Evgeny Shvarts (1896–1958) wrote the fairy tales that Soviet cinema turned into The Dragon, The Shadow, The Snow Queen and An Ordinary Miracle. For a long time he lived not far from where this exhibition is now hanging — a flat on Griboedov Canal, a two-minute walk across the Field of Mars from the Marble Palace. In autumn 2026 the Russian Museum marks the 130th anniversary of his birth with a show that goes well beyond the children's bookshelf: letters, manuscripts, stage sketches, portraits by friends from the Leningrad artistic world of the 1930s.
🏛 Marble Palace: a branch not everyone finds
The Marble Palace is on Millionnaya Ulitsa 5/1, a short walk from the Field of Mars. It belongs to the Russian Museum but has its own entrance and its own ticket (though the combined Russian Museum pass covers it). Most visitors miss it entirely — the main palace on Ploshchad Iskusstv eats the crowd. For a quiet two-hour exhibition this is one of the city's best venues: eighteenth-century rooms with original marble and no queue.
📚 What the exhibition shows
The curators have put together three parallel threads:
1. Shvarts as a Leningrad man — photographs, documents from the Union of Writers, letters to and from Zoshchenko, Marshak, Lidia Chukovskaya. The thirties and forties were his sharpest decades; the city shaped the voice. 2. Fairy tale as a tool — manuscripts and drafts of The Dragon (1943), set in a conditional city where the dragon has to be defeated by somebody born in it. The exhibition shows the plays' subtexts without turning them into a dissident lecture. 3. Illustrations and stage designs — Yury Vasnetsov, Lebedev, Mitrokhin, Konashevich — the Leningrad children's-book school working in parallel with Shvarts.
Enough for ninety minutes. The exhibition closes in late January 2027; a Tuesday afternoon is the quietest time to visit.
