Pre-order. The book will be published in January 2026. I am writing about Evgeny Schwartz because he talked about us. About a world where it's not the Dragon that's scary, but the habit of living next to it; about the fear that penetrates the soul and becomes the norm; and about the inner freedom that can be preserved even inside the unfreedom.  Natalia Gromova Evgeny Schwartz wrote fairy tales that were much more realistic than Soviet novels. In "The Shadow" and especially in "The Dragon," he prophetically revealed the nature of slavery, what would later be called the "banality of evil," the daily habit of living next to a tyrant. In an era of breakups and losses, he restored people's loss, friendship, love, and hope, and talked about them in a way that made it easier to breathe. In his plays, Schwartz laughed at his terrified contemporaries and at the same time felt sorry for them, mourning their souls. Who was he really? A scoffer or a sage disguised as a buffoon, who, turning over everyday words and meanings, saw the world more clearly than anyone else. Schwartz is one of the few artists who managed to bring inner light through the darkness of their time and give people hope for healing. ___________ Natalia Gromova is a novelist and literary historian. Until March 2022, he is a leading researcher at the State Literary Museum in Moscow. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Eugene Schwartz's "An Ordinary Wizard." Leading lectures on "Arzamas" about Schwartz, Tsvetaeva and others. He is the author of a number of scientific historical studies and nonfiction books about literary life, the evacuation of writers, post-war literary life, about Tsvetaeva, Bergholz, Pasternak and others. Finalist of the Russian Booker Prize for 2014 and the Crown Prize of the Moscow Writers' Union. Finalist of the Big Book Award for 2020.