The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Dragon (and Shvarts’s legacy more generally) has been understood in many ways, as anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-bourgeoisie, pro-proletariat, even pro-religious. This broad range suggests the astonishing versatility of folklore genres in times of crisis. For all its author’s unimpeachable patriotism, the play could not be reduced to a one-dimensional formula. In this stylized meta-fairy tale – and nowhere more so than in the cowardly collapse of all villains at the end, which suggests that evil is a sham – one senses a trace of eighteenth-century neoclassical “corrective comedy,” where virtue takes its triumph for granted and vice, once exposed, literally has no language with which to defend itself. But Shvarts’s Prince-Charming end still sounds sly and double-voiced.

In the final act, Elsa’s father, who for the first time in his life has just resisted a bribe and thus ceased (for the moment) to collaborate, says to the President: “Stop tormenting us. I’ve learned how to think, and that is tormenting enough.” The moment is stunning. Shvarts’s play builds on a long line of Russian fictions that portray the breaking-out of an individual consciousness from the benumbed or terrorized collective, often unwillingly, sometimes as a fool, sometimes as a martyr and a hero – but invariably as a person who is “learning to think.” Always there is a wound and a sense of loss. We recall D-503 from Zamyatin’s We : his growing horror at his specificity, at “feeling

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himself” separate, since (he persuades himself) “We comes from God, Ifrom the Devil” (Entry 22). Cast in the folk tale rather than the Modernist mode, however, such threshold breakaway moments will tolerate no hyperbole or hysterics. The testing and magical transformation of heroes in a fairy tale must be described mechanically, dispassionately, as something inevitable regardless of personal fears or preferences. In The Dragon that tone is scrupulously preserved. For the villains, it justifies their naked cynicism. For the mortal (but always revivable) hero Lancelot, who has been freeing people against their will for a very long time, it is all in a day’s work. For the helpers and the sought-after reward (Elsa), it registers as the triumph of good - but a depleted good. The story is not over when the Princess is won. Lancelot’s leisurely announcement of the small, tedious everyday tasks yet to come signals the couple’s exit from fairy-tale mode. It also helps explain Shvarts’s remark that his favorite author was Chekhov. As in “Lady with a Pet Dog,” a happy ending means that the hard work is just beginning.

The discomfort over Shvarts continued into the post-Stalinist and then post-communist periods. Akimov’s Comedy Theatre in Moscow revived The Dragon at the end of May, 1962, to cautious reviews. In December of that year, Khrushchev signaled the end of the cultural thaw with his crude outburst against Modernist art at the Manezh exhibit. In the spreading cultural freeze, Akimov’s theatre was charged with “ideological ambiguity.” The director defended his dramatic repertory as both “socialist realist” and true to “idea-mindedness” [ideinost']. The Dragon hung on until the end of the season (May 1963), with certain lines deleted - but the censors were nervous about deletions, which, in a well-known playtext, only drew attention to the gaps. In 2005, reviews were also mixed (although for different reasons), when Shvarts’s screenplay Goodbye, Cinderella! was revived by Anatoly Praudin in his St. Petersburg experimental theatre. The retelling had no Prince and no Ball; all that had been simply a dream. “No, spectator,” the commentator ended her review. “It’s time to grow up.”17

Andrei Platonov and suspension

Shvarts was not a dissident. But his techniques of “estrangement,” his mastery of folk narration, and his belief in the correctives of a child’s quick and healthy wit were effective responses to rigid party-mindedness. Many such strategies were devised by survivors whose lives and works fell somewhere between the extremes of “collaborator” and “martyr.” Among great writers in

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this category, the life and works of Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) are the most haunting.