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The image of the city often becomes a subject of literary studies. The article aims at expanding the issue of urbanism poetics and city influence in literature. The author investigates key aspects of the city as a socio-cultural phenomenon with the help of the works by Western and American urban theorists.

In the article an attempt is made to analyze the peculiarity of the structure of space in Dina Rubina’s novel «High Water Venetians». Venice is viewed as a field with a nuclear and peripheral spheres. Field analysis of language components allows to see a live, evolving image of the city directly linked to the internal state of the main character.

‘Insulted and humiliated’ is one of F. M. Dostoyevsky’s recurrent themes. It remains up-to-date in the last period of his creative work related to Staraya Russa. This town became the prototype of Skotoprigonievsk from The Brothers Karamazov and the small town Afimievsk from the novel The Adolescent. In Dostoyevsky’s letters, in his wife’s memoires, in the reports of the writer’s friends from Staraya Russa there crop up the recollections of the citizens, who can be considered the prototypes of the ‘insulted and humiliated’ in these novels.