Types of masks in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry

Abstract

© 2015, Ecozone, OAIMDD. All rights reserved. This article attempts to demonstrate, by providing concrete examples, several fundamentally different kinds of literary masks in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. The very notion of a literary mask has not yet got a clear understanding, which is revealed in the border and controversial cases where the identification of a mask causes difficulty, or where the apparent simplicity of this operation is deceptive. We observed four types of masks fulfilling different functions: 1) euphemistic, ‘concealing’ mask; 2) auto ironic mask; 3) language involving mask, or stylistic mask; 4) transgender, or character mask. In our opinion, the distinguished models are enough to demonstrate the extreme diversity of mask devices used by Marina Tsvetaeva and raise the question of the need to build a comprehensive system describing the literary mask function.