A brief reference, without explanation, to a person, a text, a myth or a fact known outside the work, which carries with it the meaning of that other story.
In White Nights
I would certainly have said: Madam!, if I did not know that this exclamation had already been uttered a thousand times in all the Russian novels of high society.
The sentence alludes to “Russian novels of high society” without naming any. The reader recognizes the convention the narrator steps away from, and understands that the literature he has read serves him as both model and brake.
First Night: The encounter, the Dreamer
no, we had better listen not to The Barber, but to something else.
Third and Fourth Nights and the Morning: The wait and the outcome, Nastenka
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