About the work
Three-act fairy-tale play in parable form by Yevgeny Schwartz, written in 1943/44 during the siege of Leningrad. It premiered in Moscow in August 1944 at the Leningrad Comedy Theatre, directed by Nikolai Akimov, but was banned by Soviet censors after only three performances.
Plot
A wandering knight, Lancelot, arrives in a small town ruled by a tyrannical dragon and challenges the monster to combat. He kills the dragon, only to find that the townspeople have long since made their peace with oppression and would rather accept a new, human tyrant than take responsibility for themselves. Only years later does Lancelot return to free the town from its ingrained servility for good.
Cultural significance
As a parable of dictatorship and a subservient mindset, "The Dragon" was read by Soviet authorities as a critique of their own system despite its ostensibly anti-fascist framing, and remained banned until 1962. Benno Besson's 1965 production at Berlin's Deutsches Theater later made the play widely known in German-speaking theatre, running for more than 580 performances.