Eugene Schwartz, a man from a fairy-tale

It’s not an easy task to describe a man, like Eugene Schwartz. You can give all the biographical facts, but that wouldn’t really explain who he was. And Eugene Lvovich was a man, who lived in a reality that was better, brighter than what was happening around him. He believed in a world as it could be rather than as it was, and his writing quite possibly brought it out in people.

Here are the facts:

·       He was born in October 1896 in Russia in a family of Leo Schwartz, a local medic, who converted from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity after marrying his wife, Eugene’s mother.

·       His father was sent to prison for suspicion of political activism only two years after Schwartz’s birth.

·       Schwatrz fought in 1917-1918 for the Pro-Royal army in the Russian Civil war where he got a severe post-concussion syndrome that resulted in a tremor in his hands for the rest of his life.

·       He was married twice, and had two children with his first wife.

·       Wrote some of the most wonderful fairy-tales for theatre and film in the Soviet time.

·       Despite writing the play “Dragon” which severely criticised the Soviet government and tyranny in general, and having that play performed in the time of Stalin’s repressions, he died a natural death in 1958, five years after Stalin’s own death.

What do these facts tell about him as a man? Nearly nothing.

But what about the time he nearly died from yet another stroke, and the doctors were telling the family he only had hours to live? Shcwartz would lie in bed that day and plead with his visitors:

-        Please, give me a pencil and paper! I want to write about the butterfly.

People thought he was hallucinating, but that wasn’t it. Death didn’t come this time, and later he was telling his friends how he was tortured by the thought that he’ll die and won’t have the time to tell people about this butterfly he saw this summer. It was white, fluttering about in the alley by the hairdressers. It wasn’t anything special, quite ordinary, really, but he had found the words to describe her fluttering then, in the moment when he thought he was dying.

 Or the letters, unending letters of love he was always writing to his second wife, Katya. They met when Schwartz’s first wife was pregnant with his second child, a girl, and after a few months both left their previous spouses and got married. Schwartz said he would love Katya for the rest of his life, and it was true. Two years before his death he wrote a play “Ordinary Miracle”, where the protagonist, a magician, says “Fifteen years I’m married, and still in love with my wife like a hopeless youth”. Those were Schwartz’s words about his wife.

 “I’ve been thinking all this time about you. I’ve imagined and examined you all to the last button on your jacket. There is nothing that can surprise me now. I could write 500 variations on the topic of Catherine Ivanovna (Katya’s full name). Please, don’t ever forget me. It’s impossible for me without you. This whole day I felt that nothing good will come of today, that I won’t see you yet, that for some reason a very good Thursday is wasted” – from the letter to Katya on 10 January 1929.

He was always connected with theatre. Even when he studied Law in Moscow University in 1914, he’d participate in extra-curriculum theatre activities. And, of course, he wrote. He wrote fairy tales for children, he wrote them in prose and in poetic form, and of course, as plays for theatre, scripts for film. Both his fiction and his letters were always filled with such kindness, it was hard to explain where it all would come from.

He would often say: “You must do all that people ask of you, never say no to anything. And try to do it as well as you can, even perfect”. He’d say, “I write everything, except for complaints”. (Complaints were a form of an anonymous tip from citizens on each other in the Soviet times that were encouraged by law enforcement. There even existed stories about a young boy tipping off the government about his farmer father stashing some corn in his house so as not to starve, which was illegal, as all corn was to be the property of the government. The story is told in such a light that the boy is shown to be a hero. Complaints in the Soviet times were often used by citizens who wanted a better living space, so they would write to the government and tell on their neighbour with a bigger flat, as if that neighbour was promoting anti-government propaganda. The burden of proof was never on the complaint, but on the accused themselves, and often just one such letter was enough to send a man to the gulags.)

 In his diaries he describes the time he was living in a village by Leningrad, in 1937: “In Razliv (the village) we would go to bed very late on purpose. It seemed, for some reason, especially shameful to stand before the messengers of fate in your underwear and to pull your pants on in front of their eyes. Before going to bed I’d come out onto the street. The night would be light. The chariots of lepers would crawl, skidding and buzzing down the main street. There’s one over there on the crossroads, it stops, as if smelling the prey, and ponders whether to turn in. And I, not knowing any fault of mine, am frozen, waiting, like in a slaughterhouse, the knowledge of my innocence being what keeps me in my spot”. When his friend was arrested, and became the “Enemy of the nation”, he was called in to testify against him, and despite the paralysing fear, the fear of being accused by association, which happened left and right at the time, he could not muster anything bad to say about that man.

 Still by the end of his life Schwartz would say he considered himself a cowardly, lazy man. He didn’t value what he’d done, what he’d written. In his memoirs he writes “I never betrayed or slandered anyone, and even in the toughest of times I’d try to protect those in trouble as much as I could. But that’s hardly a medal of valour. It’s not a feat”. In his own eyes he never considered himself a Lancelot, his protagonist in “Dragon”. Only Charlemagne, the father of Elsa, a man who is paralysed by fear so much he can barely protest the selection of his daughter to be the next victim of the Dragon.

 And yet, he was a visionary. In a time when most people lost their humanity to fear and desperate exaltations of glory for tyrants, he was always filled with love and tenderness even for those people that he knew little. Despite the repressions on the arts and theatre in particular, the life threatening censorship, he wrote “Dragon” and many other plays, as if it didn’t even occur to him that he could be accused on the grounds of the terrifying article 58 of the Criminal Code of USSR (counter-revolutionary acts). He once said, “A fairy-tale isn’t told to conceal, no, but to reveal instead, to say as loud as you can all that you think”.