Маската като творба
The Mask as a Work

Patroclus and Penthesilea in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Fires

Summary/Abstract: The prose poetry book Fires (1936) by M. Yourcenar can be read through two prisms–through the prism of the theatre of life and through the prism of the scene of death. The last scene of “Patroclus, or, Destiny” gives a kind of negative to the idea of a masquerade ball: the unmasking of Penthesilea reveals another mask–the death mask. The notion of a death mask is introduced in the framework of Belting, Blanchot, Nancy to analyze the death of Penthesilea as her last gift to Achilles. I use the concept of death in “Patroclus, or, Destiny” as an autotextual introduction to Yourcenar’s great novel Memoirs of Hadrian.

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