Article

Name: Semiotics of Cinema in the Novel “The Mirror” by Irina Odoevtseva

Authors: Anna A. Arustamova, Alexander V. Markov

Perm State University, Perm, Russian Federation; Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract:

In Irina Odoevtseva’s prose fiction the cinematograph appears as a border art, scary as the world of similarities, but at the same time characterizing both modernity and the current state of the world novel. The analysis of the corpus of her prose fiction indicates the persistence of a number of motifs associated with the cinematograph: untrue light, false love, and the ambiguous state of emotions. A detailed analysis of her novel The Mirror (1939) shows that cinema is understood as an international art that differently draws the boundaries between one’s own and another’s, between cultural and social worlds, as an art that reclaims existential angst in an age of blurring boundaries between estates and cultures. Odoevtseva, relying partly on the achievements of Zinaida Gippius’s prose and thought, forms a special construction of a movie within a movie, of a mirror within a mirror, of the characters’ turnover. Consideration of the novel in the context of the culture of the time allowed us to identify numerous references by Odoevtseva to Russian literature of the nineteenth century: to the novels of Lermontov, Goncharov, and Tolstoy. Odoevtseva not only finds existential problems in Russian literature, but also incorporates into it the problem of the genuine and the non-genuine, reality and falsity. The world of cinematography turns out to be the world of flatness, the world of puppets and artificial bodies, while the filmmaking is juxtaposed with werewolfism. Odoevtseva, who began as a ballad poet, reproduces the motif complexes of Zhukovsky’s most famous ballads. In doing so, she not only provides a cross-section of contemporary life with this novel, but also maintains her own literary reputation. In the end, her novel clarifies whether Russian emigration is alive in the state of constant existential struggle facing the entire Western world.

Keywords: Russian emigration, Parisian note, Irina Odoevtseva, film history, literature and cinema, semiotics of cinema, screen medium, ballad, modernist novel

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