[b]Schwartz, Evgeny Lvovich (1896–1958), Russian playwright. Born 9 (21) October 1896 in Kazan in the family of a doctor. Schwartz spent his childhood in Maykop. Schwartz did not graduate from the law faculty of Moscow University, where he studied in the first years after the October Revolution of 1917, because he began to play in theaters-studios – first in Rostov-on-Don, and from 1921 in Petrograd, in the “Theatre Workshop”. In reviews of the performances of the Theatre Workshop, critics noted Schwartz’s outstanding plastic and voice data and predicted his brilliant acting future. Despite this, he left the scene in the early 1920s and worked as a literary secretary of K.I. Chukovsky, and in 1923-1924 as a journalist for various publications in Donetsk, including the magazine Zaboy and the well-known outside the Donbass newspaper Kochegarka, for which he composed poems under the pseudonym Ded Sarai. Collaborated with the magazine "Leningrad".
In 1924, Schwartz returned to Leningrad, worked in the children's edition of Gosizdat under the leadership of S. Marshak. One of his main duties was to help the debutants, many of whom recalled that Schwartz had a rare ability to develop and complement other people’s ideas, thus helping newcomers to clarify their individual capabilities and intentions.
During these years, Schwartz was close to the OBERIU group. Like many Oberiuts, he wrote children's stories and poems for the magazines Chizh and Hedgehog (The Tale of the Old Balalaika, 1925, etc.), published children's books. Recalling the social situation of those years, Schwartz wrote: “Opponents of anthropomorphism, fairy tales claimed that even without fairy tales the child hardly comprehends the world. They managed to capture key positions in pedagogy. All children's literature was taken under suspicion. The only thing they thought children's writers were allowed to do was create some optional additions to textbooks.” In this atmosphere, Schwartz’s dramaturgy was born.
In 1929, Schwartz wrote his first play, Underwood. The plot is simple: student Nyrkov received for urgent work at home typewriter "Underwood", crooks decided to steal it, and pioneer Marusya prevented them. The childish image, embodying friendship and dedication, through which the forces of evil are dispelled, became a cross-cutting image of Schwartz’s plays – like Marusa of Underwood and the girl Ptah, the heroine of the play The Treasure (1933).
In 1934, the director N. Akimov persuaded the playwright to try his hand at comedy drama for adults. As a result, the play The Adventures of Hohenstaufen appeared - a satirical work with fabulous elements, in which the struggle of good and evil forces took place in a realistically described Soviet institution, where Upyrev's managers turned out to be a real ghoul, and Kofeikin's cleaner - a good fairy.
The play Shadow (1940), written, like some other plays of Schwartz, based on the fairy tales of H. K. Andersen, was removed from the repertoire immediately after the premiere, because in it the fairy tale too obviously approached political satire. Perhaps this explains Schwartz’s appeal to the modern topic from “ideologically held positions” and without fabulous elements. Shortly before the Great Patriotic War, he wrote the plays Brother and Sister (about saving children from the ice) and Our Hospitality (about the vigilance of Soviet people on the eve of the war). During the war he wrote a play about the siege of Leningrad One Night (1942), which also lacked elements of a fairy tale.
During the Great Patriotic War, Schwartz was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Kirov (Vyatka) and Stalinabad (Dushanbe). He worked on the play The Dragon (1943), which was staged after the war. The performance was removed from the repertoire immediately after the premiere at the Leningrad Comedy Theater. The play remained banned until 1962. The content of the play was not limited to the victory of the good knight Lancelot over the evil ruler Dragon. The power of the Dragon was based on the fact that he managed to “dislocate human souls”, so immediately after his death, a power struggle began between his minions, and the people were still content with their miserable existence.
Having familiarized himself with the directorial exposition of the Dragon, made by Akimov, Schwartz expressed in a letter to the director one of the main principles of his dramaturgy: “Miracles are invented beautifully.” But in the very abundance of them there is a shade of distrust of the play. If a miracle follows from what the play says, it works for the play. If the miracle for even a moment causes bewilderment, requires additional explanation, the viewer will be distracted from very important events. Entertainment, but distracted.” The reader and viewer of Schwartz’s plays could draw conclusions about the author’s position, based on specific images and situations, from the playwright’s consistent disclosure of the psychology of characters. In the presence of deep philosophical undertones, the plays of Schwartz Naked King (1934), Red Riding Hood (1936), Snow Queen (1938), Cinderella (1946), Ordinary Miracle (1954) and others are antididactic; the extraordinary, fabulous is combined in them with the real, recognizable. By analogy with “character comedies,” critics called them “character tales.”
After the war, the social position of the playwright was not easy. This is evidenced by his Autobiography, written in 1949 and published in 1982 in Paris. During Stalin’s lifetime, Schwartz’s plays were not staged. In 1954, Olga Bergholtz spoke for their return to the stage, calling Schwartz at the congress of writers an original, original and humane talent. In 1956, the first collection of his plays was published, performances were again staged on them - both in the USSR and abroad.
From 1955 to 1956, Schwartz kept the diary entries that formed the basis of his Telephone Book, a unique form of memoir he invented. The telephone book (first fully published in 1997) is a miniature portrait of contemporaries with whom Schwartz brought creative fate, as well as apt characteristics of various Soviet institutions - creative unions, publishing houses, theaters, railway stations, etc. Schwartz stated in the book: I write about living people, whom I consider as much as I can in detail and precisely as a phenomenon of nature. Recently, I am afraid that people of the most difficult times, under his pressure, who took or did not take the most complex forms, changed imperceptibly for themselves or stubbornly did not notice the changes around them, will disappear. It seems to me that every living person is a historical person. I write with the names and surnames of historical persons.
J. Ehrenburg described Schwartz as a “wonderful writer, gentle to a person and evil to everything that prevents him from living.” V. Kaverin called him “a person exceptional in irony, intelligence, kindness and nobility.”
Schwartz wrote about 25 plays, not all of them published. According to his scripts, the films First Grade Girl, Cinderella, Don Quixote were staged, in which brilliant actors E. Garin, Ya.Zheimo, F.Ranevskaya, N. Cherkasov, Yu.Tolubeev and others were filmed.
Schwartz died in Leningrad on January 15, 1958.
From [url=http://www.krugosvet.ru/articles/69/1006902/1006902a1.htm] encyclopedia "Circle"[/url]
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