Evgeny Schwartz - how a fighter of the White Army became the main Soviet storyteller

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Evgeny Schwartz is a writer and playwright who has given the world many fairy tales - both for children and adults. Real world fame came to him after his death - and with each new decade his works are becoming more and more popular. But even during his lifetime, the writer gained fame - despite the Junker White Guard past, there was a place for Schwartz in the literary reality of the Soviet Union.

Russian empire, war and family life

Evgeny Schwartz was born in Kazan in 1896. His father, convicted of conducting revolutionary agitation, was exiled to Maikop, where the future playwright spent his childhood. In 1914, Eugene went to Moscow and entered the law faculty of the Moscow People's University named after A. L. Shanyavsky, later transferred to Moscow University. Two years later, Schwartz was drafted into the army and promoted to cadet, and after the October Revolution he joined the ranks of the Volunteer Army in southern Russia.

Schwartz was one of the participants in the Ice campaign to Yekaterinodar (modern Krasnodar), was wounded and was demobilized after the hospital. His later life was already directly connected with the theater - he took part in productions of the Rostov "Theater Workshop", toured with small theaters, even married an actress - Gayane Halaydzhieva (on stage - Kholodova). This marriage, however, ended in 1929 with the departure of Schwartz from the family where his daughter was recently born to Ekaterina Obukh, the second and last wife of the writer. - he wrote in his memoirs. Schwartz later admitted that 1929 was perhaps the only happy period in his life - despite the fact that his literary career was gaining momentum and gave the impression of real success.

Essays, stories and plays

In 1923, Schwartz went to rest in the Donbass with his friend Mikhail Slonimsky, and there both were invited to work in the newspaper All-Russian stoker. At first, Schwartz only processed letters from readers, but imperceptibly for himself began to turn essays into short stories that were very popular with readers. In 1924, his "Story of an Old Balalaika" was born - a work for children about a great flood in St. Petersburg a century ago. The story was published in the children's magazine Sparrow. Later Schwartz was published in the magazines "Chizh" and "Ezh", where he became a permanent employee. Bianchi, speaking of Schwartz's "wonderful stories" in children's magazines, lamented that "no one thought about publishing these stories as a separate book."

"Serious" prose, on the other hand, began with the play "Underwood", which was staged at the Youth Theater in 1929. The director and the actors, and behind them the audience, unmistakably recognized in the work a "Soviet fairy tale" - one of the many that later came out from the pen of Schwartz. So it happened that almost every work written by Schwartz was printed or staged, with the exception of only a few, such as "Dragon", which was banned by the censorship and was staged only in 1962, after the death of the author.

In the thirties, Schwartz tried himself in different directions - including writing scripts for films, and "Commodity 717", a series of films about Lenochka, "Doctor Aibolit" and other films were born.

Soviet storyteller

In 1931, when a number of children's writers were arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary activities, however, these events did not directly affect Schwartz. He himself preferred to avoid any kind of conflict, to questions about literary activity he liked to answer: "I write everything except denunciations."

Indeed, he wrote in seemingly different genres, but nevertheless, the phenomenon of fabulous Soviet prose is associated primarily with the name of Schwartz. Often, nothing wonderful happens in Schwartz's texts, the characters' remarks are the simplest, the setting in which the action unfolds is generally familiar and familiar to the reader. And despite this, Schwartz is a storyteller in world literature. This desire to mix miracles and everyday life, as in childhood, he carried through all his work.

The Great Patriotic War found Schwartz in Leningrad, and despite the initial refusal to evacuate, he still flew with his wife to Kirov, where, in difficult conditions, he began to improve his life. He did not stop literary activity - during the war several new plays were written, including "Under the Lindens of Berlin", which he created together with Mikhail Zoshchenko. In 1945, the script for the film "Cinderella" was written, in which Janina Zheimo starred. In all, during his life, Schwartz wrote 22 plays, 12 film scripts and many works in poetry and prose.

Schwartz died in 1958. By a strange coincidence, in the same year, his friends and comrades-in-arms in the craft, Nikolai Zabolotsky and Mikhail Zoshchenko, passed away. In the memoirs of his contemporaries, Schwartz remained a kind - without excessive pity - a creator, simple, but shrewd, modest, but at the same time frank.

Became a special phenomenon in the Soviet and then Russian cultural reality and the film "An Ordinary Miracle", based on the play by Yevgeny Schwartz, and having your own story.