Features organization of the space of the page of novel "Masks" of A. Bely

The article is devoted to the analysis of the current literary and scholarly phenomenon - the visual and graphic appearance of the text. The analysis of theoretical works devoted to the visual poetics of a text concluded that the text model developed by A. Bely played an important role in the development of Russian literature of the 20th century. The main characteristic of the visual model of the text of the 20th - 21st centuries is the discreteness of the page space. The purpose of this article is to analyze the visual and graphic features of A. Bely’s novel «Masks». The lifetime edition of the novel «Masks», published in 1932, is used as an empirical material and considered to be the most accurately conveying the will of the author. Comprehensive research methods determined that the visual appearance of A. Bely's novel «Masks» is formed by such techniques as the arrangement of the text, the graphic equivalent of the text and the font accidents represented by the letter-spacing. Drawings do not only perform a pictorial function, but also directly affect the visual appearance of the page, and certainly interact with the verbal component, become one of the important elements of the visual organization of the page. The article emphasizes the artistic relationship of the visual and graphic features of the text with other levels of the poetics of the work. The visual appearance of the text becomes for A. Bely one of the main ways of conveying figurative content: to create an individual pause system and mark the intonation of the text; the spatial organization of the text on the page helps through the visual appearance to symbolically convey the writer’s idea of the dual world, to focus on the plot transitions between the everyday and spiritual life of the heroes.