Satire or Fairy Tale: A Little-Known Play by Evgeny L. Schwartz in the Aspect of Creative Evolution

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of Evgeny L. Schwartz’s play Adventures of Hohenstaufen and specifically the genre and development of the author’s characteristic artistic model. Contemporaries noted public satirical pathos in the play, but Schwartz himself called the work a fairy tale. This analysis considers the influence of the literary associations of both the early twentieth century and an earlier tradition: the romantic tales of Hoffmann and Odoevsky. In Schwartz’s play, there is a collision of a good sorceress with a vampire, who both serve in a Soviet institution together with ordinary people. The vampire seeks to harm the engineer Hohenstaufen, and to separate him from his bride. The good sorceress exposes these insidious intentions and enters into combat with the vampire. The satirical nature of the play is due to the denunciation of the phenomena of modernity, but the plot is built on the principle of a romantic fairy tale. The fairy-tale genre allows magic to be combined with everyday reality. In the future, this would become the main artistic principle of Eugene Schwartz. Thus, this work can be considered an important stage in the development of the writer as a fabler. The artistic model is considered in comparison with the works of Veniamin Kaverin and Lev Lunts from the “Serapion brothers” group. Interaction with these writers may have influenced Schwartz’s artistic method. In all the works there are similarities with the romantic tales of Hoffmann. Confirmation is also in the fairy-tale plays of Vladimir F. Odoevsky, who developed the same literary model in Russian literature. This model has such features as the clash of eternal forces, the penetration of magic into everyday life, phantasmagoria and the conventionality of the depicted realities.