The Dragon

The plays of Yevgeny Lvovich Schwartz are equally loved by children and by adults, through books, stage productions, and film adaptations: “Cinderella,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Shadow,” “An Ordinary Miracle.” These are not so much fairy tales as philosophical parables about love and hate, good and evil, where the extraordinary, the fairy-tale blends with the real and recognizable.

In Soviet times, the play “The Dragon” had the reputation of being dissident. To kill a dragon, you must first defeat the dragon inside yourself. The dangerous meaning of the fairy tale to the Stalinist regime outweighed the obvious associations with fascism, and the play was banned for many years.

Today Schwartz’s play can be perceived both as a sharp political satire and as a romantic love drama. Or you can simply enjoy every word of the brilliant text, discovering in the fairy tale the original source of many long-familiar winged expressions.