Two Views on “The Most Incomprehensible Work” of Leonid Andreyev

Abstract

The first part of the article outlines the links between the critical criteria of Josip Vidmar (1895–1992) and his attachment to the work of Leonid Andreyev, primarily to his play, The Black Masks. The second part, based on Bakhtin’s theses on carnival culture (Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodmnaja kul’tura srednjevekov’ja i Renessansa), interprets the properties of The Black Masks, which were either not seen or understood by Vidmar. In the 1920s, through translations and articles, the young Josip Vidmar systematically introduced the plays and narratives of Andreyev into Slovenian culture. This was also the time of Vidmar’s decision to refashion Slovenian literary criticism. To do so, he needed an optimal model from a contemporary writer with which to identify and to measure others against. He chose for this purpose a colleague of his own generation, an avant-garde poet, Anton Podbevšek (1898–1984), from contemporary Slovenian literature, and Leonid Andreyev as a representative of foreign literature. He considered Andreyev as someone who had resolutely detached himself from the Russian literary tradition, and who had based his work also on the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch. Vidmar understood The Black Masks as an allegory of the awakening of the human soul. The protagonist, Duke Lorenzo di Spadaro, seeing for the first time the true image of himself, invokes a process in which the elements of chaos and darkness enter his soul; there is a struggle between darkness and light. The protagonist loses his way, but eventually finds the path to the truth, and good triumphs over evil. Vidmar clings firmly to this traditionalist and also arbitrary interpretation, despite it being in places in obvious contradiction with the action of this pessimistic play. Vidmar solves the problem of the difficulty of comprehending the play by determining the parts of the play which are realistic and those which are only imaginary; this provides the starting-point in the process of understanding the text. Vidmar establishes that there is only one realistic scene in the play, and everything else is imaginary, representing thoughts and emotions running wild in Lorenzo’s soul. Vidmar’s interpretation echoes the “principle of projection”, employed by his contemporaries (e.g. German literary critics) to interpret expressionist drama: the dramatic action is the projection of the protagonist’s soul. However, they did not separate the real from the imaginary, because such differentiation actually eliminates or at least severely narrows the category of the artistic. It seems that Vidmar’s notions overemphasize the cognitive aspect, while neglecting aesthetic and ethical. – The interpretation of The Black Masks on the basis of Bakhtin’s theses on carnival culture seems appropriate, if only because carnival permeates the action from the first scene to the last. In his castle, Duke Lorenzo organizes a masked ball, eagerly awaited by everyone. However, the initially merry atmosphere grows progressively terrifying, and at one point Duke Lorenzo realizes he can no longer remove or tear off his mask. The motif of carnival participation, progressing from great joy to horror, and the motif of a mask becoming an inseparable part of the personality, correspond to Bakhtin’s conclusion that the carnival is lived, not observed; the carnival cannot have an audience, because it absorbs everyone present, eradicating the line between spectacle and life, and in doing so producing a power, liberating, yet also magical and demonic. It is the demonic aspect which becomes increasingly predominant in The Black Masks, anticipating the struggle with the Devil which occurs at the climax of the play. The presence of the Devil is carefully established and subtly alluded to, step by step – for example, by means of duplicating the main characters; at the climax of the play the protagonist himself is given a double. The concepts of the mask and the Devil in The Black Masks reflect the changes that came about on the journey from the Middle Ages to Romanticism; and Symbolism, to which The Black Masks belong, is an heir to Romanticism. Under the influence of the self-destructive romantic subject, the positive regenerative power of the carnival spirit transforms itself into an uncanny world, where a man feels like a stranger. The Devil is no longer a medieval joker subverting the authority of power; he is constructed as an explicitly dangerous being; he is intelligent, an aesthete, a nihilist, and has a bizarre and destructive imagination. Andreyev is very careful and never allows the Devil to appear onstage; we can, however, observe how his presence is reflected in the behavior of the protagonist and other characters. In other words: to what extent the protagonist is possessed by him. In the series of Andreyev’s plays dealing with the dimensions of evil, The Black Masks, for their complex and multi-faceted structure, is without doubt an outstanding accomplishment. Again, because of its complexity, this play is hard to comprehend, it is “the most incomprehensible work” of Leonid Andreyev, as Vidmar admits himself.