Writer and literary historian Natalya Gromova, discussing her book “The Fate of a Storyteller in the Age of the Dragon,” said that Yevgeny Schwartz’s play The Dragon was linked not only to the struggle against Nazism but also to the experience of Stalinist dictatorship. In her view, later interpretations that deliberately blur good and evil depart from the author’s original intent.
Gromova argues that for Schwartz, Lancelot and the Dragon stood on opposite sides of a moral line: he was a sharp satirist, yet remained a humanist. For that reason, readings in which defeating evil seems pointless or merely produces new evil belong, she says, to the directors’ worldview rather than to Schwartz himself.
The researcher stresses that her theory about the origins of The Dragon rests on indirect evidence. After a reception attended by Joseph Stalin, which Schwartz described in diaries only after 1953, he soon began the first act of the play. Outwardly, people were told it was about Hitler, but Gromova says contemporaries recognized the machinery of dictatorship at once. She recalled that the play was staged only three times — twice in Moscow and once in Stalinabad — before being shut down.
Gromova also points to the 1930s, when fear gradually closed in around Samuil Marshak’s editorial circle and the children’s magazines Chizh and Yezh. Writers close to Schwartz were repressed, including Nikolai Oleynikov; later Zabolotsky, Kharms, and Vvedensky were arrested. Schwartz himself, she notes, went through interrogations and later summed up his position by saying that he wrote everything except denunciations.
“God made me a witness to many misfortunes,” Schwartz later wrote in his diaries about that period.
In Gromova’s view, Schwartz’s main answer to an age of violence is tied not to a lone hero but to the figure of the archivist Charlemagne, the keeper of memory. When people cannot unite without risking immediate betrayal, what remains is to preserve testimony, diaries, and human dignity. That, she says, is why Schwartz’s plays still resonate today.