Personality and authorship: Literary tradition and modernity

Abstract

A review of Justin Weir’s book “The Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov” is presented in a broad literary context. This allowed to actualize the evaluation of the monograph, in which the reception of mise en abyme was studied more than twenty years ago. The author analyses the meaning of the key term, gives the variants of its modern interpretation, names the most important works, devoted to the metafunctionality as a phenomenon. The discussion of literary criticism positions of the author is followed by the evaluation of literary methods used in the book. The author emphasizes J. Weir’s pioneering contribution to the problematic of autoreferencing in the historical and literary perspective.