MISE EN ABYME AS VISUAL TROPE, EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE, AND MORE

The mise en abyme trope was introduced into western criticism as a narrative concept of visual self-reflexivity in the arts by A. Gide in 1893, representing the re-lationship of a larger and smaller image or text in a work of art. My essay begins by considering the trope in its original artform of painting, primarily in the western baroque. But the essay's main subject -one little studied in the Russian context -is the mise en abyme as a visual trope in early Russian modernist writing: A. Bely's Pe-tersburg (1913), V. Mayakovsky's �From Street to Street' (1913), B. Pasternak's �The Mirror' (1917), and Yu. Olesha's later Envy (1927). The key component of mise en abyme in literature is a text inside a text, consisting of reflections as i f in a mirror, and juxtaposed recursiveness that engages the correlation of part and whole. As they involve a correlation of the verbal and visual, literary mise en abymes require close reading by the reader as viewer, who often knows little about the trope; hence my em-phasis on close reading of mise en abymes in the selected literary and visual works. I focus especially on two reflective surfaces, the traditional mirror and modern window, requiring the reader's power of sight.''& COPY; 2022 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This article discusses the concept of mise en abyme as a narrative technique in visual arts and literature. It focuses on its application in early Russian modernist writing and emphasizes the importance of close reading and understanding of this trope by the reader.