Evgeny Schwartz. The Fate of the Storyteller in the Age of the Dragon (deluxe edition)

I am writing about Evgeniy Schwartz because he spoke about us. About a world where it is not the Dragon that is scary, but the habit of living next to it; about fear that penetrates the soul and becomes the norm; and about inner freedom, which can be preserved even within unfreedom.

  Natalya Gromova

Evgeniy Schwartz wrote fairy tales that were much more realistic than Soviet novels. In "The Shadow" and especially in "The Dragon" he prophetically revealed the nature of slavery, what would later be called the "banality of evil" - the everyday habit of living next to a tyrant. In an era of breakups and losses, he brought back lostness, friendship, love, hope to people and spoke about them in such a way that it became easier to breathe. In his plays, Schwartz laughed at his contemporaries who were frightened to death and at the same time pitied them, mourning their souls.

Who was he really? A mocker or a sage in the guise of a jester, who, turning everyday words and meanings upside down, saw the world more clearly than anyone else. Schwartz is one of those few artists who managed to bring inner light through the darkness of their time - and give people hope for healing.

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Natalia Gromova is a prose writer and literary historian. Until March 2022, leading researcher at the State Literary Museum in Moscow. Curator of numerous exhibitions, including “An Ordinary Wizard” about Evgeniy Schwartz. Presenter of lectures at Arzamas about Schwartz, Tsvetaeva and others. Author of a number of scientific historical studies and documentary books about literary life, the evacuation of writers, post-war literary life, about Tsvetaeva, Bergholz, Pasternak and others. Finalist of the Russian Booker Prize for 2014 and the Crown Prize of the Moscow Writers' Union. Finalist for the 2020 Big Book Award.