Shadows and Light of the Fairy-Tale World: Romantic Imagery and Romantic Topos in the Works of Evgeny Schwartz

Abstract

This article examines the artistic specifi city of the images and motifs of the works of Evgeny Lvovich Schwartz (1896–1958), in whose dramaturgical and prose fairy tales the infl uence of the romantic literary tradition is traced. Turning to the works of Andersen and Perrault, amongst others, Schwartz transformed not only the original plots, but also the very fi gurative poetics of their works. A hypothesis is advanced on the infl uence on these poetics of the motifs and images of E. T. A. Hoffmann and German Romanticism in general. In part, such an infl uence became possible since the literary author’s fairy tale itself was formed largely thanks to German romanticism. However, it is also necessary to take into account the close creative interaction of Schwartz with the artistic association of the “Serapion brothers.” Special attention is paid to the poetics of urban topos in the fairy tales “Doll City”, “Adventures of Gogenstaufen”, and “Shadow”, where the romantic tradition inherent in such authors as Andersen, Hoffman, and Odoevsky is traced. Using the historical poetics method, the comparative historical method, and comparative analysis in the works of Schwartz, the principle of romantic duality is revealed: the interaction of shadow and light, the motif of illusion, and the style of phantasmagoria. The motif of vampirism in the literal and allegorical sense is also separately touched upon, with reference to the peculiarities of this motif in the poetics of Romanticism.