The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.

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