The Theme and Structural Significance of Leonid Andreev's The Black Masks

THE THEME AND STRUCTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF LEONID ANDREEV'S THE BLACK MASKS No MAJOR WORK OF Andreev has provoked less comment than his allegorical drama The Black Masks. This is particularly surprising in view of the great importance which he himself attached to it. He wrote to the critic A. Evlakhov in 1916: "For me personally 'The Black Masks' is the most important of my works; it is the closest to me and psychically the dearest (despite its many formal defects)."l Although he is referring here primarily to its theme, a greater impression was made by the structural and formal peculiarities of the play when it appeared in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1908 in the seventh of the Sipovnik ("Wildbriar") almanacs. Whilst most theatre-goers, according to the contemporary critic Kozlovskij, were discouraged by the complexity of the work from even attempting to understand the thought expressed in it,2 many theoreticians of the "new theatre" were intrigued by Andreev's manner of treatment. It is maintained by the present writer that the source of this interest was due recognition of the fact that Andreev had attempted in the play to put into practice certain theoretical principles which were the subject of keen debate in theatrical circles at the time. But before this aspect of the play's significance can be discussed, it is necessary to establish briefly what Andreev was trying to depict in the play; the "what" must precede the "how." He began the work in 1907 while he was sojourning at Capri with Gor'kij, who had invited him there to recuperate after the death of his wife in Berlin the previous November. With the gradual alleviation of his sorrow, brought about by the scenery, the sea, and the kindness of the people about him, he embarked on one of the most prolific periods of his literary career. In the course of the next six months he devised the scheme of Tsar Hunger, wrote Judas lscariot, Darkness and the satirical one-act play Love for One's 1 See A. Linin, "Neuere Forschungen uber Leonid Andrejev," Zeitschrift fur Slavische Philologie, VIII (1930), pp. 214-215' 2 See L. S. Kozlovskij, "L. Andreev," in Russkaia literatura XX veka, I890-I9IOJ II, 2 (edited by S. A. Vengerov. Moscow, 1915), pp. 252-253. 95 96 MODERN DRAMA May N eighbour~ drafted the preliminary sketches of Saska Zegulev and The Ocean~ and wrote three chapters of My Notes. It was in the process of writing My Notes that he conceived the idea of The Black Masks. Just as the symbolical scheme of the play is foreshadowed and largely explained in a monologue of the hero of My Notes~3 so its theme is closely related to that of the other major works, both dramatic and narrative, written by Andreev at this time. Indeed, it might almost be regarded as an allegorical representation of the fundamental idea of his story Darkness~ which appeared in September 1907 in the third Sipovnik almanac, and a direct parallel can be drawn between the spiritual experience of the hero and that of Werner, the central figure of The Story of Seven Who Were Hanged~ published in the fifth Sipovnik almanac in May 1908.4 Andreev's theme is the tension and conflict between the metaphysical and empirical personalities of the individual. The setting-the castle of Lorenzo, Duke of Spadar05 and Knight of the Holy Spirit -is a projection of the protagonist's inner world, and the action is an externalisation of his psychic conflict. Whilst the close affinities between the play's symbolical framework and that of Poe's poem The Haunted Palace suggests that here, as in other works,6 Andreev experienced the influence of the American writer, the content with which he fills it deprives of its basis the critic Kugel's hardly disguised charge of plagiarism.7 The antipodes of the hero of My Notes-who, like Raskol'nikov, might be described, in Vja<::eslav Ivanov's phrase, as a "magician of self-incarceration"8-Lorenzo opens his castle to the world. Like the hero of Darkness-a "saintly" revolutionary terrorist whose lofty ethical ideals suffer near collapse when he is confronted with life in a brothel (an intensified microcosm of the life for the sake of 3 See Polnoe sobranie socinenij Leonida Andreeva, III (A. F. Marks, St. Petersburg , 1913), p. 223. Hereafter this eight-volume edition will be referred to as "Works." 4 For an analysis of this story see my article: "Leonid Andreyev's 'Divine Comedy'," Canadian Slavonic Papers, VI (University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 73-79· 5 The name "Spadaro" was taken by Andreev from a fisherman at Capri (see Gor'kij's reference in a letter to Andreev of autumn 1906 in P. Yershov (ed.). Letters of Gorky and Andreev, I899-I9I2 (London, 1958), p. 89. 6 For a discussion of the influence of Poe on Andreev's early stories see: V. L'vov-Rogacevskij, "Mertvoe carstvo. (Po povodu rasskazov Leonida Andreeva)," Obrazovanie, IX (1904), pp. 73-130; also G. Culkov, "Tretij 'Sbornik' tovari~cestva 'Znanie' za 1904 g., SPb., 1905," Voprosy ti.zni, I (1905), pp. 303-304. 7 See A. R. Kugel', "Literaturnye vstreci i xarakteristiki," in his List'ja, s dereva (Leningrad, 1926), pp. 82-83. 8 V. Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life. A Study of Dostoevsky (London. 1952), p. 79· 1967 ANDREEV'S The Black Masks 97 which he allegedly endangers his life)-he bares his soul to the test of reality. The first guests to flock in are symbols in which he sees his diversity reflected-his heart, his thought, his lies, etc. He is not aware of this, however, and merely expresses dismay at their ugliness . Equally dismayed are his wife Frances'ca, his servants and his jester. Andreev's justification for this introduction of external characters into the projected subjective world of the protagonist was that he was concerned not with these characters as objective figures but with the transformation which they undergo in Lorenzo's eyes in the course of the play. This transformation is employed as a means of illuminating the dichotomy of the hero's personality. The statement of the Cadet critic Gabrilovic (better known by his pseudonym "Galic") that there are no contacts in the play with the "non-ego"9 should be replaced by the statement that the external exists but, as always in Andreev, only for the purpose of casting light on the inner drama of the individual. Andreev's premise is that the personality of man is conditioned by his contacts with external reality, the potential result of which is the eclipse of the true personality. People disappear and are replaced by constantly changing masks. Even one's dearest are overcome by the same fate and the most powerful love becomes incapable of apprehending the essence of the eternally changing scene. Hence the increasing perplexity of Lorenzo as one after another women appear before him identical in appearance to Francesca; to each he responds as though she were his wife. His inability to see beyond the masks of empirical reality denotes the predominance of his empirical over his true personality. The black masks who throng into the castle-Poe's "evil things in robes of sorrow"lO-are symbolic of the false reality which has engulfed Lorenzo's soul. Extinguishing the lights, they plunge the castle of Act I into darkness. In Act II the dichotomy of the hero's personality is extemalised in the appearance of a "second Lorenzo." This is the first and only time in Andreev's fiction that the individual sees his duality embodied in his own image. Prior to The Black Masks the only suggestions of the Doppelganger-theme appear in the portrait of the hero of My Notes11 and in the terror of Dr. Kedentsev, the hero of Thought (1902), before his own reflected image-the mirror-motif 9 See L. Gabrilovic (L. Galic), "0 'cernyx maskax'," Teatr i iskusstvo, LI (1908). p. 914. 10 J. A. Harrison (ed.), The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, VII (New York, 1902). p. 84. 11 See Works, III, p. 216. 98 MODERN DRAMA May being one of the many variants of the theme used extensively by the German romantics, especially HofImann.12 The two personalities confront one another in mortal combat in a scene which recalls the battle in Poe's William Wilson between the protagonist and his embodied conscience. The joust is resolved in the triumph of the true personality. The false Lorenzo is killed and is now subjected to the penance of being made to lie in his coHin and listen to the record of his sins from those whom he has wronged. The illusions have been swept away and the masks stripped off; only truth remains. The play concludes with a symbolical representation of the cleansing of the soul in the purifying flames of truth, before which the black masks recoil in confusion. In The· Black Masks~ as in Darkness~ the "Divine Comedy" is re-enacted. Like Dante, the terrorist and Lorenzo are confronted with the corruption of their personalities and with the dark forces of the "inferno" which is empirical life. They survive the test of both; the spirit of the terrorist "gleams with a white flame"13 and' Lorenzo ascends to paradise in a burst of radiance. One is tempted to suspect more than coincidence when Lorenzo cries to his servants at the beginning of the play: "The whole road must shine, blaze with lights like the road to paradise,"14 and when he replies to the masks who complain of the cold in Act I: "Cold? Why to me it seems as hot here as hell itself."15 The "presence" of the great Florentine is felt repeatedly. The influences which are sensed in the structure of the play, however, are contemporary and Russian. It was written, of course, at a time when the Russian theatre was experiencing a phase of unprecedented experimentation. The period was marked by the appearance of a whole succession of theoretical pronouncements on drama and the theatre prompted by the spirit of anti-realism which dominated Russian art in the first decade of this century. It was a time when plays were judged not only by their intrinsic merits, but 12 That Andreev was familiar with Hoffmann is confirmed by an unpublished letter to Nemirovic-Dancenko of 1914 or 1915 in which he recounts, albeit in distorted form, an episode from one of the German writer's stories-evidently The Sandman and the part thereof which constitutes Act I of Offenbach's operain order to point out a parallel between it and his intentions in his play Ekaterina Ivanovna (1912). An extract from the letter is quoted in Herman Bernstein's Preface to his translation of Ekaterina Ivanovna, published in New York in 1923, pp. vii-viii. In Andreev's time the mirror-motif was perhaps most strikingly employed by Brjusov in two stories in his cycle The Earth's AxisIn the Mirror and The Archive of a Psychiatrist. 18 Works, II. p. 171. 14 Works, I, p. 234. 15 Ibid., p. 239. 1967 ANDREEV'S TkeBlack Masks 99 also by the degree to which they conformed or dashed with theoretical requirements. The problem which lay at the basis of the most important of these theories was that of theatrical communication, i.e. the problem of how to enhance the relationship between the stage and the auditorium . In Mejerxol'd's conception, the footlights were automatically bridged by the active participation of the audience which was demanded by "conventional" or "stylized" productions, i.e. by the imaginative and intellectual effort which was required to build up a complete picture from the evocative "suggestions" offered by the regisseur, and he made certain technical adjustments to reinforce this "participation," abolishing the curtain and extending the stage~ platform downstage. There is ample evidence that Andreev was also intensely preoccupied with this same problem. Thus in a long letter to Stanislavskij about his play The Lite of Man (1906), produced at the Moscow Art Theatre in December 1907, he wrote: "The stage is linked only with the auditorium; it must be cut off from the wings."16 This detachment of the stage from its coulisses was dictated by the playwright's wish to eliminate all distraction, to focus the entire attention of the audience on the stage iself, and thus to establish a closer bond between the play and the spectator. In The Black Masks he went considerably further in his attempts to solve the problem, and the play contains distinct reflections of his receptivity to two solutions which were put forward at the timethose of Sologub, with whom he was closely associated on the editorial board of Sipovnik, and Evreinov. His experiment is a significant response to the basic reform which they advocated. In Sologub's opinion, the main obstacle to the spectator's selfidentification with the action was the actor. "The actor draws too much attention on himself from the spectator," he wrote, "and thereby obscures the drama and the author."17 The result was that lack of unity in contemporary productions to which the symbolists, especially Blok,18 were constantly drawing attention. Sologub maintained that unity could not be achieved until it was realised that the theatre would never be capable of playing a genuinely creative role while it made use of a plurality of different types of character; there is only one man, he states, "only the 'Ego' in the entire uni16 See LeDnid Andreev. P'esy (Moscow, 1959), p. 567. 17 F. Sologub, "Teatr odnoj voli," in Teatr. Kniga 0. nDVDm teatre (St. Petersburg , 1908), p. 183. 18 See, for example, A. BIok, "0 drame," SDbranie sDcinenij v vDs'mi tomax, V (Moscow-Leningrad, 1962), p. 171. The article was first published in Zolotoe RunD, VII-IX (1907). . 100 MOOERN DRAMA May verse."19 The empirical world is a forest of masks concealing the single creative soul of the "Ego" and the revelation of this eternal "soul" and the rending of the masks must become the single purpose of drama. Hence there should be only one hero attracting the whole attention of the audience: "All the rays of the action on the stage must converge in a single focus in order that the bright flame of ecstasy should suddenly burst forth."20 The other characters should merely represent steps leading up to the single unifying protagonist. This was the fundamental point of Sologub's theory of the "theatre of one will." The theory found its logical successor in Evreinov's theory of the "monodrama," which was born of the same desire to abolish the fragmentation of action which precluded the spectator's self-identifi· cation. Evreinov conceived the idea of staging the entire development of the action as it was viewed by the central character, subjecting the other characters and the environment to changes of appearance dependent on the protagonist's changes of mood and attitude. He wrote: My conception of the monodrama is a dramatic performance in which the world surrounding the character appears as it is apprehended by him at every single moment of his life on-stage.. Thus the basic principle of the monodrama is the principle of identity between the mise-en-scene and the performance of the character. In other words, the external spectacle must be an expression of the inner spectacle.21 Ideally, the spectator would accompany the protagonist, as his alter ego~ through the stages of his spiritual drama. In the same article Evreinov also makes the remark that Andreev's The Black Masks was one of the few plays which came close to realising the "monodrama ."22 Since the "monodramatic" depiction of environment, i.e. its illumination through the prism of the protagonist's mind and mood, constitutes one of the most common and striking devices of Andreev's narrative style, the complete projection of the inner drama of the protagonist in The Black Masks may certainly be considered a perfectly logical development in his art. Yet the fact that the appearance of the play coincided with the proclamation of their theories by Sologub and Evreinov and Andreev's confirmed preoccupation 19 Sologub, loco cit., p. 184. 20 Ibid., p. 190 • 21 N. N. Evreinov, "Vvedenie v monodramu," Teatr i iskusstvo, X (1909). p. 184. 22 See ibid. Together with The Black Masks he also mentions Hauptmann's The Assumption of Hannele and Maeterlinck's The Bluebird. 1967 ANDREEV'S The Black Masks 101 with the problem of the relationship between the stage and the auditorium-the problem which those theories were designed to solve-·suggest that here, as in his former plays, he was responding to current developments. Many regisseurs of the time were experimenting with the "monodrama," including Gordon Craig who came to Moscow in 1908 to produce Hamlet at the Art Theatre; in a letter to Il'ja Sac of April 1909 Stanislavskij wrote: "Craig is staging 'Hamlet' as a monodrama. He looks at everything through the eyes of Hamlet."23 It is difficult to believe that Andreev's experiment at such a time was simply a coincidence. The concentration of the drama round the figure of the protagonist is already clearly discernible in The Life of Man and Tsar Hunger. In the former the "story" of the protagonist embraces the whole play and the existence of the other characters is totally dependent, as their names indicate (Wife, Relatives, Friends, Enemies), on the existence of Man himself. The only inconsistency in this regard (the Drunkards) was rectified in the second variant, published in 1908, of the fifth Picture of the play, in which they are replaced by the Heirs.24 Even the antagonist, Someone-in-grey, is essentially representative of part of the protagonist himself-the mundane ambitions which propel him round the "circle of iron predestination" and against which he ultimately rebels. Tsar Hunger reveals the complete elimination of the antagonist, and the action is simply a graphic illustration of the workings of the abstract idea-the will, in the Schopenhauerian sense of the term-represented by the protagonist. Just as The Black Masks marks an advance on the thought expressed in The Life of Men in the sense that it portrays the completion of the act of self-transcension which is foreshadowed in Man's rebellion, so it represents the logical culmination of the "centripetal" structure of the earlier play. The antagonist is now specifically designated as one of the personalities of the protagonist. In Act I the dichotomy is prefigured in Lorenzo's failure to recognise the splintered facets of his personality, and it is completed in the duel-scene in Act II. Sundered from and victorious over the mundane personality, the immortal "ego" is consumed in that "bright flame of ecstasy" in which the harmony between the experience of the protagonist and that of the auditorium, in Sologub's ideal conception, was to be consummated. At the same time Andreev, as we have seen, did not hesitate to criticise the formal aspect of the work in his letter to Evlaxov, and it 23 K. S. Stanislavskij, Sobranie socinenij v vos'mi tomax, VII (Moscow, 1960). p. 431. 24 See "Smert' Celoveka. Novyj variant pjatoj kartiny 'tizni Celoveka'," Literaturno-xudozestvennye al'manaxi izdatel'stva "Sipovnik," IV (St. Petersburg, 1908), pp. 255-273. 102 MODERN DRAMA May is reasonable to assume that the source of his disquiet was the blatant discord between the subjective and objective elements in the play, i.e. the introduction of external characters into the dramatisation of the inner conflict of the protagonist. Even though Andreev was concerned specifically with Lorenzo's changing attitude towards them in the course of the drama, their presence is stridently incongruous. Evreinov naturally drew attention to this defect; he wrote: Despite the artistic value of the plays which I have named, it is not difficult to notice that even in them the objective is combined in the most ridiculous way with the subjective element which is dependent on the main character. And if the objection is raised that it is impossible to manage in the theatre without conventions, I will reply that even stage convention must be subordinated to strict artistic logic and harmony.25 It is significant, however, that despite this criticism it was Evreinov who accepted the play for production at Komissadevskaja's theatre in the autumn of 190826 after it had been turned down by the Moscow Art T'heatre.27 He clearly welcomed this opportunity to present the only play offered by contemporary Russian dramatists which provided scope for the "monodramatic" type of production. In reality, Evreinov, who had shortly before replaced Mejerxol'd at Komissadevskaja's theatre, was the senior member of a "triumvirate" there consisting, beside himself, of Fedor Komissadevskij and A. P. Zonov,28 and it was actually Komissadevskij, in collaboration with Zonov, who produced The Black Masks.29 The premiere took place on December 2nd, 1908. After attending one of the performances Andreev wrote to Komissadevskij (on January 17th, 1909): "Once more I thank you warmly for the production. Though there are certain shortcomings involving details, the production as a whole is artistic and noble."30 The only other comment on the production 25 Evreinov, loco cit., p. 184. 26 It was produced the following year at Nezlobin's theatre in Moscow. 21 See Andreev's letter to Komissarlevskaja of October 19th, 1908, in "V. F. Komissadevskaja i simvolisty/' Teatr, II (1940), p. 115· 28 Vsevolodskij-Gerngross makes no mention of Zonov and refers to R. A. Ungern as the third member of the "triumvirate" (see V. Vsevolodskij-Gerngross, lstorija russkogo teatra, II (Leningrad-Moscow, 1929), p. 250). Komissadevskij's reminiscences, however, leave no doubt that it was Zonov (see Theodore Komisarjevsky , The Theatre and a Changing Civilisation (London, 1935). p. 145). 29 Komissarlevskij appears to have been the main figure in the production. BeklemiSeva's inference that it was Zonov who directed it (see Rekviem. Sbornik pamjati Leonida Andreeva (Moscow, 1930, p. 244) is contradicted by both Evreinov and Znosko-Borovskij, who state categorically that it was Komissarlevskij (see N. N. Evreinov, Istorija russkogo teatra s drevnejSix vremen do I9I 7 goda (New York, 1955), p. 382; and E. A. Znosko-Borovskij, Russkij teatr nacala XX veka (Prague, 1925). p. 345). 80 "V. F. Komissarlevskaja i simvolisty," p. u6. 1967 ANDREEV'S The Black Masks 103 that can be found is that of the actress V. Beklemi~eva, a close friend of Andreev, who writes simply: "The only reality on the· stage was Duke Lorenzo."S1 The public reaction of perplexity and incomprehensions2 completely undermined, however, the theoretical justification of the play's structure. Unmotivated by extra-subjective factors, the purely abstract drama of the individual's acquisition of metaphysical selfawareness encountered a wholly negative response. Andreev was forced to retreat, to acknowledge that the dramatic potentiality and intelligibility of his philosophical theme had been seriously impaired by his almost total abandonment of the "non-ego." His subsequent plays are the record of his initially reluctant and ultimately determined attempts to clothe his allegories and symbols in more realistic vestures and to achieve a degree of synthesis. Nevertheless, The Black Masks continues to merit attention not only as a development in the art of Andreev himself, but also as an attempt to embody certain structural principles which mark a brief phase in the history of pre-revolutionary twentieth-century Russian dramatic theory. JAMES B. WOODWARD 31 Rekviem. Sbornik pamjati Leonida Andreeva, p. 244. 82 For descriptions of the irritation which it provoked see: ibid., p. 245; and S. Auslender. "Iz Peterburga. Novye .tragedii L. Andreeva," Zolotoe Runo, I (1909), p. 103. ...