From the Introduction:
Yevgheny Shvarts was born on the 21st of October 1896 in the country near Petersburg, and died on the 15th of January 1958. In the posthumous Soviet edition of his plays and film scenarios in 1960. he is described as one o f the leading Soviet dramatists'. His plays, however, were not published in a separate edition until that year and, until recently, have had only a few performances.
Shvarts's interest in the theatre dates back to the early twenties when he was a member of a 'Theatre Workshop' at Rostov-on-Don. His literary career began in 1925 when he gave up acting and became a contributor to, and later, one of the editors of a children's magazine in Leningrad. He wrote several plays for children, but his reputation as a dramatist is based on three remarkable satirical plays for adults, although these, too, like his plays for children, contain a strong vein of fantasy.
It is perhaps not surprising that the ideas and feelings which underlie these three important plays, The Naked King, The Shadow and TheDragon, had to be disguised by clothing them in the garb of fairy-tales - for they were written during thedecade of1934-44), the years dominated in Russia by the 'cult of personality' and the ruthless persecution of all dissenters from the official ideology of Stalinism.