“Shadow can only win for a while”

On April 12, 1940, the Leningrad Comedy Theater for the first time showed the play-tale “Shadow” by Yevgeny Schwartz staged by director Nikolai Akimov.

The play “Shadow” was written in 1937-1940 especially for the Comedy Theater on the idea of ​​Nikolai Akimov. Rehearsals for the play began in 1939. The play was corrected and completed right while the director and actors were working on it.

Nikolai Akimov met Evgeny Schwartz during his work at the then young Theater named after Evg. Vakhtangov. This was in 1931. When, two years later, Akimov organized an experimental studio at the Leningrad Music Hall, which was supposed to grow into a synthetic theater, where the art of a dramatic actor would be combined with music, ballet and circus, he turned to three playwrights in search of repertoire: Shakespeare, Labish and Schwartz. Evgeny Schwartz proposed to make a free presentation of Andersen’s fairy tales, connecting The Princess and the Swineherd with The Naked King.

“This work was banned by the Glavrepertkom for reasons not formulated,” writes Nikolai Akimov in his memoirs about working with Evgeny Schwartz (quoted from the book “We knew Evgeny Schwartz”, L. — M .: Art, 1966), “but she will forever approved our alliance with Schwartz. After a long choice of a theme for an “adult” play (during this time Schwartz wrote several plays for children), I suggested that Schwartz continue the experience of turning to Andersen and take a short fairy tale – “Shadow”, which I have always loved very much. Ten days after this conversation, he read the first act, written in one gulp and almost without alterations, the most brilliant in this play. The completion of the work – the second and third acts – took many months. This marked the beginning of our ongoing argument with Schwartz. He categorically did not recognize the drawing up of a preliminary plan for the play, saying that it embarrasses him and deprives him of the taste for work, that this is the French way, and he is a Russian playwright. He accused me of being fond of the French, and the French of eating frogs! And no matter how right he was in his position, he always had enough free flight of fantasy unencumbered by a plan for the first acts, which really turned out wonderfully, after which compositional torments invariably began, in which both the theater and the director had to take part. But still, in 1940, The Shadow appeared on the stage of the Comedy Theater and was immediately recognized by both the audience and the critics, and began its long life on the world stage.

“Shortly before the premiere, a field dress rehearsal was held at the Writer’s House,” recalls the theater critic, art historian Yevgeny Binevich (quoted from the book “Eugene Schwartz. Chronicle of Life”, DNA publishing house, 2008). “There was a tradition in those days. Passed the show festively on our small stage. Showed the most successful pieces of the performance. Everyone liked everything, everyone was cheerful (…) And so the dress rehearsal took place in the theater. In the evening. First general. We watched in despair as she crawled across the stage of the theatre, getting tangled up in the crowbars, as complicated as always with Akimov. The actors are dead. Not a single living word! And the next day, the audience came to the morning viewing, and everything seemed to come to life. And the play was a success.

P. Sukhanov played the role of the Scientist, E. Garin (Zh. Letsky), Pietro – B. Tenin, Annunziata – I. Gosheva, Yulia Julie – L. Sukharevskaya (I. Zarubina), Princess – E. Junger, Caesar Borgia – G. Florinsky, First Minister – V. Kiselev, Minister of Finance – A. Beniaminov, Privy Councilor – A. Volkov, doctor – I. Hansel, Executioner – N. Volkov and others.

Nikolai Akimov had his own vision of the production.

“Shadow” poses a number of unexpected and unforeseen tasks for the theater,” he wrote in the essay “The Storyteller on Our Stage” (quoted from N. P. Akimov’s book “Not only about the theater”, M .: Art, 1966) – Realistic , a lyrical play imbued with sharp humor, includes many events that the realistic theater is not used to depicting. How to play an ogre? How, according to the laws of realism, should the Shadow be separated from the person? With what natural gesture should one lose one’s head from one’s shoulders? In all such cases, one has to put aside theatrical self-study, empirically, listening to the style of the author and to the exact laws of the fairy-tale world, to guess the solution.

After the second production of “Shadow” in 1960, Nikolai Pavlovich will say that “Shadow” for the Comedy Theater is the same performance as “The Seagull” for the Moscow Art Theater or “Princess Turandot” for the Vakhtangov Theater.

The performance was sold out. According to Yevgeny Mikhailovich Binevich, during the rehearsals, Schwartz tried in every possible way to soften the director’s evil satire, to push forward the lyrical outline of the play.

“And he succeeded in something,” says E. M. Binevich. – Those who watched the production of the fortieth year and the sixtieth, when the author was no longer alive, said that the second performance was much sharper and angrier. And the “Shadow” of the sixties told more about the “shadows”, and love, the chivalrous impulse of the Scientist to make all people happy, faded into the background. “The theater here is cruel, very cruel,” one of the reviewers remarks about it.

Surprisingly, despite the boldness and poignancy of the play, the press following the production of The Shadow was mostly favorable to Schwartz. “Schwartz wrote a genuine, real fairy tale play. But at the same time, there is a lot of genuine life truth in this play. Schwartz knows how to wittily implement fairy-tale metaphors, translate fairy-tale images into everyday, “home” plan, bring them closer to the reader and viewer…”, wrote Literaturnaya Gazeta on May 10, 1940. N. Zhdanov in the Theater magazine (No. 7, 1940) noted that the performance is “one of the rare examples of a surprisingly harmonious interaction between the dramaturgical and directorial principles underlying the performance”, that the play “provides a lot of material for asserting that real theatrical convention, which is deeply consistent with the nature of the theater and especially the theater of the comic. “The most remarkable thing in the performance of the artist Erast Garin is that he makes the viewer feel his dependence on a person …,” we read in the Pravda newspaper of May 26, 1940.

Of course, there were art officials who tried to ban the performance because of too bold satire. Akimov even had to make excuses that the Doctor from The Shadow had nothing to do with Soviet doctors, and Caesar Borgia had nothing to do with the Writers’ Union…

On May 24, 1940, the Comedy Theater presented The Shadow to the Moscow audience. Criticism in Belokamennaya was harsher for the performance.

“It seemed to almost everyone that the first act was very well, harmoniously and logically built, while the other two were much worse,” writes theater expert Yevgeny Binevich. “Schwartz’s fairy tale,” wrote Y. Greenwald, “is a philosophical fairy tale… In Akimov’s interpretation, it is not only simplified and lightened, but also excessively stylized. The fantasy of the plot, the improbability of the adventures of the heroes, the fabulous miracles bursting into their lives attract Akimov’s attention more than the moral and ethical problems that make up the content of this play ”(Vechernyaya Moskva newspaper, May 26, 1940)“ The Comedy Theater is acute I felt the satirical orientation of Schwartz’s fairy tale and, less so, its poetic, romantic essence ”(Trud newspaper, May 26, 1940). Evgeny Lvovich went to the next performance of The Shadow,“ as if to an execution. (…) And then a miracle happened. The performance went not only with great success, but with exceptional success. (…) The curtain was given several times. The author was called. The director was called…”

Critics admitted: “Schwartz is a great master of subtle, sparkling irony” (“Soviet Art”, May 27, 1940)

In Schwartz’s fairy tales, even such gloomy ones as “Shadow” or “Dragon”, a happy ending is inevitable. He didn’t like stories with bad endings.

“I remember how I resolutely refused to listen to the tale of Thumbelina,” writes E. Schwartz in the book “I live restlessly … (from diaries)” (ed. “Soviet writer”, 1990) – The sad tone from which the tale begins inspired me an invincible certainty that Thumbelina is doomed to perish. I plugged my ears and forced my mother to shut up, not wanting to believe that everything would end well. Taking advantage of this weakness of mine, my mother became from me, a boy already obedient to her, quite already twisting ropes. She terrorized me with bad ends. If, for example, I refused to eat a cutlet, my mother began to tell a fairy tale, all the characters of which fell into a hopeless situation. “Eat up, otherwise everyone will drown.” And I ate.”

In G. H. Andersen’s fairy tale “Shadow”, the Scientist is dealt with, and his Shadow gets the princess.

In Schwartz, when a scientist is beheaded, his shadow is also decapitated. The frightened royal court has to agree to the resurrection of the scientist. Conclusion: “the shadow can win only for a while.”

“… A hundred years separating Schwartz from Andersen influenced the denouement of this story. If the triumph of the shadow is logical and inevitable for Andersen, then Schwartz can only agree to its temporary triumph,” wrote Nikolai Akimov.

Schwartz’s plot is based on a brilliant conjecture about the parasitic nature of evil. Evil is obliged to take care of good, to protect it, since it feeds on this good; the shadow is obliged to protect the source of light, for it is also the source of its existence.
“Schwartz’s tales are real contemporary contemporary plays,” says N. Akimov (in the book “We knew Evgeny Schwartz”, L.-M.: Art, 1966). And Yevgeny Lvovich himself in the prologue to the play “An Ordinary Miracle” wrote: “A fairy tale is told (…) in order to open, say with all your might, at the top of your voice, what you think.”

Sergei Ishkov.

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