of the premiere. Repression His career in the theatre effectively stalled, Erdman turned his attention to the cinema. He wrote scripts for several silent films, the most famous being Boris Barnet's The House on Trubnaya. After Stanislavsky's actor Vasily Kachalov thoughtlessly recited Erdman's satirical fables to Stalin during a night party in the Kremlin, their author's fate was sealed. He was arrested when filming his first attempt at a musical, Jolly Fellows, and faced deportation to the town of Yeniseysk in Siberia (1933). The following year he was permitted to move to Tomsk, where was able to secure a job in a local theatre. Although he was not allowed to appear in Moscow, Erdman would visit the city illegally in the 1930s. During one of such visits, he read to Mikhail Bulgakov the first act of his new play The Hypnotist (never completed). Bulgakov was so impressed by his talent that he petitioned Stalin to sanction Erdman's return to the capital. The petition was ignored, but Erdman's script for the comedy Volga-Volga was awarded the Stalin Prize for 1941. At the outbreak of World War II, Erdman was in Ryazan with his friend and collaborator Mikhail Volpin, whom he had known since his time with Mayakovsky. As both men had a history as political prisoners, they were unable to enlist in the army in the ordinary fashion. Instead, they had to travel by foot to Tolyatti, a distance of 600 kilometers, in order to enlist in a special unit open to disenfranchised persons and former priests. In 1942, through Lavrentiy Beria's patronage, Erdman obtained a transfer to Moscow for himself and Volpin, and they spent the remainder of the war writing material for the Song and Dance Ensemble at the Central Club of the NKVD. After the war he remained shut out of theatrical circles. With no other means of livelihood but the cinema, he turned to the most apolitical activity available, contributing scripts for children's films such as Jack Frost and It Was I Who Drew the Little Man, often in collaboration with Mikhail Volpin. The Thaw Erdman's perfection of dialogues and compositions was crucial in adapting Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale to the Soviet film screens. The film The Snow Queen was cowritten by director Lev Atamanov and Georgy Grebner(ru). Of all the people in the world influenced by the movie, it would be the Japanese people that