Saturday, March 22, 2014

Tsar Vladimir's Masks in Ukraine




--Image from, with caption: We Russian liberators are so popular we have to wear masks so people won’t kiss us.

Regarding the Oprichnina during Ivan the Terrible's reign:
"Thus," commented a Livonian knight who took service under the Tsar, "they prepared the whip and the birch with their own hands and all those ... devil-masks before which all the spiritual and secular orders bowed down."
--From: Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff, Ivan the Terrible (2012), p. 226

In Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946):
The Oprichnina, Ivan's secret police, dance raucously at a banquet, let by Fyodor Romanov wearing a mask ...
--From Carrie J. Preston, Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance  (2011), p. 96



--From: GILA MONSTA, oprichnina

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