Not confining himself to the elucidation of the outer forms of his dramas, Andreyeff gives a direct key to the understanding of his Black Maskers in My Diary, published in 1908,two or three months before the writing of The Black Maskers. The hero of that sketch, an old man who has been immured in a prison since early manhood, writes in his diary: Every man, as I afterward came to see and understand, was like that rich and distinguished gentleman who arranged a gorgeous masquerade in his castle and illuminated his castle with lights; and thither came from far and wide strange masks, whom he welcomed with courteous greetings, though ever with the vain inquiry: Who are you? And new masks arrived ever stranger and more horrible. To this description the prisoner adds, as a foot-note to his diary: The castle is the soul; the lord of the castle is man, the master of the soul; the strange, black maskers are the powers whose field of action is the soul of man, and whose mysterious nature he can never fathom. These beings bring into the soul darkness and death, extinguishing the light of life. The simple maskers, the guests of Lorenzo, are ordinary people; yet even these are transformed and lose their real semblances and, like the black maskers, they become mysterious, incomprehensible, and terrifying to Lorenzo, who fails to understand them as he fails to understand his own soul. Lorenzos mind becomes clouded, his own soul becomes repulsive to him, he seems strange to himself. Though he longs to accept his own soul as his own, yet the ugliness, the repulsiveness, of that which he sees within it checks his resolve to do so, and his soul becomes two souls —Lorenzo becomes two Lorenzos. Before him he sees his double—his horrible, disgusting, false double—and incensed with anger he draws his sword and slays it. Recall the uncanny scene in which the servants, friends, and wife of Lorenzo come to bid farewell to the remains of the dead duke, while the duke himself—his other half—stands in the shadow at the head of the bier and observes how they greet the cold corpse of himself. The duality of soul, the duality of personality, has led to the final tragedy of the duke— insanity. ~ from the introduction by V.V. Brusyann
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 05:00:07 +0000
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