Yevgeny Shvarts

• Born: October 21, 1896
• Birthplace: Kazan, Russia
• Died: January 15, 1958
• Place of death: Komarovo, U.S.S.R.

Other Literary Forms

Yevgeny Shvarts began his literary career in the 1920’s as a writer of poetry and stories for children. In the 1930’s, he wrote some prose adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales; in the 1940’s, he wrote a number of original, realistic stories for children about contemporary life. The best-known of these, Pervoklassnits (1947; the first grader), was made into a film in 1948. Other film scenarios by Shvarts include Razbudite Lenochku (1933; wake up, Lenochka), Zolushka (1947; Cinderella), and Don Quixote (1957).

Achievements

Yevgeny Shvarts succeeded, perhaps better than any other Soviet playwright, in popularizing the formally sophisticated avant-garde theatrical styles that reached their maturity under Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920’s but then, in the Stalinist years from 1930 to 1956, either were repressed for political reasons or lost out in competition with the old, established realist tradition of the Moscow Art Theatre and the new tradition of socialist realism. Shvarts is an anomaly because he made his major contributions to the Soviet avant-garde tradition in the period from 1934 to 1944, after that tradition was dead or dying or had gone underground elsewhere in Soviet theater.

Shvarts drew the materials for his plays from stories that had become familiar in Soviet mass culture through published translations of fairy tales by Andersen and Charles Perrault and of popular versions of medieval romances. He also drew on nonliterary sources—his audience’s collective memory of Russian folktales. He elegantly reworked these materials drawn from popular and folk sources, transforming them in his stylized adaptations. He succeeded in returning them to popular theater and film, where they enriched Soviet popular culture both as individual classics and as continuations of the 1920’s avant-garde tradition.

Shvarts is officially recognized in the Soviet Union primarily for his adaptations of fairy tales for children’s theater. His versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Snow Queen,” and “Cinderella” are part of the standard repertoire of Soviet children’s theaters and children’s film series. He is also officially recognized for some of the works that he wrote for adult audiences, such as his screenplay for the Soviet version of Don Quixote. Yet he receives only unofficial recognition for his three major political plays: The Naked King, The Shadow, and The Dragon.

The political question yet to be resolved in official Russian scholarship is whether, as political satire, these three plays are aimed exclusively at Fascist Germany or whether their target is Stalinist Russia as well. Shvarts’s Soviet biographer Sergei Tsimbal asserted that these plays are anti-Fascist satires. In the brief period between 1960 and 1962, however, when Nikita Khrushchev’s regime gave official support to anti-Stalinist literature and criticism, there was some official recognition that Shvarts’s political plays might have been directed against both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. For one brief theatrical season in 1960, the political plays were performed in official, professional theaters and were finally published in a 1960 edition of Shvarts’s major plays. Yet, 1960 turned out to be the only year when The Dragon and The Shadow passed official censorship either for publication or for performance in a professional theater. As a result, Shvarts’s Soviet reputation as a political satirist is based almost entirely on his place in the repertoire of unofficial, amateur theaters, which frequently perform The Dragon and The Shadow.

Biography

Yevgeny Lvovich Shvarts was born on October 21, 1896, in the city of Kazan on the Volga River. His father, Lev Borisovich Shvarts, was from a Jewish family and worked as a provincial doctor. He was one of the many liberals of Anton Chekhov’s generation who dedicated themselves to the gradual reform of Russian society through their work as educated professionals (doctors, teachers, and so on) within the provincial government. Shvarts’s mother, Maria Fyodorovna, came from a Russian Orthodox family, was well educated generally, and was particularly interested in theater. The family moved several times in Shvarts’s youth—from Kazan to Dmitrov near Moscow, then back to Kazan, and, at the outbreak of World War I, to Maikop in the northern Caucasus and to Rostov-on-the-Don. Shvarts began the study of law at Moscow University during the first year of the war but then left the university in 1915 and returned to Rostov. In 1917, he joined an amateur avant-garde theater in Rostov called the Theater Workshop, where he became a character actor, specializing in comic roles. His first marriage was to one of the actresses from the Theater Workshop, Gaiane Khaladzieva.

When the Russian Revolution and Civil War were over in 1921, Shvarts moved to Petrograd (rechristened Leningrad in 1924) with other members of Rostov’s Theater Workshop. The attempt to establish their experimental workshop as a professional theater failed after its second season, but the move to Petrograd had put Shvarts in touch with the leading members of the literary intelligentsia there. He soon became personal secretary to Kornei Chukovsky; he was an active member of the writers’ club known as The Crazy Ship; and in 1925, he became an editor and writer for two children’s magazines, Hedgehog and Siskin. Together with his chief editor, Samuil Marshak, Shvarts encouraged the collaboration of leading experimental prose writers and poets (such as Danil Kharms and Nikolai Zabolotsky) in the writing of children’s literature.

Shvarts wrote his first play, Undervud, in 1929 for the Leningrad children’s theater TIUZ; in 1932, he wrote Pustyaki (trifles) for the Leningrad Puppet Theater; and in 1933 and 1934, he wrote three plays: Klad (the treasure), Priklyucheniya Gogenshtaufena (the adventures of Hohenstauffen), and The Naked King. Except for The Naked King, all these early plays are clearly written for children and combine a realistic portrayal of contemporary life with fantastic elements (for example, Undervud is about the theft of a typewriter from an office by a woman who turns out to be a witch). The Naked King is different from the earlier plays in that its erotic and political themes make it more appropriate for adults than for children; it also marks the beginning of Shvarts’s works as a dramatic adapter of popular tales.

In 1934, Shvarts also began his friendship and collaboration with Nikolai Akimov, director of the Comedy Theater in Leningrad. With Akimov’s encouragement to continue adapting popular stories according to ironic, fantastic, avant-garde styles, Shvarts wrote his Krasnaya Shapochka (Little Red Riding Hood) and Snezhnaya Koroleva (the Snow Queen), both of which immediately became perennial favorites in the repertoires of Soviet children’s theaters. Three of the plays he wrote in the period from 1939 to 1942 were straightforward realistic representations of the Soviet Union’s struggle against Germany: Nashe go stepriimstvo (our hospitality), Dalyokiy Kray (distant region), and “Odna Noch” (one night), the last of which is a modest, unheroic autobiographical account of his own experience of the blockade of Leningrad in 1941 to 1942. In spite of the hardships of the war, Shvarts also wrote his two most innovative and most political plays in this period: The Shadow and The Dragon.

Shvarts was subjected to criticism and censorship during the “anti-cosmopolitain” campaign that began in Soviet letters in 1946 and continued until after Stalin’s death in 1953. He was vulnerable to criticism because both The Shadow and The Dragon could be interpreted as anti-Stalinist political satire, because so much of his writing was based on Western European models, and because he was Jewish. In this period, he began writing realist plays and stories about problems of family life in contemporary Soviet life. In the 1950’s, he returned to writing fairy-tale plays, but he now drew on Russian folk sources (as in The Two Maples) rather than on Western European models.

In the late 1950’s, Shvarts’s health began to fail, but he completed the scenario for Grigori Kozintsev’s film version of Don Quixote in 1957, shortly before his death.

Analysis

The distinctive feature of Yevgeny Shvarts’s style is his use of “old stories” to provide the plots, characters, and even the settings and costumes for his plays. This creates a reflexive sense of dramatic fiction as a playful, ironic variation on narrative fiction. His characters refer to themselves as the roles that they have been designated to play in old stories, and much of their dialogue refers explicitly to how the play’s action is progressing in relation to the fairy-tale plot or plots of which it is an adaptation. The dramatic conflict in a Shvarts play is typically a struggle between one group of characters, who want their old stories to be reenacted in accordance with their old plots, and another group of characters, who attempt to change the old story. For example, in The Shadow, the hero knows that his life follows the plot of Andersen’s tale “The Shadow,” in which the hero’s romantic idealism is destroyed by the cynicism of his worldly shadow or double. He attempts to change the outcome of the Andersen tale and maintain his idealism, while his shadow attempts to reenact the Andersen plot.

Sometimes the self-conscious ironic emphasis on plot in a Shvarts play serves a comic, lyrical function. For example, in The Naked King, the character Christian uses plot devices from Andersen fairy tales to promote the exuberant, comic love between the hero, Henryk, and the heroine, Henrietta. Christian’s artful invention of Andersen-inspired twists in the love plot is designed to prevent the impatient heroine from proceeding directly to the kissing and lovemaking that are the desired end of romance, but which, if reached too soon, would silence the aesthetic expression of romantic desire.

Sometimes, however, the plots of Shvarts’s plays express his tragic moral philosophy. In The Shadow, the shadow’s cynical reenactment of the old Andersen plot asserts the powerlessness of moral faith and free will in the real world, while the scholar-hero’s attempts to change the Andersen plot assert his faith in his own moral values. In a number of plays, such as Krasnaya Shapochka, The Shadow, and The Dragon, Shvarts uses the plots of old fairy tales to assert the pessimistic view that good is usually defeated by evil, given the endemic strength of evil in human nature and in the “dragons” of political institutions. He then presents his moral heroes and heroines (such as Little Red Riding Hood or Lancelot of The Dragon) as possessors of an absurd existentialist faith in the power of their own actions to thwart the seemingly inevitable triumph of evil.

Drawing on the Gogolian models and popular carnivalesque traditions that Meyerhold had introduced to Russian avant-garde theater, Shvarts complemented his main plot lines with a zany, carnivalesque profusion of subplots and verbal banter. This aspect of Shvarts’s writing is aptly described by Mikhail Leonidovich Slonimsky’s term for Gogolian comedy—“comedy whose name is muddle.” The Naked King creates a “muddle” by confusing or inverting a number of opposed categories: high and low classes are confused as the heroine-princess falls in love with the hero-swineherd, humans and pigs are confused as the swineherd gives his pigs the names of the king’s ladies-in-waiting, and so on. Muddles such as these are at the center of many of Shvarts’s most hilarious comic scenes, yet they may also appear in a dark, satiric light in his political plays when they are the creations of rogue-bureaucrats (such as the Mayor and his son in The Dragon) who create political muddles to obfuscate and confuse simple moral responses to their corrupt reigns. From Henryk of The Naked King to Lancelot of The Dragon, Shvarts’s heroic characters possess the roguish ability to best their antagonists in duels of obfuscation. Perhaps Shvarts’s greatest accomplishment as a playwright is to have created a number of brilliantly witty verbal duels between villains who are geniuses at obfuscation and heroes who can match the villains in this respect while also being able to penetrate muddles of amorality or immorality with their simple, clear moral vision.

The Naked King and The Dragon are Shvarts’s two best dramatic works. Together, they provide a good example of how the main plots of his plays are adaptations of popular fairy tales and legends, while the subplots are generated according to the zany, comic principles of Gogolian “muddle.” Together, they also represent the full spectrum of his moral vision, ranging from the optimistic comedy of The Naked King to the pessimistic satire of The Dragon.

The Naked King

As the curtain opens in act 1 of The Naked King, Henryk, the swineherd, is tending his pigs in a meadow and telling his friend Christian, the weaver, how much he loves the Princess, who lives in the castle nearby. Unlike the swineherd of Andersen’s “The Princess and the Swineherd,” Henryk is not a prince in disguise; he is a swineherd, but he borrows the plot from Andersen’s tale to lure the Princess out of the castle to visit him: He offers to let her see the magic kettle that Christian has made and then offers to exchange the kettle for kisses from the Princess. The premise of the plot in Andersen’s tale is the swineherd-prince’s need to overcome the Princess’s resistance to his love. The Princess covets material things such as the kettle but does not value the prince’s spiritual love. Andersen’s prince catches his Princess with the material kettle but does not gain her spiritual love. In Shvarts’s play, on the other hand, the Princess offers no resistance to Henryk’s love. She is quick to offer eighty, then one hundred kisses in exchange for the kettle.

While Henryk and the Princess are in the middle of their first, seemingly endless kiss, they are interrupted by the Princess’s father, who tells his daughter: “Tomorrow I’ll marry you off to our neighboring king.” The scene changes then to an inn along the road that leads to the neighboring king, where that king’s Minister of Tender Feelings is arranging a reception for the Princess. He hopes to find out whether the Princess is of royal blood by subjecting her to the test that is at the base of the plot of Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.” He hides a pea under the featherbeds on which the Princess sleeps at the inn: If she notices the pea, she will be proven of royal blood. If this test fails, he has a backup—twelve bottles of strong wine with which he hopes to loosen the tongues of the Chamberlain and Governess accompanying the Princess. The scene in which the Minister interrogates the drunken Chamberlain is a prime example of Gogolian muddle in Shvarts: The Chamberlain imagines in his drunken delirium that he is at a fox hunt; he refers to his princess as “a vixen with a tail”; the Minister taunts him with, “so you’ve got a king with a tail” and when the drunken chamberlain replies, “Why no, our King’s tail-less, but her father has a tail,” the Minister deduces that the Princess is not of royal blood.

Zany nonsense such as this derails Christian’s attempts to bring about the marriage between Henryk and the Princess, but Christian remains undaunted. In act 2, he schemes to prevent the king’s marriage to the Princess by borrowing from the plot of Andersen’s famous story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” He offers to sew the king a wedding suit that only stupid and incompetent people will be unable to see; all the king’s ministers therefore pretend to see his new clothes. When the king appears naked at the royal wedding, a child exclaims “He’s naked and he’s fat!” prompting all the king’s subjects to jeer and whistle him offstage and thereby clearing the way for the Princess to marry Henryk. This light, comic ending is delayed and postponed throughout act 2 by more zany Gogolian satire, the object of which is the absurd extremes of pretentiousness and hypocrisy in the king’s court. In The Naked King, this satire of political hypocrisy simply functions to set up the comic resolution of the romantic plot. In The Dragon, however, hypocrisy and pretense are seen as ludicrous but terrifying elements of political despotism.

The Dragon

As act 1 of The Dragon begins, the hero, Lancelot, stops to rest from his journey at the house of Charlemagne, Chief Archivist of the local Dragon’s kingdom. Lancelot is told by a cat that Charlemagne’s daughter, Elza, is threatened by a great misfortune: She has been selected as this year’s sacrifice to the Dragon that has been ruling the city for nearly four hundred years. When Charlemagne and Elza return home, they tell Lancelot that he will be able to rest well in their “very quiet city” where “nothing ever happens.” Having recently heard that Elza is about to be sacrificed to the Dragon, Lancelot is surprised to hear the city described as quiet, but Charlemagne explains to him that it is quiet because the Dragon is such “an amazing strategist and great tactician” that “as long as he is here, no other dragon will dare touch us.”

Asked to tell where he is from, Lancelot says that he is a reader of a book that “records all the crimes of all the criminals, all the misfortunes of those suffering in vain.” Dedicated to interceding on behalf of these sufferers, Lancelot admits wearily that he has been “mortally wounded three times by the people [he] was saving by force.” Following his script as faithful defender of innocent victims, Lancelot announces that he “will call the dragon out to do battle,” even though Elza beseeches him not to fight, fearing that he will be killed.

At this point, the Dragon makes his appearance in a number of guises, some human, some superhuman, but all signifying a combination of invincible power and mystification. Undaunted by the Dragon’s displays of power and by blatant evidence that the people of the town would rather be left alone to suffer their Dragon in peace, Lancelot prepares for battle.

In act 2, Lancelot fights the Dragon while the Dragon’s top government bureaucrats, the Mayor and his son Henryk, prepare to take credit for Lancelot’s brave exploits and set themselves up as the city’s new dragons. Seeming to have been mortally wounded in battle, Lancelot withdraws from the city after killing the Dragon, while the mayor’s son takes over as the new dragon and prepares to marry Elza.

Meanwhile, in the ironic, unsentimental romantic plot that relates Elza to Lancelot as damsel in distress to faithful knight-savior, Elza’s feelings have changed. Early in the first act, she is as cynical as Henryk in accepting the evil reign of the Dragon. By the end of act 1, she is still uncertain about whether she would obey Henryk’s order to kill Lancelot. In act 2, however, Elza and Lancelot begin to feel some love for each other in spite of their mutual ironic sense that they are merely going through the motions, playing tired and trite romantic roles. By the end of the play, Elza wants to be saved from the cynicism she shared with Henryk at the beginning of the play; she desires Lancelot’s return.

In the final scenes, Lancelot returns to the city, easily deposes Henryk as false pretender to the throne, and berates the citizens of the city for pretending to believe in Henryk’s impersonation of the Dragon. Lancelot himself is burdened with Ivan Karamazov’s skepticism about the ability of ordinary people to maintain faith in the power of love and virtue, given their fearful, morally lazy desire to surrender their moral freedom to powerful political authorities. The Dragon is a pessimistic, satiric play insofar as it is ultimately centered on Lancelot’s doubts about his ability to rule the citizens of the city through the moral authority of his own example, rather than through the combination of coercive power and pretense represented in the alliance between the Dragon and Henryk.

The two opposite poles of Shvarts’s moral vision are represented in The Naked King and The Dragon—on one hand, his optimistic faith that adults can regain a simple, childlike sense of right and wrong in their political lives and see that the king has no clothes, thereby deposing him, and, on the other hand, his pessimistic sense that people are too likely to surrender to hypocrisy and cowardice and accept despotic rule.

Bibliography

Corten, Irina H. “Evgeny Lvoich Shvarts: A Biographical Sketch and Bibliography.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 16 (1979). This article presents a brief overview of the life of Shvarts and his works.

Corten, Irina H. “Evgeny Shvarts as an Adapter of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault.” Russian Review 37 (1978): 516-567. This essay focuses on Shvarts’s adaptations of fairy tales in his plays.

Leach, Robert, and Victor Borovsky, eds. A History of Russian Theater. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999. This overview of Russian drama presents background information on the theater during the time in which Shvarts wrote. Bibliography and index.

Metcalf, Amanda T. Evgenii Shvartz and His Fairy-Tales for Adults. Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham Press, 1979. A critical analysis of the works of Shvarts, which include fairy tales. Bibliography.

Neill, Heather. “Sinister Fairy Tale.” Review of The Dragon, by Yevgeny Shvarts. The Times Educational Supplement, November 20, 1992, p. 11. A review of a performance of Shvarts’s The Dragon by the Royal National Theatre in England.

Segel, Harold B. Twentieth Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present. Rev. ed. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. This examination of Russian theater in the twentieth century includes coverage of Shvarts’s role. Bibliography and index.

Smeliansky, Anatoly. The Russian Theater After Stalin. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Although this work begins in 1953, toward the end of Shvarts’s career, it sheds light on the forces that affected his work. Bibliography and index.