This book is concerned with the literary development of the narrative category of space in Russian literature from Romanticism until Modernism. It consists of two parts. The theoretical introduction renders a survey of some major 20-th century theories on literary development in the tradition of Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism. A critical discussion is given of the cultural and stylistic typologies of the soviet scholar D. Lichacev and the semiotician I. Smirnov. Furthermore, the ideas on literary space, as they were developed by two important representatives of the Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics, Ju.Lotman and V.Toporov, are described together with the method of literary analysis they offer.
The contents of the second part of the book are analyses of the structure of space in the following narrative works: Mcyri by M.Ju. Lermontov, Nevskij prospekt by N.V. Gogol, Oblomov by I.A. Goncarov, V tolpe by F. Sologub and Kotlovan by A. Platonov. The analyses are accompanied by an interpretation of the story based on the spatial details in the text.
It appears that both continuity and change characterize the development of literary space. This two-fold nature of the evolutionary proces comes to the fore through recurrence of spatial archetypes in all the periods under discussion and through ambivalence of meaning as a result of the semiotization of literary space in each literary work.