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Abstract: The article explicates various aspects of understanding the urban text, focused primarily on the linguistic analysis of Arina Obukh’s works about St. Petersburg. The relevance of the research is motivated by its inclusion in the modern paradigm of scholarly research, correlated with the functional-semantic, communicative and discursive aspects of literary text analysis. The interest in this problem is also dictated by the need to study changes in national self-awareness, which has led to the desire to understand the city as a cultural category, as a symbolic and holistic space. The aim of the study is to identify the specificity of the formation of the semantic field of the urban text. This aim predetermined the formulation of a number of tasks: 1) to consider and structure the symbols of the city of St. Petersburg; 2) to identify the key components of the denotative content of the image under study; 3) to identify and describe the dominant symbols reflecting the dynamic characteristics of the image of the city; 4) to identify the linguistic means of representation of each of the selected components and analyze the peculiarities of their functioning in the local text. The research methods employed in this study include interpretive semantic, definitional, and contextual methods. The practical research material comprises fiction texts of the contemporary author A. Obukh, which are part of the series “St. Petersburg and its Inhabitants”. The linguistic processes presented and analyzed on the basis of the literary texts of this author characterize the linguistic space of modern prose and the perception of space by a young writer. The article reveals the verbal means of representation of the author’s vision of space, as well as lexico-semantic means of verbalization of traditional symbols of St. Petersburg. The suggestive significance of these means in the production of emotional and aesthetic connotations of linguistic images is demonstrated to the readers of the article. The study carries out a comparative analysis of the semantics of the symbols of the city with those from the previous texts about St. Petersburg. In the course of the study, it was found that the image of St. Petersburg in the discourse under consideration is formed primarily by knowledge about the city – its significant locations and objects, as well as information about the lifestyle of the people touching upon all significant spheres of life of the inhabitants of the city. The conceptual component in fiction texts coexists with the associative and symbolic characteristics of the city.

About the author(s) :

Guzel R. Nasibullova

Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University (Kazan, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1826-0022

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 11.04.2025; date of publication: 31.10.2025

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