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.
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.
Platonov departs from our other exemplary writers in having no special city. He is associated with open spaces: wilderness, steppe, desert, tumbleweed, the wandering of lost people or tribes through exotic Siberian and Asian-Russian locales. Activityinthatwide-open space iscontemplativeratherthan aggressive; it does not know the frenetic pace of the production or construction novel. But Platonov was not a “peasant writer” with nostalgia for the pre-industrial village or patriarchal homestead – not, in other words, like Russia’s most famous twentieth-century Slavophile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Platonov was part of the new Russia. He knew machines and admired them. In his world, however, the human body is the furthest possible thing from a machine.
Born in the south of Russia into a poor metalworker’s family, Platonov, the eldest son, trained as a metalworker and hired himself out to build electric stations. After the Revolution he found work as a specialist in land reclamation in central Russia, where he gained first-hand knowledge of the terrible famine in rural areas during the early 1920s. In the mid-thirties, after Stalin’s savage drive to collectivize the peasantry, he made a trip to Turkmenistan in Soviet Central Asia, where the poverty, drought, and suffering had yet to find its chronicler. Throughout these years he wrote steadily: ten novellas, a hundred stories, four plays, six film scenarios, and dozens of critical articles.
Platonov began publishing seriously in 1927, although in small editions. His heroes and plots were out of step with the time: dreamers and drop-outs at grandiose but unrealized construction projects. When, in 1931, Stalin happened to read a short story of Platonov’s that struck him as sympathetic to the rich peasants (called kulaks or “fists”) then being deprived of their lands and goods, the author found himself almost unemployable. In 1938, his only son, age fifteen, was charged with counter-revolutionary conspiracy and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in a far northern camp. Through the intervention of Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84), Party-approved author of The Quiet Don, Platonov secured his son’s release in 1940, but the boy was already dying of tuberculosis. During World War II, Platonov worked as a war correspondent, and after he was wounded was again briefly published. By 1946, he was back on the blacklist – this time for a singularly beautiful short story, “The Homecoming,” about a soldier returning from the front to his now-unfamiliar family, a plot Stalin considered “anti- Soviet.” From then on, Platonov eked out a living by rewriting folk tales in a mandated pro-Stalinist spirit until his death at age fifty-two, from tuberculosis contracted while nursing his son. Out of this very ordinary, very terrible Soviet-era writer’s biography, we will consider only one work, the 1929–30 novel The Foundation Pit [Kotlovan],
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the first and greatest philosophical commentary on the structure, language, energy level, and party-
