Mise en Abyme as Visual Trope, Early Twentieth Century Russian Literature, and More

Abstract

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 relationship 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 Petersburg (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 if 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 emphasis 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.”