with these priorities. It is significant that throughout the Stalinist period, the quest for a “Red Tolstoy” continued. Appropriately trimmed and packaged, his legacy was not incompatible with many versions of socialist realism. A “Red Dostoevsky” or “Red Chekhov” is inconceivable.
With its lack of irony and its advocacy of a straightforward Purpose, socialist realism (if judged by Enlightenment criteria) seems to infantilize its participants. For skeptics, this is one reason why children’s literature enjoyed such high status under communism. But more substantial reasons exist for the high priority placed on writing fiction for the young. Intense interest in the proper upbringing of the “New Soviet Child” (Gorky founded the first post-revolutionary magazine for children in 1919) reinforced Russia’s distinguished research record in developmental child psychology. Writing for children attracted brilliant literary talents who were also shrewd child psychologists – most notably the poets Samuil Marshak (1887–1964) and Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969), both prote?ge?s of Gorky – as well as avant-garde poets and prose writers interested in Modernist, Formalist techniques of “estrangement.” But children’s literature was always ahaven.The “world from theview of thechild”is an ancient mode of protest against servility and convention, from the Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to the response of the childish Natasha Rostova to an opera performance in
Like Nikolai Gogol, Evgeny Shvarts (1896–1958), son of a provincial doctor, was active in amateur theatricals asa child and displayed a great gift of mimicry. In the early 1920s, Shvarts arrived in post-Civil War Petrograd, where he associated with Surrealist, Absurdist, and Futurist poets; by the end of the decade he was working for children’s literary magazines and the Leningrad Children’s Theatre.In 1933 he was invited by the Experimental Workshop of the Leningrad Music Hall to create a “Soviet fairy tale.”15 His first attempt, a satire against obstructionist bureaucrats, already exhibited his trademark deadpan tone. His basic recipe mixed everyday routine with the fantastic; concretely realizing metaphors (the bureaucrat really
Shvarts had a talent for performing the brief, incongruous, manic-dramatic anecdote. He was famous for his jingles and madcap improvisations (a nervous
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tremor in his hands made it impossible for him to speak from notes). He managed to ply his trade throughout the worst Stalinist years. The fairy-tale format provided optimism without the ambitious bombast of the production novel; moreover, since villains were essential to the folk tale, evil could be portrayed close up even after class antagonism had been formally dissolved by the 1936 Constitution. Shvarts was not repressed, but his best work – a dozen plays in all – either never made it to opening night, or else played once and then were abruptly withdrawn. Only posthumously did his plays enter permanent repertory.
The depthless and detached narration of the folkteller’s art would seem to work against its successful dramatization. But Shvarts, at home in the avant-garde from his early Petrogradyears, overcomes this handicap by estranging the fairy tale from itself – making it, in its dramatic form, “self-aware.” Characters comment to one another on theirown fixed function in the plot, which provides them with the security of distance and a certain solace. The most comic and most politicized of Shvarts’s plays to speak out in this way is his 1943 classic,
Lancelot is unimpressed by the Dragon’s argument. After all, most of the people he liberates, in story after story and kingdom after kingdom, advise him against such heroics. His task is not only to save the maiden but to wake up the bewitched, collaborating town, to bring it to new consciousness, however
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
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
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