How beautiful the tragic seems when it is beneath a mask, but when it appears so nakedly before me and... when I am so forcibly implicated... I don't know whether I care for it so much. Somehow or other it is as though I were torturing myself.("Thirty-Three Abominations")
Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
mask, masks, tragedy, tragic