The City and Literature: A Few Reflections on Dostoïevski’s Views on Space

Abstract

The literary city of the nineteenth century, considered by some as a study of urban sociology carried out before its time, and as an outstanding historical testimony by others, contributes to set out the urban myth at the turning point of a new configuration of society. Generally regarded as a composite representation, it oscillates between the two poles of a classical dichotomy: the real and the imaginary ones. The proposed article suggests to discuss this dichotomy by studying anew the notion of the literary city. Considering the latter as a particular manifestation of space and aesthetics, we can assume that a work of literature does not reproduce reality, nor does it create a mythical
city, but it develops an intermediate space, virtual and independent, obeying to what we might call the writer’s spatial philosophy. The purpose of my article is to define some characteristics of this 
philosophy in relation to Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg and to discover its aesthetic construction which is too often obscured by the semiotic approaches.