The figure of city in contemporary prose (Olivia Laing’s ‘The lonely city’ and Albert Spiazzatov’s ‘Losing our streets’)

The article explores the boundaries of such a type of narrative as urban narrativity. Based on this approach, not only is a city an object of observation and description, but it also influences the creation of texts, being both the material for the plot and the narrative structure. The expression ‘figure of city’ is formed based on the well-developed concept of the ‘language’ of space (Antsiferov, Toporov, Certeau) and actualizes the rhetorical use of this language by the narrator to communicate with the readers. In this research paper, two contemporary prose works balancing between fiction and autofiction are in the focus of this ‘figure of city’ approach. In the case of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (2016), the image of the city performs the function of a synecdoche, and the expression ‘lonely city’ is read as an unspoken ‘lonely me’, ‘lonely us’. In the case of the novel by Albert Spiazzatov (pseudonym of Eldar Sattarov) Losing Our Streets (2010), the city acts as a conceptual metaphor of the hero’s life and as a language for his self-reflection. The two examples demonstrate that thinking about a city is an understanding not only of a specific urban space but also of modern life itself. The figure of city can act both as an ontological metaphor and as a metalanguage of modern life.