From the topography of the place to the tomography of the text: urban narrativity in Andrey Levkin’s prose

The article examines the prose of contemporary Russian novelist and essayist Andrei Levkin as an example of unconventional writing practices that include a fundamentally different type of representation of urban space. The author introduces and substantiates the term “urban narrativity” as adequate for a comprehensive analysis of the writer’s texts, the genre and fictional nature of which is a theoretical problem, and the urban-oriented nature of which is inextricably linked to the narrator’s autobiography. A brief review of the key texts of the major “novel” prose is made and two types of Levkin’s urban descriptions are distinguished: descriptive, characteristic of the genre of travelogues and anticipating the plot; and metanarrative, when the city acts as a discursive metaphor for the reflection of the writing process. The collection of texts ‘A Place without Properties” (2023), compiled by Levkin’s publishers on the basis of the development of his writing style, demonstrates the role of the city as an organizing metaphor for the texts. The final text of the collection, the last one written by Levkin during his lifetime, contains the less characteristic metaphor of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), which expresses the intention to comprehend the mechanism of formation of a place not as a topographical point, but as a cognitive-emotional space created by the correlation of the subject and the environment. From this perspective, Levkin’s indefinable prose, which oscillates between urban sketch and self-reflexive prose, can be seen as an attempt to verbalize directly the consciousness of modern man.