| This study explores the meanings and functions of mask, masking, and masquerade in three semiotic systems (social behavior, literature, and theater) within Russian culture, and it considers the compatibility and equivalency of these semiospheres. Masquerading and masquerades as social phenomena and as literary constructions offer an inviting space in which translation between sign systems can take place, in part because transformation is at the very heart of masquerade itself. Chapter 1 examines the cultural and literary history of masking and masquerade in Russia, including folk and Church beliefs holiday celebrations, Imperial masquerades, political imposture, high-society balls, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary representations. Chapters 2 through 4 explore the inscription of Russia's historical experience with masquerade into Modernist literature, and the centrality of the themes of deception, conspiracy, spectacle, betrayal, and transformation in the literary masquerades. The texts analyzed include Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons (Besy, 1872), Fyodor Sologub's Petty Demon (Melkii bes, 1902), Aleksandr Blok's Fairbooth Show (Balaganchik, 1906), Andrei Bely's Petersburg (Peterburg, 1912), Anna Akhmatova's Poem without a Hero (Poema bez geroia, 1940-62), and Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita 1939, published in 1966). These chapters also analyze how the language in which the literary representations of masquerade are composed enacts and supports the themes that the masquerades emblematize. Chapter 5 investigates the masquerade as a site of semiotic transference between literature and stage performance by examining the transpositions for stage of each literary text named above. The transpositions studied are Konstantin Nemirovich-Danchenko's Nikolai Stavrogin, Sologub's reworking of Petty Demon, Bely's transformation of his novel into the play Death of a Senator , Blok's reworking of his eponymous poem "Fairbooth Show," Akhmatova's sketches for a ballet libretto based on Poem, and Yurii Liubimov's stage productions of Master and Margarita. |
