical assistance from a special-effects technician.

Notes:  The style and genre of this play is different from the usual material considered by StageArts.  I provide this evaluation on the behest of Nell Robinson [one of StageArts artistic directors], who took an interest in the play when I described it to her orally.  It may, in fact, be too cumbersome to produce on a limited time and financial basis.  It is, however, an unusual play, and will not have been produced recently in New York, or the U.S. in general.  A good production of such a play might, indeed, garner some critical attention.

Source: Franklin D. Reeve, ed., An Anthology of Russian Plays: 1890-1960, Volume 2, An Anthology of Russian Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

*  *  *  *

THE NAKED KING

Голый король (Golyi korol’, 1934)

by Evgeny Shvarts

2 July 1984

Plot Synopsis:  Basically this is the story of “The Princess and the Pea” combined with “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  Heinrich, a young swineherd, falls in love with the Princess who returns his feelings.  The King Her Father sends her off to marry the neighboring King, a pompous fool.  Henry and his friend Christian follow to save her from this fate.  Along the way, the ministers of the King she is to marry endeavor to prove her royal lineage and purity (the “Princess/Pea” plot). 

When the King falls in love with her on sight, Henry and Christian pretend to be weavers with a magic cloth to show him to be a fool before the Princess’s father (the “Emperor’s Clothes” plot).  Of course, the King goes to his wedding stark naked and the people realize that all their leaders are fools and liars and revolt.  The Princess’s father flees in fear, and Heinrich turns the revolt into a salute to “love, friendship, laughter, and joy!”

Theme:  As with Shvarts’s other adult fairy tales, he presents his two main themes: the power of love and the unmasking of fools and tyrants in leadership.

History: Written in 1934, The Naked King was not published in the Soviet Union until 1960 (during the Khrushchev Thaw following the death of Joseph Stalin) because of its “dangerous allusions.”  The play’s première production in the Soviet Union was also in 1960, at Moscow’s Contemporary (Современник - Sovremennik) Theater.  Even then, it was considered an act of political tightrope-walking, but the play was popular and remained the troupe’s repertoire for decades.

In 1991, The Naked King was staged at The Russian State Theater “Satyricon” in Moscow.

Genre/Style:  Adult fairy tale; allegory

Structure:   2 acts, many scenes; panoramic

Setting:  Various locations in 2 fairy-tale kingdoms.  Realism will not work or be suitable; suggested and fanciful settings, easily shifted, would be necessary to accomplish the fast-paced scene changes.

Language:  Fanciful, stylized dialogue; much poetry and singing; non-realistic.

Characters:  Large cast with much doubling/tripling necessary.  Name characters are 1 woman (Princess), late teens-early 20’s; 6 men: 2 40-50, 2 30-40, 2 20’s.  Extras: Court ladies, Gendarmes, Soldiers, Courtiers, Ministers, Populace, etc.  (4-5 each men and women should be sufficient.)

Evaluation:  I don’t like this play as well as The Shadow, but it is amusing and pleasant.  Its large cast has many quirky characters (e.g.: the General, Officer & Sergeant who only talk in military commands) which should be fun to act.  The story is so well-known, however, that the larger issues Shvarts is raising may be lost.

The two fairy tales Shvarts amalgamated into The Naked King do not really blend seamlessly.  In fact, until the heroes establish themselves as weavers, the early part of the play seems like prologue.  It may play better than it reads, however.

Recommendation:  Second reading

Source: Franklin D. Reeve, ed., Contemporary Russian Drama (New York: Pegasus, 1968)

*  *  *  *

THE DRAGON

Дракон (Drakon, 1944)

by Yevgenii Shvarts

Plot Synopsis:  This fairy tale for adults is too complex to relate in simple form.  It is the story of Lancelot, who comes to a town ruled by a Dragon who exacts tribute in the form of a young girl every year.  The townspeople have been caring for and supporting the Dragon for 400 years, not wanting to take the action necessary to free themselves. 

The only supporters the knight finds are Charlemagne, the Keeper of Public Records, whose daughter is the next sacrifice, and his Cat.  Everyone else is afraid to meddle with the status quo.  Finally, just before the battle, Lancelot is given some magical gifts by some last-minute supporters: a flying carpet, an invisibility hat, a sword and lance, and a self-playing musical instrument.  In a fierce battle above the town square, Lancelot defeats the Dragon, chopping off his three heads one by one.  Mortally wounded, he disappears, leaving the town in the hands of the Mayor and his son, Henry.

The Mayor, declaring himself the true Killer of the Dragon, makes himself President, and Henry becomes the Mayor.  The President is forcing Elsa, Charlemagne’s daughter, to marry him.  Just as the wedding ceremony is taking place, Lancelot returns, frees the town once again, and sends the Mayor and Henry off to prison.

cast:  3 acts; 6 women, 18 men; much doubling

Theme:  Shvarts has two common themes in these adult fairy tales (The Shadow and The Naked King are of this genre): love conquers all, and good triumphs over evil.  He was a staunch anti-Fascist, and he showed tyrants to be cowards and weaklings in his works.  In The Dragon, he showed that the people prefer the “protection” of a tyrant over governing themselves.  In the end, Lancelot says that it isn’t enough to kill the Dragon, but that all the little dragons inside man also have to be killed before the town is safe from tyranny.

History: The Dragon was written in between 1942 and 1944 while Shvarts was an evacuee from besieged Leningrad in Stalinabad (formerly and currently Dushanbe), Tajikistan.  Attempts to stage the play at the Leningrad Comedy Theater, directed and designed by Nikolai Akimov, during the rules of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev ended with a ban; the first public performance took place in August 1944 in Moscow, but it was canceled after a few performances. 

The first full début of The Dragon in the Soviet Union was not until 1962, mounted by Akimov at the Leningrad Comedy Theater; the production was banned after a month.  In Moscow, the play was also staged in 1962—at the Moscow State University Student Theater, directed by Mark Zakharov; this production was banned after 17 performances.

In the early 1960s, the first foreign productions of The Dragon were mounted in Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).  Subsequently, productions were staged in France, in Saint-Étienne, Grenoble, and Bourges.

The Deutsches Theater in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, known colloquially as East Germany) holds a special place among foreign productions of The Dragon.  Directed by Benno Besson, designed by Horst Sagert, with music composed by Rainer Bredemeier, The Dragon played for the first time there in March 1965 and remained in the repertoire until the end of the 1981 season, accumulating 580 performances.  The performance was successfully presented in many countries of Eastern and Western Europe, was unanimously praised by viewers and critics, and became an event not only in German, but in world theater.

At the Pinocchio Theater in Magnitogorsk, Victor Shraiman staged the play in 1979 using dolls and masks to depict some incarnations of the Dragon, the cat Masha, and the townspeople (putting mannequins among the audience) while the main roles were played by actors.  In 1980, puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov presented a full puppet version of The Dragon in Obraztsov Puppet Theatre.

In 1969, the (East) Berlin State Opera (the state opera of the GDR) premiered the opera Lancelot, composed by Paul Dessau for a libretto (based on The Dragon) by East German playwright Heiner Müller. 

In 1988, director Mark Zakharov made the film To Kill the Dragon based on the play.  The St. Petersburg Studio of Radio of Russia broadcast a radio play version of The Dragon In 1994.

Since the turn of the 21st century, there have been no less than six production of the Shvarts’s play, the most recent being a 2017 staging at the Moscow Art Theater Chekhov (formed in 1987 after the division of the famous MAT into two companies).

Evaluation:  Like The Shadow, this play requires a considerable amount of magic in the staging.  It has fantastic characters (talking cats, donkeys and dragons) and good deal of other special effects.  The style of Shvarts’s plays is far from realistic, and a flair for the broad humor and fantasy of children’s theater is necessary.  (This is not to say that the play is a children’s play; it is decidedly a serious piece for adults.)  Color and spectacle are certainly important aspects of the production of The Dragon, and a careful balancing of the message with the fairy-tale elements will not be easy.

The characters are all creatively imaginative, though the best lines belong to the villains of the piece.  With the right kind of actors, these would be wonderful and challenging roles for performing.  The language, because of the fairy-tale aspect and the translation, can be slightly stilted, but this can be overcome with a combination of style work in rehearsal, and some retranslation.

Shvarts’s works are not often produced in this country, and are not well known.  I believe that a good production of one of his plays will be a significant theatrical event in New York.  I recommend serious consideration of this play, and Shvarts’s other works, even though they may not be easy to produce.  The large cast requirement can be dealt with by doubling many of the characters, and the magic and fantasy can be accomplished with good, creative staging.  The innate charm and uniqueness of Shvarts’s plays will certainly attract critical attention and audience appreciation.

[A quick word about the titles of these plays: because the Russian language lacks articles (a, an, the)  the titles of The Shadow and The Dragon are sometimes rendered in English as simply Dragon and Shadow.  (I’ve never seen The Naked King written without the ‘the,’ but I suppose it could be.  Theoretically, The Shadow and The Dragon could also be translated as A Shadow and A Dragon—just as Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is sometimes published as A Seagull—but I’ve never seen that, either.)

[The 1988 movie adaptation of The Dragon is listed with three English variations of the title that I’ve encountered: Kill the Dragon, To Kill the Dragon, and To Kill a Dragon.]

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.]