ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the Soviet modernist writer Leonid Dobychin’s short novel The Town of N, published in 1935, in the literary-historical and theoretical context of the Russian provincial town. The experimental novel portrays, from a child narrator’s perspective, Daugavpils, a multicultural city in today’s southeastern Latvia, during the first decade of the twentieth century. It is argued that Dobychin’s novel is a provincial Bildungsroman that builds on and develops further the imagined geography of the Russian provinces in the modernist context. Theoretically and methodologically, the chapter draws from the semiotics of culture and the concept of the chronotope, backed up with recent studies on imagined provinciality in Russian literature, and hence provides an exploration of a semiotic and Bakhtinian approach to the literary city. Moreover, the chapter contributes to research on peripheral fictional cities within the specific Russian cultural context, with relevance also for how the literature of provincial cities takes shape.