St Petersburg

In form the plays are fairy tales (The Naked King and The Shadow are based on stories of Hans Christian Andersen), but they were intended primarily, though not exclusively, for an adult audience. Shvarts used a broad spectrum of expressive devices, blending fantasy, irony, parody, lyricism, and lampoon. His plays can be read as parables, but they are most effective on stage, amusing and touching.

Like the historical political allegories in Tynyanov’s prose, Shvarts’s plays were filled with political hints and allusions, which Soviet audiences easily understood. Like Tynyanov, Shvarts transcended the political situation of his time, thanks to which his plays remain topical. But unlike Tynyanov, Shvarts had to suffer much at the hands of the Soviet censors. The authorities subjected plays and films to much greater scrutiny than books, and all of Shvart’s best works underwent lengthy periods of being banned.

The censors were right to be upset by the characters Shvarts created: the Cannibal, who worked for the police; the Shadow, who ran affairs of state; the Vampire Bureaucrat. The greatest indignities were visited on The Dragon, written in 1943, one of the best Russian plays of the twentieth century. Shvarts tells of a magical city ruled by a terrible Dragon, which any Soviet citizen would recognize as Stalin. The Dragon frightened and corrupted his subjects. “Armless souls, legless souls, deaf-mute souls,” he says with contempt.

As Kaverin, who read The Dragon in manuscript, recalled, the first readers were stunned by Shvarts’s brutal analysis of Soviet conformity. “The impossibility of struggling against violence, the attempt to justify what is unjustifiable—that is ours, lived through.” A traveling knight kills the Dragon, but true liberty still does not come to the people: power in the city is seized by the monster’s loyal aide, the obnoxious Mayor. The Dragon may be gone, but tyranny “with a human face” continues.

In 1944 Shvarts and Akimov tried to bring The Dragon to the Soviet stage in the guise of an “anti-fascist satire.” But even in the war years, when ideological censorship was comparatively temperate, the play was instantly banned. It was produced in Leningrad only in 1962, four years after the author’s death.

Everyone rushed to see The Dragon at the Comedy Theater (Akimov both directed and designed the sets and costumes). They wanted to see the play before it was closed down. This possibility was real, since people saw in the social-climbing Mayor who replaced the Dragon-Stalin none other than the brutish Khrushchev. Shvarts’s Dragon, like his other plays, had been prophetic.

Along with Shvarts’s Shadow, which had been permitted on stage after a twenty-year hiatus (alas, after the author’s death), The Dragon was Akimov’s signature piece. A similar relationship linked another Leningrad director, Georgy Tovstonogov, to two plays by Alexander Volodin, like Shvarts a Leningrader. Twenty years younger than Shvarts and badly wounded in World War II, Volodin tried to express the feeble hopes of Leningraders in the period of Khrushchev’s brief thaw.

If Shvarts resembled Andersen, then Volodin resembled Chekhov. The heroines of his plays (Volodin almost always had a woman at the center of his works)—saleswomen, telephone operators, secretaries—tried to find meaning and a little happiness in the grim life around them. It never occurred to them to confront the regime, but neither were they Soviet literature’s traditional obedient cogs in the state machine.

Volodin’s characters were not given to lofty declarations; they spoke and behaved like real people. This recycling of Chekhovian technique irritated official critics. As Volodin, painfully shy—not unlike his characters—later recalled, “Even before I completed the play Five Evenings, they came up with the formula that this was malicious barking from around the corner. However, there was no barking at all, no criticism of reality—it is beyond that, either beneath or above it, as you like. Then they changed the formula: These are just little maladjusted people, pessimism, petty themes.’ And they all repeated it every time: whatever I did, it was a petty theme and pessimism.”

Conservative reviewers fought doggedly to get Volodin’s plays off the stage since their very existence undermined socialist realism. Thus, becoming Volodin’s champion—which is what the sober and cautious Tovstonogov did—demanded quite a bit of courage.