It’s interesting that Evgeny Schwartz’s name isn’t all that widely known. But his plays and the films based on them are another matter entirely. What’s more, they’re known far beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union, as his works were staged not only in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. There have been theatrical productions and film adaptations in West Germany, the US, France, the UK, and other countries.
If his name still doesn’t ring a bell, let me just name some of his best-known works: “The Dragon” (adapted into the Soviet film “Kill the Dragon“), “The Shadow,” “The Tale of Lost Time,” “The Naked King,” “An Ordinary Miracle,” and others. If you’re from Eastern Europe, you’ve almost certainly heard of at least one of them.
I love his plays, and I’ve often wondered how works like these could ever have been published and staged in Soviet times. Because they raise questions that are anything but simple, and behind the fairy-tale facade, the allusions to the Soviet tyranny of those years are quite recognizable.
For example, many people assume that the film “Kill the Dragon,” released in 1988 and directed by Mark Zakharov (who had previously made another wonderful adaptation of Schwartz’s work, “An Ordinary Miracle“), could only have appeared thanks to the wave of Perestroika and Glasnost. But the play “The Dragon” was written… in 1944. Yes, it was presented as an anti-Hitler play. But even back then, many understood that there were, shall we say, certain nuances. And yet the play was published and staged in theaters.
And then, about a year ago, a book about Evgeny Schwartz’s life came out. I couldn’t pass it up. I wanted to understand who this man was, how he could write works that were so kind and yet so fiercely critical of the reality around him.
Natalia Gromova’s “Evgeny Schwartz: The Fate of a Storyteller in the Age of the Dragon” is a biography of the playwright (and that’s exactly what he preferred to call himself, always doubting whether he was really a writer). It’s based both on his own diaries and on numerous recollections by other people of that era who, in one way or another, had crossed paths with Evgeny Schwartz.
Schwartz struggled for a long time to decide on a profession. His youth fell in the early 20th century, shaken first by World War I and then by the Russian Revolution. He lived under the rule of both the Whites and the Reds before finally settling in Petrograd, where he briefly worked as an assistant to Korney Chukovsky and then joined the newly established children’s literature editorial department headed by Samuil Marshak.
I won’t go into the details of his biography. You’re better off reading the book for that. What’s amazing is that he was surrounded by people we now know either from Russian literature textbooks or from history textbooks describing various periods of terror.
Evgeny Schwartz was fortunate enough to work with talented writers who, I’m sure, helped him grow as a creative person himself. And yet, toward the end of his life, he believed he’d never had any real friends. He was shy and constantly doubted himself, while those around him saw him as someone who knew how to offer support and look at what was happening with a sense of humor (even when storms were raging inside Schwartz himself).
In the late 1930s, many of his colleagues and friends were arrested, convicted, and executed. He himself was always expecting to be arrested. But somehow, he escaped that fate.
In the first days of the Great Patriotic War, he tried to join the people’s militia but was rejected on health grounds and remained in Leningrad. During the siege, he and his wife stayed in the city for a long time. Every night, he stood watch on rooftops, putting out incendiary bombs. Eventually, he gave in to persuasion and, utterly exhausted, finally left the city.
When the persecution of Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko began, he was one of the few who supported them and continued meeting with them despite the danger of doing so. At one of the meetings where they were being denounced, he even dared to shout out that it was a blatant lie.
And through all of this, he just kept writing and writing:
- 1934 — the play “The Naked King”
- 1938 — “The Snow Queen,” based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale
- 1940 — the play “The Shadow,” also based on Andersen’s work
- 1944 — the play “The Dragon” (although censorship problems arose after its first productions)
- 1945 — the screenplay for the film “Cinderella,” written specifically for actress Yanina Zheymo (many people have always wondered how a 36-year-old woman could play a young Cinderella, but the book explains that Evgeny Schwartz and director Nadezhda Kosheverova essentially rescued the actress from a terrible psychological crisis, during which she had even begun forgetting letters of the alphabet)
- 1956 — the play “An Ordinary Miracle”
His biography shows what an extraordinary person Schwartz was. And it’s absolutely baffling how he managed to write works like these without falling under the hammer of repression. Well, to be precise, they did come for him, and he was summoned for “conversations” at the MGB (the Soviet Ministry of State Security). But he was never actually arrested. And through it all, he kept joking. Perhaps that was the only way to cope with life in an atmosphere of constant surveillance and fear. The book recounts one episode when, after yet another “conversation” during the campaign against cosmopolitans (read: Jews), he ran into the artist Miney Kuks outside the MGB building and asked:
“I don’t understand what they want from us. Everything seems to be in order. Two fine Russian surnames: Kuks and Schwartz.”
You’d think it simply couldn’t happen: a man almost openly supports people he’s not supposed to support, writes plays with practically blatant “hidden meanings” — and somehow he’s still alive. Back then, that could hardly have failed to raise suspicions: was he informing on people to the right authorities? Although they were executing even their own informers left and right in those days.
Which makes it all the more astonishing that his entire biography, and all the recollections of the people around him, suggest that he really was an honest man who had apparently simply stopped being afraid. And through his plays, he found a way to cope with that constant sense of fear all around him. Only after 1953 (the death of Joseph Stalin) would he begin writing more openly in his diaries about what had happened in earlier years. Until then, he simply remained a decent human being, not just in words but in deeds.
So why did he survive and manage to pass his wonderful plays down to us? Perhaps it was that very “ordinary miracle.”
My rating: 4/5
