find in those texts miniature versions of Pnin's Russian doll structure, mise-en-abymes placed by Nabokov into his novel

As with other mise-en-abyme endings (like that of "Octet")

within the formal model of mise-en-abyme

A mis-en-abyme of desire...

enraptured by a jouissance or mise-en-abyme which promises to shatter

In a mise en abyme of these dyads, the Whitney Museum catalog for the Jeff Koons retrospective included an in situ image of I Could Go for Something Gordon’s

The mise-en-abyme here produces a charge of the weird, both because of the scandal of an uncreated thing, and because of the twisted causality that has allowed such a thing to exist

The mole offers the spy story its mise en abyme: their every act is at once real and false, an embodied double negative; they threaten at every moment to double or triple themselves