The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

quixotic – or holy-foolish – the gesture. Shvarts’s characters are cool and flat, surprised at nothing, like “real” fairy-tale folk. Lancelot courts Elsa as Bulat the Brave courted Vasilisa for the Tsarevich: matter of factly, without exaggerated desire or anxiety. He reminds her that neither of them has much freedom within the genre; he has to fight the Dragon, she will have to love him for it. The “animal tale” is also present in this play – a genre whose task is to expose specifically human folly. A plain-speaking, truth-telling cat, disgusted at the town’s cowardice, teams up with a donkey serving a group of craftsmen with skomorokh-style professions: musical instrument-makers, weavers, and hatters who produce magic carpets and invisible caps. This group of Russian tricksters are the play’s subversives, the nucleus of the resistance.

The Mayor and his son Heinrich reproach Lancelot. Call off this challenge, don’t fret our dear old Drag, things were quiet here and the Dragon was busy purging our enemies, so who invited you? They bribe Lancelot to withdraw. But the conventions must be observed; “professional villains and heroes” have their obligations, the battle in the sky must begin. Although Lancelot is mortally wounded, he lops off all three of the Dragon’s heads. The town takes note. The Mayor, startled, commands the townspeople not to believe their own eyes but only the official communique´. Eyewitnesses can be mistaken until the course of history is properly understood.

Act III, set one year later, pits the innocence of the fairy tale, with its mandatory transformations and happy ending, against more acerbic types of folk-tale narrative: animal tales and tales of everyday life. In the last two, we recall, the most sinister path is usually the most sensible, and nothing need work out for the heroes at all. Which type of folk tale will this turn out to be? The Mayor is now President, Heinrich is Mayor, and history has been rewritten. It is now officially the President who killed the Dragon – that’s his new epithet, Dragon-Slayer – and all his enemies are in prison. He is about to marry Elsa. But something has changed. The letter “L” keeps turning up on walls. The animals and fish can’t be forced to talk. Elsa’s father can’t be bribed with a 153-room apartment with a view. And Elsa, during the wedding ceremony, says “no.” The gathered functionaries discount her errant remark, but at that moment Lancelot materializes, greets the crowd, and marches the villains off to prison. The President and his Mayor son make feeble excuses but do not resist. Every rogue and villain in this play knows who he is. Then the returning hero surveys the townsfolk and announces to his Elsa that they must work to “kill the dragon in each of them” – tedious yet necessary work, he says, “more fine-grained than embroidery.” As in Pushkin’s historical romance The Captain’s Daughter and other political catastrophes resolved by fairytale techniques – even as far back as the submerged city of Kitezh before the Mongol horde – the righteous are

210 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

saved at the last minute by a miracle that no one has any right to expect. But mercifully the genre requires it.

The Dragon was written at a dark time. Shvarts’s native Leningrad, with a population of almost 3 million, had been blockaded by Nazi troops since September 1941, in what was to become a 900-day siege. Throughout December of that extremely cold winter, with daily bombardment and without fuel, water, heat, or rations, 3,000 people starved to death daily. Shvarts and his wife refused to leave the city. Grown terribly thin but still working as a firefighter, he agreed to be evacuated only in December 1941, when he was almost certain to die of starvation. In reluctant exile from the besieged city, he wrote a play about the Leningrad Blockade titled One Night; like the rest of his work, its language was that of a stylized, “self-aware” fairy tale. A Moscow-based committee rejected it for performance. Although the committee members had not themselves experienced Leningrad under siege, they were under orders to minimize the image of that city’s suffering. A year later Shvarts wrote The Dragon, having been evacuated even further, to Dushanbe (then Stalinabad, Soviet Tajikistan). In August 1944, Nikolai Akimov’s theatre in Moscow ran The Dragon for one night and the play then disappeared from repertory. Like One Night, its courage was judged insufficiently patriotic and single-voiced.