Yevgeny Schwartz wrote fairy tales for adults — in Stalin's time, when plain speech was dangerous. The Dragon, The Naked King, The Shadow: plays in which tyrants, cowards, and conformists speak in their own words, never suspecting that they will be recognized.
He was born in Kazan in 1896, studied law, and was swept up in the Civil War. Rostov, then Petrograd. He worked at the children's magazines Yozh and Chizh alongside Kharms and Vvedensky.
The Dragon (1944): Lancelot kills the dragon — but the townspeople are no longer who they were. "It is not only the dragon that must be killed — everything the dragon has bred in people must be killed too." The play was staged once, then shut down.
An Ordinary Miracle is a story about love proving stronger than any spell. He wrote it shortly before his death, in 1958. Only afterward did his plays return to the stage.