The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Stalin years 211

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