Ekphrasis and the frame: on paintings in Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky STILIANA MILKOVA Abstract Theories of ekphrasis—the literary description of an artwork—have traditionally addressed the figurative contest between verbal representation (text) and visual representation (image) that structures the trope. Little attention has been paid to the material, physical aspect of the artwork and especially the solid, touchable picture frame. This article examines the function of the frame-as-object in the context of ekphrasis and nineteenth-century realist narrative. It argues that the physical border of the picture frame operates as a demarcating device in the ekphrastic text, as a door-like liminal space that outlines and maintains the boundaries of representation. Moreover, the picture frame’s material presence facilitates both representation and perception in the nineteenth-century realist text. It renders the artwork described more visible, touchable, real. Three nineteenth-century Russian literary works serve as case studies: Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Portrait (1842),” Lev Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1873–77), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869). By analyzing ekphrastic scenes in which painted figures step out of the picture frame, this article shows how the frame becomes intertwined with questions of representation, aesthetics, and realist narrative. Keywords ekphrasis, picture frame, realist representation, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky Theories of ekphrasis—the literary description of an artwork —address primarily the figurative contest between verbal representation (text) and visual representation (image) which structures ekphrasis. Recent scholarship focuses on the dichotomies and tensions that drive and constitute this trope. In James Heffernan’s words, ekphrasis “evokes the power of the silent image even as it subjects that power to the rival authority of language, it is intensely paragonal.” 1 Ekphrasis stages a conflict between the verbal and visual modes of representation; between narrative action in time and fixed bodies in space; between poetic voice and silent image; between a male viewing/writing subject and a femi- nine art object; and between the text’s anxiety about reality and the deictic thisness of the artwork. 2 Ekphrasis serves as a site where texts encounter their semiotic others and thus it is energized by difference. 3 If ekphrasis implies difference, then it also marks the borders that establish, maintain, and differentiate self from other, word from image. Ekphrasis draws, as it were, a frame around the art object to delineate and contain its otherness while at the same time relying on the effect produced by otherness. The bounded space that ekphrasis delineates gains visibility when the artwork described is a framed painting—a portrait, for example. The text evokes the power of the image precisely as a framed artwork while relying, implicitly or explicitly, on the power of the frame to enforce proper boundaries. The frame- as-object therefore operates as a demarcating device in the ekphrastic text; it outlines the borders of representation by pointing a deictic finger to the artwork and then reinstating the text’s authority by making the artwork part of the narrative action. In semiotic terms, the picture frame signals the painting as painting. 4 When a painting is its subject, the ekphrastic text relies at least implicitly on the presence of a frame to demar- cate the borders of the visual image and signify it as such. It is the frame-as-object, the frame as what Louis Marin calls “edge and rim, frontier and limit,” that allows one mode of repre- sentation to cite and taunt the other. 5 To take Valentine Cunningham’s argument further, it is in fact the physical, “real” presence of the frame that embodies the art object’s “allegedly touchable, fingerable, thisness.” 6 The artwork itself would be far less touchable and fingerable (for fear of dama- ging the canvas, for one) than the solid material of the frame. The frame can therefore be said to demarcate a liminal space, a threshold of sorts that enables ekphrasis literally by defining the artwork as such and metaphorically as a figure of contact between the verbal and visual media. 7 Much scholarly work has been done on conceptual and contextual framing in literary texts. 8 Still, literary scholars have remained somewhat impervious to the literal frame, WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 32, NO. 2, APRIL–JUNE 2016 153 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2016.1144435 # 2016 Taylor & Francis