The Existential Illusory Nature of Arbenin's Image as a Condemnation of the Ideological Perversion of the Ideals of Romantic Culture in M. Lermontov's drama "Masquerade"

Mysovskikh Lev Olegovich ORCID: 0000-0003-0731-1998 Postgraduate Student, Philological Faculty, Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, Ural Federal University named after the First President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin 620083, Russia, Sverdlovsk region, Yekaterinburg, Lenin str., 51, office 336 levmisov@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The romantics worshipped Shakespeare, whose art was equal to his genius, his dramaturgy was impeccable, there were no poets or playwrights equal to him in the knowledge of life and people. Young Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov knelt before the same altar. Both Othello and Hamlet were staged in Moscow when Lermontov lived there. And he constantly visited the theater during his stay in the capital. In an 1830 or 1831 letter to his aunt, Lermontov expressed admiration for Hamlet and Shakespeare in general: "I stand up for Shakespeare's honor. If he is great, then it is in Hamlet; if he is truly Shakespeare, this genius is all-encompassing, penetrating into the human heart, into the laws of fate, original, that is, inimitable Shakespeare" ^{[8, p. 314]}. Lermontov included direct references or allusions to various Shakespeare plays, especially Hamlet, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice, in a number of his poems, dramas and prose works. And in the last letter that reached us, written in June 1841, less than a month before his death, Lermontov asked his grandmother to send him the complete works of Shakespeare in English, if she could get them.

Given this admiration, it is not surprising that Lermontov largely modeled what became the most famous of his six dramas – "Masquerade" – based on one of Shakespeare's famous tragedies – "Othello". Lermontov's direct acquaintance with Othello is indicated by a quote in English of Iago's hypocritical warning: "Beware, my Lord, of jealousy" (beware, my Lord, of jealousy), as an epigraph to the 1830 poem "Two Slaves". Lermontov wrote several versions of Masquerade between 1834 and 1836, and they all borrow their plot from Othello. But, paying homage to Shakespeare, Lermontov transfers the plot into a post-romantic work in which the ideals of romantic culture are reduced to a post-Romantic ideology. Thus, Lermontov captures one of the most acute difficulties of post-Romanticism: attempts to keep the ideals of Romanticism in the era of its decline can turn into ideological self-deception. If a fallen idol has become a god, you need to admit it, otherwise you will fall into idolatrous veneration, which can turn into a dangerous ideology.

To see how such an ideology arises, let's first briefly compare Shakespeare and Lermontov. Like Othello, the main character of "Masquerade" – Evgeny Arbenin – falsely believes that his beloved wife Nina is cheating on him, as a result of which he kills his wife, and then realizes his own mistake, which can no longer be corrected. Like Othello, Arbenin understands that his unfounded jealousy is fueled by someone who seeks to control his life. As in the case of Othello, a strong love for his wife, coupled with intolerance for dishonor and betrayal, led the protagonist to a fatal act. But there are also noticeable differences between Othello and Arbenin, which make the latter more ambiguous in existential, psychological and moral terms. Firstly, unlike the naive Othello, Arbenin presents himself as a man wise with experience and tired of the world, as well as intellectually superior to the society around him, which he views as a collection of gossips inciting obscene scandals. Secondly, Arbenin refuses to take responsibility for the murder of his wife, even admitting his mistake: "I am not her killer" ^{[7, p. 351]}, he declares in the finale of the drama, laying the blame for Nina's death on a vicious society and inexorable fate, as well as on noble but uncontrolled love. And, thirdly, Arbenin does not punish himself, as Othello does, but simply loses the power of speech. Nevertheless, both characters are brought together by their existential-psychological state, into which they fall due to jealousy devouring their souls. This is a state of despair described in the theories of the founder of existentialism, S?ren Kierkegaard, who argued that "despair is not just the worst of suffering, but our doom" ^{[6, p. 31]}. In the end, for both Othello and Arbenin, despair really becomes Kierkegaard's "disease to death", which for Lermontov's character seems much more terrible than for Shakespeare's hero, because Arbenin, unlike Othello, does not die physically, he is overtaken by spiritual death, exactly the death that Kierkegaard wrote about: the death of a unique existence, that is, eternal death, without hope of resurrection. Thus, Othello finds a way out of the borderline situation in the spirit of the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre ^[15], who asserted the absolute freedom of man. In this regard, Othello is similar to Lermontov's Pechorin from the novel "The Hero of Our Time", who "considered death as a way of getting rid of his own mental suffering" ^{[10, p. 83]}. Consequently, the method of resolving the existential situation is identical in Othello and Pechorin and "coincides with Sartre's assessment of death as an absurd, meaningless insignificance" ^{[10, p. 83]}. However, Arbenin behaves differently in a border situation.

Arbenin's statements about intellectual and moral superiority, courage and honesty, defining him as a romantic hero, contradict the facts that say that Arbenin is a conformist, a coward and a person prone to self–deception. The conformism of the main character of "Masquerade" in the context of modern existential psychology seems obvious, since in the case of Arbenin there is "the conditioning of the individual's behavior by the influence of the group on him" ^[12]. Arbenin's inability to meet the high standards that he ascribes to himself suggests that he is not an admirable romantic hero and idealist who opposes a society that refuses to accept him, or the forces of Rock. He is a post–romantic ideologue, someone who has turned established romantic ideals into a belated and rigidly systematized set of self-deceptive ideas that blind him. In other words, Arbenin acquires an illusory image of himself at the cost of his existential-psychological and moral integrity.

To see Arbenin as an ideologist, not an idealist and a hero, means to see in the "Masquerade" a warning against the potential dangers of romantic ideals as a source of ideology. And yet this does not mean that Lermontov used drama to condemn Romanticism itself as an ideology, rather, he used it implicitly to condemn the ideological perversion of the ideals of romantic culture. Thus, the drama focuses on a borderline situation: how to protect oneself from the temptations of ideology at a time when existing ideals and values are disappearing, which is consonant with the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer about a state when an individual has to "rely only on himself and where contents are found in the person himself, which are always hidden in the process of purely functional application of science aimed at mastering the world" ^{[2, p. 21]}, in turn derived from the doctrine of the borderline situation by Karl Jaspers, who argued, based on Kierkegaard's existential theories, that "a person's spiritual situation arises only where he feels himself in borderline situations. There he remains as himself in existence, when it does not close, but all the time breaks up again into antinomies" ^{[17, p. 322]}. Consequently, "Masquerade" provocatively dramatizes Lermontov's post-romantic ambivalence towards Romanticism, whose cultural and moral authority and integrity he admired, but which was perceived as aging and vulnerable to distortion. At the same time, modern scientific research has already proved that long before the appearance of the drama "Masquerade", "in Lermontov's early works, both the concept of anxiety described in Kierkegaard's theories, which the Russian poet was forced to overcome, and transitional ambivalence towards the key components of Byron's psychology and aesthetics were manifested" ^{[13, p. 58]}, in turn, has always been for Lermontov the main authority among romantics.

The concept of "ideology"

Before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the text of the drama, let's briefly focus on the interpretation of the term "ideology" in the context of this article. We do not use this concept in the positive (albeit somewhat condescending) sense that Napoleon had in mind when he called a group of French liberal thinkers of the XVIII century "ideologists" for their concern about promoting social harmony through ideas and ideals, which in some sense is consonant with the thought of the outstanding existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre ^[21], who considered fiction the best way to "convey ideas and ideals of a person" ^{[11, p. 32]}. Within the framework of this article, ideology is interpreted in a more negative sense, proposed by the social philosopher Karl Manheim, who described ideologists as those who "distort the experience of the elementary realities of human existence, "reifying", "idealizing" or "romanticizing" them, in short, when through various methods of escape from himself and from the world he achieves false interpretations of experience" ^{[9, p. 77]}. The concept of Manheim's ideology – basically combining K. Marx's theory of ideology as a "false consciousness" generated by the social class with F. Nietzsche's idea of self–deception generated by emotional need - actually translates ideology from the philosophical sphere to the existential-psychological one. In this light, ideology is not a philosophy that analytically explains concepts and experiences and can adapt to them. Nor is it idealism–even if it entails idealization–that strives for high opportunities, but may not expect to find them in the real world. Ideology is rather a self–serving system of rigid and absolute ideas about how the real world works or how it should work, which dictates and justifies almost everything the ideologist thinks and does.

Manheim points to psychological satisfaction with ideology, since ideology provides its adherents with a sense of emotional security in the belief in a complete and unmistakable understanding of experience. This security, in turn, gives a sense of intellectual and moral superiority over others. Adherents of ideology can see what others do not see, because they can penetrate through the deceptive illusion to get to the truths hidden under it. Ideologues have a lofty vision of themselves as extraordinary individuals who not only have to believe that they know, they have to believe that they know better than others. This vision makes them chosen in their own eyes. The emotional appeal of such a vision can even be described as the romance of ideology, because ideologists can literally fall in love with the image of themselves as possessing unusually sharp insight, pervasive knowledge and infallible directness. This, in turn, can be allegorically inscribed into the Lacanian theory of the "mirror stage", with the only difference that here self-identification occurs not through reflection in another, but through reflection in an illusory image of oneself, that is, the Lacanian mirror turns into a crooked mirror, since in fact the illusory image does not reflect the true the existence of a person and a situation arises, which was described by Slava Zizek, when "the effect of inversion, characteristic of fetishism, appears here in the form of its opposite" ^{[3, p. 31]}. Thus, ideologists pay a certain price for their psychological pleasures, and this price is self–deception. In other words, ideology is a masquerade. But this is an involuntary masquerade, which, ironically, deceives those who wear masks, intending to expose the false appearance of others.

Based on the above, we propose to understand the "mask" of Lermontov's "Masquerade" as an ideology that Arbenin uses to hide reality from himself. Arbenin certainly fits the negative definition of an ideologue: he adheres to a rigid set of ideas about himself and his circumstances, which he uses to rationalize everything he thinks and does, excluding any contradictory facts or ideas. This ideology gives him existential and psychological satisfaction, and yet it turns out to be deeply illusory and ultimately self-destructive, leading not only to the death of his wife, but also to his own mental collapse, equivalent to the destruction of human existence, as soon as the protective mask is removed from the ideology, because the "Masquerade" exposes the paradox of the ideology itself: a potential source of insight and inspiration can also be a source of distortion and self-deception. The origins of Arbenin's ideological self–perception are in several qualities beloved by romantics: a sublime rebellious spirit; transcendent emotions; intelligence and insight. Confident that he possesses these qualities, Arbenin in his own eyes is a romantic hero, akin to the characters depicted by such writers as Schiller and Goethe, Shelley and Byron, Chateaubriand and Hugo. And yet, as Lermontov's drama shows, Arbenin is not a real romantic hero with an ideal "I". He just has a romanticized image of himself. That is, he believes that he has the qualities and ideals embodied by symbolic romantic heroes, but his actions prove that this is not the case. His spirit is not exalted or rebellious, he hesitates, he is weak. His emotions are not transcendent, they are restrained and conditional. His intelligence and insight are mediocre, they perceive and judge incorrectly. Consequently, Arbenin does not correspond to romantic role models and ideals. He simply lives in accordance with a selfish post-romantic ideology that so closely unites all his false thoughts and emotions, which is a perversion of integrity, and this allows him to justify a sublime self-perception until he can no longer support it, and at that moment he goes crazy. For when Arbenin finally faces irrefutable evidence of the fatality of his self-serving delusions, his ideologically inflated self-esteem and distorted worldview collapse, taking with them his very sanity. In the end, Arbenin is more pathetic than tragic. He is more of a self-indulgent post-romantic ideologue than a nobly doomed romantic idealist. If he is a victim at all, then he is a victim of his own need for existential-psychological self-aggrandizement, which he satisfies with the help of an ideology that closes his eyes to himself and the world around him.

Exalted rebellious spirit

The first component of Arbenin's post-Romantic ideology is his belief in his extraordinary energy and heroic spirit, in short, in his willpower. The will for Romantics lies at the heart of human existence. Arbenin identifies his own will with the elemental force of nature: "I was born / With a soul boiling like lava: / Until it melts, It is hard / like a stone... but the fun is bad / To meet her flow!" ^{[7, p. 271]} He also boasts that he has "both the look and the voice of a formidable" ^{[7, p. 271]} and that he is a "cruel, / Mad slanderer" ^{[7, p. 267]}, who is not restrained by society. Before taking revenge on his wife's alleged lover, he declares: "I will prove that in our generation / There is at least one soul in which insult, / Sinking, bears fruit ... Oh! I am not their servant" ^{[7, p. 300]}. Suspecting Nina of treason, Arbenin rages: "I will not call the law for my revenge, / But without tears and regret / I will tear our two lives apart!" ^{[7, p. 271]} Considering himself completely inexorable, Arbenin insists that he cannot be dissuaded or restrained as soon as he takes the path of action: "Don't expect forgiveness" ^{[7, p. 271]}. Thus, Arbenin, thanks to his fearless willingness to act against all conventions and restrictions, puts himself on a par with such large-scale romantic figures as Byron's Corsair and Giaur, Goethe's Faust and even Mary Shelley's monstrous creature in Frankenstein. He is a majestic man, a rebel and even a villain who will burn with a thirst for revenge in the face of betrayal and be guided only by his own will. At least, that's what he claims.

However, Arbenin turns out to be much less strong-willed, independent and rebellious than he wants to believe. He does not act consistently with rebellious disregard for society, in fact, he shows himself to be quite an ordinary, poorly socialized, shy and even cowardly person. He is tormented, for example, by the thought that Nina's infidelity has disgraced him in the eyes of society and that these eyes will regard him as a buffoon. Fearing that society will perceive him as a cuckold, he is actually engaged in self-torture: "I am pathetic to them, ridiculous!" ^{[7, p. 321]} The thought that others consider him a weakling and a simpleton drives Arbenin crazy. And yet, when he sees a sleeping Zvezdich, a man whom he suspects of having an affair with Nina and whom he intends to kill in order to restore his social position, Arbenin suddenly loses his composure. He leaves the room a few moments later, pale, muttering: "I can't!" ^{[7, p. 300]} Of course, we can say that Arbenin's refusal to kill an enemy caught by surprise demonstrates the same nobility that, for example, the noble pirate Conrad Byron shows in "Corsair", refusing to stab his sleeping The abductor is the Turkish Pasha Seyid. But Arbenin's refusal to commit a secret murder out of revenge stems not from a conscious commitment to high moral beliefs, but from the fact that his will was broken when it was put to the real test. He admits to himself in a brief and uncharacteristic outburst of self-understanding: "This is beyond strength and will" ^{[7, p. 300]}, because "I flew too high" ^{[7, p. 301]}. But this outburst passes quickly, and he immediately takes a new course, plotting another revenge, motivating it by the fact that "murder is no longer in fashion" ^{[7, p. 301]}, and therefore he will go another way, which is not connected at all with the will and courage of the hero, but with the cunning of a coward: he will destroy Zvezdich with the tools of society, that is, slander and bribery: "Language and gold... here is our dagger and poison!" ^{[7, p. 301]} Thus, Arbenin resorts to the lowest form of conformism, which, it would seem, he condemns in society. This form of conformism in modern existential psychology is defined as the most destructive for human existence, because in this case "a person ceases to be a person. He, as if in a mystical mirror, becomes a reflection of other people's ideas about the surrounding world, society, its structure, norms and rules. In such a perspective, conformism can be presented as a kind of way of an individual's existence, giving him the opportunity to adapt to reality, a kind of illusion that allows him to achieve greater security by completely merging with a faceless crowd" ^[12].

Arbenin further exposes the illusory nature of his romanticized self-image when he launches this new revenge strategy. After he threatened to call Zvezdich a coward, thereby compromising him in society, the prince asks: Are you a man or a demon? ^{[7, p. 317]}, Arbenin declares: "Am I a gambler!" ^{[7, p. 317]}. Forgetting about the recent lack of will and courage, he stubbornly continues to think of himself as a brave and risky person. This self–deception brings him closer to a cohort of Russian literary players (for example, Pushkin's Hermann), as well as to many romantic figures, including the greatest player, Goethe's Faust, who is ready to risk everything and everything, indifferent to traditional moral restrictions that defy fate, in the pursuit of personal elevation. "The barrier has been destroyed between good and evil" ^{[7, p. 317]}, he tells Zvezdich, so any adventure is not too great now.

And yet the ideologist Arbenin, like most ideologists, does not really gamble – he wants to be confident in himself. Arbenin actually gave up gambling during his marriage and returned to the gambling table only after he was convinced of Nina's infidelity. But, ironically, he does not seek the excitement of risky unpredictability of the game. Instead, he returns to escape the emotional uncertainty of love and the threatening prospect of losing Nina to another man. As Arbenin replies when Zvezdich asks him if he has stopped gambling for fear of losing: "I... no!.. those blessed days are over" ^{[7, p. 247]}. For Arbenin, gambling has come to represent familiar ways of behaving and worldviews that can comfort him in the face of a future that has become radically uncertain due to Nina's alleged betrayal. Thus, Arbenin's claim that he has the fearless spirit of a risk-taker is another self-deceptive component of Arbenin's romanticized self-image. And so he soon abandons his insidious plan against Zvezdich. Even the only perfect act of revenge turns out not to be a courageous act of will, but a cunning act of cowardice. Abandoning his planned revenge on the prince, Arbenin decides to get satisfaction by killing Nina, a less risky goal. But, on the other hand, he does not attack her directly, committing a crime of passion, like Othello. Arbenin does it like a spider hiding in the shadows. He doesn't even touch Nina. He prefers to put poison in her plate, that is, he kills her with chemical toxins, instead of destroying Zvezdich with the social poison of slander. Thus, he can take revenge at a safe distance, acting as if there is ice in his heart, not lava. Arbenin's cold, cowardly revenge extends to a gloomy gloating, similar to the sadistic pleasure with which he watches Nina's physical and emotional torment. When she asks him to send for a doctor, he sarcastically replies, "Well? Is it impossible for you to die / Without a doctor?" ^{[7, p. 333]}. And when Nina says she's dying, he coldly remarks, glancing at his watch: "So soon? Not yet. / Half an hour left" ^{[7, p. 333]}. Physically and emotionally detached revenge gives Arbenin the bittersweet pleasure of satisfying a coward's resentment - to see an enemy destroyed by cunning. And yet Arbenin considers himself a man of great romantic energy, will and courage. This self–respect is the most important element of his post-romantic ideology, replete with self-deception.

Transcendent capacity for love

Arbenin's claim to a heroic nature is intertwined with his claim to possess a transcendent capacity for love. And here romanticism gives him an ideal, which he turns into an ideology. He presents his love for Nina in the spirit of romantic love stories from books such as Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther and Constant's Adolf. But Arbenin's vision of his love is more ideological than truly romantic, because it is aimed at self-glorification of him, confirming only his own transcendence as a person, and not elevating a unique union with another person. Arbenin's soul never truly becomes one with Nina's soul. Arbenin's love for Nina is actually self–love. Arbenin initially describes this love as having transformed him. Before he met Nina, Arbenin explains, he looked at the world with "deep disgust" ^{[7, p. 266]}, although he claims that "he was often loved ardently and passionately, / And I did not love any of them" ^{[7, p. 262]}. Instead, he simply cynically "repeated / Words of love to his beloved, like a nanny a fairy tale" ^{[7, pp. 262-263]}. But after meeting Nina Arbenin feels reborn to life and ready to do good deeds. The love he claims to feel for her is a romantic's dream, capable of liberating, elevating, transforming and redeeming his soul. This is the type of love that, according to Arbenin, he should have as an exceptional person. His affection for Nina becomes so all-encompassing that he says: "All that remains to me from life is you" ^{[7, p. 271]}, adding that without her love, her smile, her gaze, "I have no happiness, no soul, / No feeling, no existence!" ^{[7, p. 271]}. The same exclamation could have escaped from most Byronic heroes, as well as from Werther or their numerous romantic brethren tormented by passion.

And yet, despite all his statements about this transcendent love, when Arbenin first suspects that his beloved may turn out to be a lying woman, he reacts not with the disappointment of a lover with a broken heart, but with the cold rejection of an ideologue who is threatened by a crack in his belief system. He concludes almost immediately that she is as deceitful as everyone else around her, and that his life with her is "only a dream / And this is an awakening" ^{[7, p. 267]}. But Arbenin's words and actions show that he loves himself much more than Nina. Always selfish, Arbenin is not just offended or angered by the thought of his wife's betrayal, he is offended by the thought that she might have had the audacity to betray him. As he states when he first asks her about his suspicions caused by the bracelet, which, according to her, she lost and which he saw at Zvezdich's: "About honor, / About my happiness here we are talking" ^{[7, p. 268]}. His happiness, his honor, is at stake, not their love or her honor. Later he comes to existential despair: "Is it possible! sell me! – / Me for kissing a fool... me, who / According to the first word, I was glad to give my soul, / Should I change? for me? and so soon!.." ^{[7, p. 333]} These lines dramatically convey Arbenin's concern for himself and concern exclusively for his wounded heart. Thus, he illustrates the tendency of ideologists, noted by Manheim, to confess loyalty to ideals, pursuing interests that they seek to hide.

Arbenin further flatters his own selfishness, regaling Nina with deadly poison, and then lamenting only about himself: "Yes, you will die – and I will stay here / Alone, alone... years will pass, / I will die – and I will be all alone! Terrible!" ^{[7, p. 336]} He has no deep attachment to his beloved, which romantic lovers show after the death of their beloved women. Nina's death does not mean for Arbenin the loss of the beloved woman for whom he, as he himself claimed, lives; rather, it means the loss of someone who allowed him to confirm his own importance, a crooked mirror in which he sees the illusion of his sublime feelings. Nina's emotional reaction to his icy pleasure of watching her die contrasts with his character: "Oh, you don't love me" ^{[7, p. 333]}. Arbenin loves himself too much to really love someone else. His pride, vanity and conviction that he has been treated unfairly close his eyes to the truth, namely that Nina sincerely loves him and has been faithful to him all this time. And so, when Nina dies, still asserting her innocence before God, Arbenin approaches her, and then, according to Lermontov's stage instructions, "quickly turns away" ^{[7, p. 337]}, pronouncing his final verdict on her dying assurances of innocence: "Lies" ^{[7, p. 337]}. He clings to his version of the truth, instead of believing the words of the person he claimed to love more than anything in the world.

Nina hinted at the falsity of Arbenin's love: "You are a strange person!.. When eloquent / You tell me about your love, / And your head is on fire, / And your thought shines vividly in your eyes, / Then I believe everything without difficulty, / But often ..." ^{[7, p. 266]} This unfinished "But often ..." suggests that, no matter how devoted Nina is to him even she suspected that his emotions didn't match his rhetoric. And she's right. Arbenin's love is much more rhetorical and, in fact, more ideological than real; it boils down to a set of phrases expressing the ideas Arbenin learned from Romanticism and describing the emotional heights that, in his opinion, he and Nina should achieve as people who love each other. Therefore, at the first suspicion that she has fallen from these heights, he makes his verdict: "A fool who in a woman alone / Dreamed of finding his earthly paradise" ^{[7, p. 266]}. No, not a fool – a real romantic lover. Ironically, if Arbenin had seen the truth, he would have known that he had actually found his paradise on earth in Nina, the woman who loves him above all else, and he could have lived his life in earthly paradise. But as a post-Romantic ideologue, and not a true lover, Arbenin could not see this paradise. Ideology has hidden the truth.

Intelligence and insight

The third component of Arbenin's ideologized romantic self-image is the belief that, in addition to his heroic nature and the transcendent power of love, he also possesses excellent intelligence and insight. He believes he knows what others don't. Arbenin repeatedly shows this ideological inclination, claiming that he knows almost everything, especially in the field of human behavior – a perversion of the romantic epistemological desire of many German philosophers and English poets to reveal metaphysical and existential psychological truths inaccessible to ordinary perception and way of thinking. Arbenin insists that he has high insight: "I saw everything, / felt everything, understood everything, learned everything" ^{[7, p. 265]}. No event, no emotion, no idea is beyond his comprehension. And what he surely knows is that deception flourishes everywhere: "Evil is everywhere – deception is everywhere" ^{[7, p. 295]}. In other words, for Arbenin, the social world in which he lives is a masquerade: deceptive appearance deliberately hides the ugly truths that lie under this illusion. And Arbenin despises masks: "The mask has neither a soul nor a title, it has a body. / And if the mask features are hidden, / Then the mask is removed from the senses boldly" ^{[7, p. 248]}. But Arbenin comforts himself with the certainty that he alone can see the truth through all the masks – his insight has no limits. Therefore, when the servant reports that he could not find the bracelet, which, according to Nina, she lost, but which, according to Arbenin, she gave to her lover, Arbenin snaps: "I knew it ..." ^{[7, p. 269]}. A moment later, when Nina insists that his suspicions are unfounded, he rejects her words with a statement: "I know everything" ^{[7, p. 272]}. Even when she calls God to witness, declaring: "I am innocent... may God punish me, listen..." ^{[7, p. 272]}, – Arbenin interrupts her, parrying: "By heart / I know everything you say" ^{[7, p. 272]}. And subsequently, he announces to Zvezdich, whom he takes for Nina's lover: "I understood everything, I guessed everything..." ^{[7, p. 312]} He believes that the two alleged deceivers failed to carry out their masquerade – that is, to preserve their deception – in front of him, because his omniscience and insight do not allow him to be deceived.

To support his claims to infallibility and insight, Arbenin must selectively exclude or intentionally distort information that contradicts his conclusions, as ideologists do. For example, he rejects Nina's assurances of innocence, consistently interprets every word of his wife in a distorted way. When he asks Nina in detail about her actions at the masquerade ball, she jokingly rejects his questions, answering: "Funny, funny, by God! / Isn't it a shame, isn't it a sin / To raise the alarm out of trifles" ^{[7, p. 270]}. But Arbenin is not funny: "I am ridiculous, of course, / Because I love you so much" ^{[7, p. 270]}. However, his misinterpretation of Nina's answer does not indicate a strong love for her, but his conviction of his own omniscience, along with his misunderstanding of the love that Nina actually feels for him.

Soon after, Arbenin again misinterprets Nina's words when she tells him that his suspicions are so wrong that "not I alone, but the whole world will laugh!" ^{[7, p. 272]}, having heard them. Genuinely surprised, she wants to protect him from public shame. But he is unable to recognize her good intentions and again distorts the meaning of his wife's words, although he agrees with them: "Yes! laugh at me, you, all fools of the earth, / Careless, but pathetic husbands, / Whom I once deceived" ^{[7, p. 272]}. He thinks that he will be ridiculed not because he is unfairly suspicious, but because, as he prefers to believe, his suspicions are justified. Arbenin cannot recognize and appreciate his wife's loving care for him, he can only imagine how it will hurt him, because he "knows" the truth – she betrayed him. Thus, Arbenin continues to misinterpret Nina's assurances of innocence until her death, perceiving them as a veiled confession of her guilt. When she comes to the conclusion that his accusations have moved from comedy to tragedy, Nina persistently denies the treacherous betrayal of which her husband accuses her: "The prince found my bracelet, then / By some slanderer / You were deceived" ^{[7, p. 334]}. But Arbenin sees in her words only confirmation of guilt: "So, I was deceived!" ^{[7, p. 334]}. He takes into account only the words about deception, ignoring the statement about the innocence of his wife.

Until the very end, Arbenin continues to try to bring reality into line with his interpretation instead of adapting his interpretation to reality. Even after Nina's death, he continues to assert that his judgment about her was correct: "Yes, I was a passionate husband – but I was a judge / Cold" ^{[7, p. 344]}, for: "It is impossible / If I make a mistake, who will prove me wrong / Her innocence is false! false! / Where is the proof – I have one! / I didn't believe her – who will I believe" ^{[7, p. 344]}. And he asks the last rhetorical question: "Who will dare to disbelieve Me?" ^{[7, p. 344]}. Arbenin is sure that no one would dare, since it is impossible that he would make a mistake. He must be right from the point of view of ideological justification – Arbenin's romantic self-determination depends on it. Determined to maintain his ideology, Arbenin eventually sacrifices both his wife and himself on its altar.

Conclusions

Given Arbenin's mental dependence on ideologically determined self-image, it is not surprising that when he finally realizes the truth about Nina's innocence and his terrible mistake, his psyche cannot bear it. Faced, finally, with the evidence of his wife's innocence, which Arbenin cannot deny – or, at least, Lermontov does not force him to deny it – Arbenin, stuttering, utters several incoherent phrases, and then, as dictated by the author of the drama, "falls to the ground and sits reclining with motionless eyes" ^{[7, p. 352]}. At this moment, Arbenin sees his ideology fatally independent of reality. Watching Arbenin fall into this stupor, the Unknown notices: "And this proud mind is exhausted today!" ^{[7, p. 352]}

Instead of, like Othello, committing suicide in a fit of conscious remorse and self–flagellation, Arbenin suffers from a mental breakdown that makes him weak-willed, insensitive and thoughtless, reflecting the destruction of the three pillars of his exquisitely integrated ideas about himself and his world - his faith in his heroic rebellious spirit, transcendent love and superior intelligence. Arbenin falls not into romantic madness, but into madness, which, in fact, can be considered as an extreme form of Kierkegaard's existential despair, which makes it impossible for the main character of "Masquerade" to positively resolve the existential situation. In fact, Arbenin's condition can be described in the context of the reflections of the modern existential antipsychiatrist R. D. Laing, who claims that "the loss of a part of a linear time series due to focusing on one's temporal self can feel like a catastrophe" ^{[19, p. 109]}. Thus, the borderline situation that lasts throughout the drama ends for Arbenin with a spiritual impasse, the same Kierkegaard's "illness to death", that is, spiritual death, but not physical. However, such a finale is inappropriate, because, according to the logic of his character and the established dramatic canon, Arbenin must die physically. B. M. Eichenbaum argued that the entire fourth act of "Masquerade", along with Arbenin's catatonic collapse, does not really belong to the drama in the form in which it was originally conceived. Eichenbaum is convinced that Lermontov added this act only as a handout to the censors after they rejected the three-act version of the drama originally presented by Lermontov. The three-act version ended with the unrepentant Arbenin, still unaware of his fatal mistake, standing over Nina's corpse and gloating over her demise. According to Eichenbaum, the three-act version of "Masquerade" better corresponds to Lermontov's worldview, because it allows the evil act of killing Arbenin, like all evil in Lermontov, to be an understandable manifestation of "rebellion against the entire structure of human life, against God and morality" ^{[16, p. 229]} for the sake of a lost paradise, which "for him closed again and forever" ^{[16, p. 229]}.

Although no one disputes the censorship story on which Eichenbaum bases his interpretation of the drama, this interpretation is erroneous from an aesthetic, existential-psychological and philosophical point of view. The fourth act, depicting Arbenin's descent into catatonia, is the most appropriate denouement of all possible, even despite the departure from the established dramatic canon of Romanticism. In the fourth act, Arbenin, who considered himself above all others, exposed their lies, especially the lies of his wife, appears himself in the image of an exposed man who lacked the intelligence and honesty to see and admit the truth, especially about himself. Consequently, Arbenin cannot be released into the romantic transcendence of death.

Thus, in The Masquerade, Lermontov praises the romantic ideals of a rebellious spirit and will, transcendent love and insight, even when he shows the dangers of turning these ideals into an ideology necessary to ensure existential psychological satisfaction. This combination of a tribute to the ideals of romantic culture and a warning against Romanticism as an ideology makes Masquerade one of the most provocative works of the transitional period of the 1830s. For Arbenin is not placed among the true tragic and romantic heroes of Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand and others, but is located closer to such characters as Stendhal's Julien Sorel in "Red and Black" (1830), who consciously lives for the sake of romantic heroism and love. This interpretation of the "Masquerade" and Lermontov's ambivalent attitude to romanticism receives some additional, albeit indirect, textual support from the fact that Lermontov did not call the "Masquerade" a romantic drama, as he did in "Strange Man", which also depicts an alienated character named Arbenin, who faces an evil society and tragically dies. This "strange" Arbenin is a colorful illustration of the fact that "the universal formula of the relationship between man and the world is alienation. It is realized at all levels: alienation from nature, habitat and civilized environment, alienation from one's own Self" ^{[4, p. 32]} But instead Lermontov called "Masquerade" just a drama in 4 acts, in verse. And that's right, because "Masquerade" is not a romantic drama. This is a drama about romanticism, that is, about how the ideals of romantic culture can be perverted into an ideology that deceives and destroys people, instead of elevating them.

It is possible to assume that "Masquerade" is a realistic criticism of a romantic hero. But this is also not true. Of course, Lermontov's criticism of Romanticism in Masquerade bears some resemblance, for example, to F. M. Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground (1864), where criticism of illusions encouraging romantic imagination, idealism and heroism is seen. But if we analyze in detail the objections to Romanticism presented by Dostoevsky, we can understand Lermontov's continuing attachment to Romanticism. A man from Dostoevsky's underground condemns stupid romantics who are completely divorced from reality. The man himself from the underground has thoroughly studied reality. This reality is completely separated from the sublime and the beautiful – qualities highly valued by romantics, to which a man from the underground was devoted in his youth. Romantic dreams, according to a man from the underground, have led society to lose touch with real life to such an extent that real life has become disgusting.

The warnings in the Masquerade against the post-romantic reduction of romantic values to a self-serving and self-deceptive ideology thus implicitly support these values, in contrast to the direct condemnation they receive from a person from the underground. Moreover, Lermontov presents his warnings in a romantic, not in a realistic context, since in the main works of realism, reality is usually complex and ambiguous, whereas "Masquerade" depicts an unambiguously mistaken hero and an unambiguously faithful heroine. In fact, if Nina had been described more fully, she could have become an exemplary romantic heroine, faithful to herself and her love until death, whereas Arbenin, as a post-romantic ideologue, is not faithful to anyone, even to himself.

Thus, "Masquerade" is a variant of Lermontov's reaction to the difficulties that arose in his post–romantic, transitional time. Conveying his admiration for the ideals of romantic culture, Lermontov embodies one of the types of reaction to the realization of the decline of these ideals – the stereotypical reduction of the romantic worldview and values to a set of ideological concepts. But by portraying Arbenin, Lermontov hints at the possibility of recognition, albeit tacit, that the worldview and values of Romanticism are losing their authority and integrity and that turning them into an ideology does not compensate for this loss. We need to find a new worldview, new values, new ideals.