The still non-writing Yevgeny Shvarts grew closer to the Serapion Brothers and often attended their gatherings at the House of Arts, where the strict Serapions admitted far from everyone. However, he mostly sat somewhere on the sidelines and kept silent.

Sometimes there was no electricity in the House of Arts, as in the entire city. There was nowhere to watch movies. Then it was decided to produce their own "films." Together with Zoshchenko and Lunts, Shvarts wrote scripts for them. A crowd gathered for these performances—writers, artists, musicians. "Action films" appeared—"The Family Diamonds of Foma Zhanov," "The Marriage of Podkopytin," where Shvarts slyly set up the audience members as Gogol-like characters. But no one took offense, not even Zoshchenko, to whom he assigned the role of Zhevakin, as "a great amateur from the side of female fullness." In "The Fake Diamonds," Vyacheslav Ivanov was portrayed, who had never had any, let alone family, diamonds, and in which he himself played the title role. The audience laughed uproariously. And only Akhmatova always watched attentively and seriously.

The audience did not remember the details of the performances, only a few titles and their cheerful atmosphere. Mostly, these were improvisations. Before the start, Shvarts and Lunts would step aside for five minutes and decide what would be performed that day and who would participate. No one had the right to refuse a role. The "mute forces of nature" were usually portrayed by the youth. The main performers here were Volodya Pozner, future French writer; Kolya Chukovsky, son of Khodasevich; Garik and Dima, sons of Forsh. Olga Dmitrievna called them runts. It was these runts who portrayed the sea, dolphins, and all the rest of the auxiliary elements. In "Antony and Cleopatra," the sea was made from a huge carpet covering the entire room, left by the former owner of the house, the famous merchant Eliseev. The runts, making waves, dived under the carpet as dolphins…

And in 1930, Olga Forsh’s novel about the House of Arts and its inhabitants—"The Mad Ship"—would be published, which she considered her best book and in which she "wanted to capture the entire path and the end of the former 'Russian intelligentsia'." Yevgeny Shvarts appears in it under the name Genya Chorna.

Now, as soon as almost everyone had a collection of someone's works under their belt, the news spread that the "public favorite" Genya Chorn was coming with his troupe. The predominance of imagination over other intellectual baggage was a salvation in the hungry years. Genya Chorn, an improvising master of ceremonies, possessed the gift of the legendary Pied Piper, who, as is known, had such power over the children that, playing a light pipe, he led the entire population out of the German town along with the rats—Genya Chorn co-organized the runts of both sexes from the cabins of the Mad Ship. Now he raised his Roman profile and commanded:

– The meeting of the fleets of Antony and Egyptian Cleopatra. In the absence of ships and suitable heroes, the action will be presented in a single foreground—the play of delighted dolphins. Dolphins, frolic!

Genya Chorn excited the troupe’s ambition with just one profile. The dolphin runts, to out-dive each other, broke their noses bloody. The injured were brought out before everyone by the enthusiastic Chorn, who sympathetically exclaimed:

– Let us honor the heroes of labor with a splash of palms!

Then they moved on to the troupe’s highlight—"Boarding Noah’s Ark and the collective formation of the elephant." Less trusting of divine providence than the patriarch Noah, Genya Chorn declared that in the ark they would not seat "pairs of pure with impure," as was customary before the revolution, but more in tune with the era—for the protection of the ark, troops would be the first to board.

The ark itself was declared invisible, like the one moored at the pier on the Karpovka River near the House of Writers—but the parade of boarding troops was trumpeted. The infantry stomped heavily, the cavalry more briskly, and finally, somewhat indecently emphasizing their branch of arms, the artillery. The audience cheered, and sitting on the encyclopedic, once soft, writers waited like children to see how Genya Chorn would lead the "collective formation of the elephant," already loudly trumpeting with its trunk, through the narrow doors without scattering it.

And twenty-five years later, in 1956, Yevgeny Lvovich would receive a congratulation on his sixtieth birthday, signed by Olga Dmitrievna Forsh and Forsh the dolphin. And only after Shvarts had passed away did she lament that his image in the novel was "barely outlined, in no way expressing the soul, talent, and mind of Yevgeny Shvarts, which I deeply regret."

Shvarts could also often be found at the "Sounding Shell." When you walk along Rubinstein Street towards Nevsky, across the avenue stands a house whose top floor housed the studio of the photographer and artist Moisey Solomonovich Nappelbaum. Next to the huge window was a long balcony. Those who had been there said that stepping out onto it in the evening, they admired the sunsets over Nevsky, visible all the way to the Admiralty. Nappelbaum’s elder daughters, Ida and Frederika, students of Nikolai Gumilev, held poetry evenings here.

Source:

Evgeny Mikhailovich Binevich, “Yevgeny Shvarts. Chronicle of Life”

http://literatura5.narod.ru/disk.html