Masks takes up the action some two years after the ending of Moscow in Jeopardy, in the autumn and winter of 1916. The war forms a constant background and the explosion with which the novel culminates can best be understood as representing revolution, just as the final explosion did in the dramatized version of Petersburg. Masks thus leads up to the February revolution in much the same way that Moscow led up to the outbreak of war.

All the major characters of the first volume of Moscow reappear here in the second, but not always in the same guise. Kierko appears as Terentiy Titych Titelev and Lizasha as his wife Eleonora Leonovna, while Eduard Mandro, who was supposed to have died, re-emerges in anagrammatic form as a French journalist by the name of Drua-Domarden (Droit d'Homme Ardent). But the characters are ‘masks’ for a deeper reason than this, as Bely explains in his preface. The second volume is the antithesis of the first; there the characters appeared in their full egoism as ‘personalities’, while here they are commencing a process of transformation whose outcome will only be evident in the synthesis. It is the revolution itself that will tear the masks from them and reveal their new selves. Professor Korobkin, in particular, is said here to have rejected his former way of life, but not yet to have found his role in the events that crowd in upon him.