A wonderful playwright, prose writer, screenwriter Eugene Schwartz lived a very difficult life. Everything was enough in his life - there was a wound from which he did not recover until the end of his life, and refusals in publications and productions of his works, and the loss of friends during the repressions. There was also great love, which lasted thirty years until his death.
Childhood and youth
Eugene Schwartz was born in the family of a Jewish doctor, but always considered himself a Russian. He graduated from a real school, and soon a junker, more precisely, already promoted to the rank of ensign, at the age of eighteen he got to the front. When capturing Yekaterinodar in the army, Kornilov received a concussion. His whole life left her with a trembling hand.
After demobilization, he seeks himself, and only after he got to Leningrad, Eugene Schwartz since 1923 begins to be published in the children's magazines "Hedgehog" and "Chizh". He enters the literary environment. He is kindly accepted as a wonderful storyteller and inventor. At the same time, he draws closer to the literary group "The Serapion Brothers", which includes Vsevolod Ivanov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Benjamin Kaverin. Kaverin introduces Eugene Schwartz with his sister Catherine. Mutual love flares up, which they carried through their whole lives. It is about this love, as many people think, that the Wizard from the Ordinary Miracle says.
By this time, the first book was published, which brought Yevgeny Lvovich success - “Tales of the Old Balalaika”. Others follow. Schwartz is assigned the glory of a children's writer.
Dramaturgy
In 1929 in Leningrad, in the Youth Theater, his first play Underwood was staged. Later two more plays. As a result, Eugene Schwartz was admitted to the Writers Union. This, of course, is a success.
And he continues: his plays “Treasure”, “Brother and Sister”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Snow Queen” are staged.
But the NKVD defeated the publishing house Chizh. And Schwartz’s friends Nikolai Oleinikov and Nikolai Zabolotsky were arrested. Children's literature is becoming a suspicious and dangerous occupation.
Eugene Schwartz tries to write comedies for adults. But his plays, for example, The Shadow, were too close to political satire, and therefore they were not staged. But there are newspaper articles.
War
Evgeny Lvovich spends the first siege winter in Leningrad, and as he himself testifies, he sees how people cease to be people from fear. But at the top, a decision was made to evacuate Schwartz to Kirov. There he will write the play "One Night", which no one will undertake to stage. The same thing will happen with the next play “Far Land”. The play "Dragon" is also not staged.
Movie shooting
In 1946, the film "Cinderella", still beloved, was released. And the work of the scriptwriter is separately noted.
In the same year he was awarded two medals: “For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War” and “For the Defense of Leningrad”. This is where all the good ends. Hard times are coming. The new script “King Vodokrut” was written in 1946, and the film based on it, “Mary the Artisan”, was released only in 1960 after his death. Eugene Schwartz will never see many of his works. The works, one of the most significant in his work, “An Ordinary Miracle”, “Shadow”, “Kill the Dragon”, will be staged by wonderful directors with excellent performers, but it is too late for the author.
Tireless work
Eugene Schwartz is full of new ideas and ideas. He writes more and more plays and scripts, which almost all are not censored. “Vasilisa the Worker,” “First Name,” “One Day.” And, finally, in 1954, Kozintsev took on his screenplay Don Quixote. However, at the congress of Soviet writers, Eugene Schwartz is accused of separating form from content. Spitting in the face. And for a while Evgeny Lvovich stops writing.
In 1956, on his sixtieth anniversary in Moscow and in Leningrad, his program fairy tale “An Ordinary Miracle” was staged. In the same year, a gala evening in honor of Yevgeny Lvovich takes place in Leningrad. And by the end of the year he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. And for the first time his plays were published in one collection. This is what Eugene Schwartz looks like (photo).
In 1957, his film Don Quixote was shown in Cannes. This is a significant event in his life. But health is already failing. On the eve of 1958, the premiere of the play "The Tale of Young Spouses", which he had been waiting for ten years, takes place. And after two weeks the writer dies. This is how the life of a wonderful storyteller, who was Eugene Schwartz, was not easy. His biography consisted of work and attempts to stage his plays. And if he wrote in a relaxed and joyful way, all things began with the fact that dark forces were gathering, but the ending was usually joyful and cloudless. By his work, the writer brought people hope. Perhaps not everyone managed to tell us Eugene Schwartz. The biography will briefly list everything that he wrote. After all, he laid all out in his works.
Life after death
In 1971, the film of Nadezhda Kosheverova based on the play-tale of Schwartz's “Shadow” was released. In a fabulous fairy land, a learned, simple-minded and gullible Christian Theodore is in love with a beautiful princess.
But his Shadow has separated from him and is striving to occupy a high position.
Given the time the play was created, the image of the Shadow somewhat resembles Hitler. Both the princess and the throne become dominated by the shadow. After much upheaval, good, as happens with Schwartz, defeats evil. But the scientist no longer needs the traitor-princess and this kingdom. He leaves with a girl who always believed in him.
In 1988, director Mark Zakharov poses the film parable "Kill the Dragon" based on Schwartz's play "The Dragon."
In the city where the merciless Dragon rules for four hundred years, the
wandering knight Lancelot falls.
Residents are accustomed to all the oppression and believed that life is going well and right, even that the most beautiful girl in the city should be given to the Dragon every year. And the knight fell in love with this beautiful Elsa. The burgomaster dissuades Lancelot from the battle as best he can.
He assures the knight that freedom will bring people confusion and misery. But the knight did not abandon his intention and destroyed the cruel dictator. It was his duty to fight the usurper. But people, as the mayor had predicted, did not understand what to do with their freedom. The city began to plunge into the abyss of chaos. Souls of people are not cured. Moreover, people decided that the mayor had killed the Dragon, and they gave him the beautiful Elsa as his wife. What does the knight have to do when he realized that it is not enough to defeat evil? It is necessary to destroy all its consequences, and this is not at all as easy as killing the Dragon. Everyone needs to kill the dragon in his soul. The knight retires.
The good storyteller Yevgeny Lvovich Schwartz always asked that his tales not look for subtext and allegories. But all this was immediately read out, even where the author himself had not imagined. And nowadays you just have to turn to his works again and again, since they are ambiguous.