The dissertation focuses upon problems of the theory of time and space of the city in literature, examining and systematising methodological approaches to studying of theoretical and literary category of urban time and space, detects miscellany and variability of existence with its peculiar temporal and spatial co-ordinates, based upon the material of literary texts by Bruno Schulz and Debora Vogel. The author ascertained the essence of spatial / topographic turn as a tool to rethink the relations between time and space. It has been proven that contemporary concepts of time and space are aimed at stressing the material contents of the spatial past, id est, at merging of temporal and spatial characterisations in the notion of locus, wherein collective values, individual experience, geography, and history become accomplished. Novel theories from realms such as social philosophy, cultural studies, and urbanistics have been analysed; these theories usher in the emergence of a brand new orientation for researchers – that is, geopoetics – which appears not only as unique literary topography of the city but first and foremost as a theoretical reflection on time and space in the literary realm.
Having analysed the dichotomy connection between the city and literature, the author has highlighted four varieties of poetics in presentation of the city in the 20th century literature (parabolic, perceptive, constructivist, and social documentary) and has ascertained that Schulz's city is represented from the standpoint of parabolic poetics whereas Vogel's city is presented pursuant to the constructivist poetics approach. Schulz was creating the myth of «epoque geniale», whereas Vogel was declaring/praising the civilisation myth.
Besides, the dissertation also examines Schulz's dilogy, Cinnamon Shops & The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, and The Acacias are in Bloom by Debora Vogel and has examined the peculiarities of temporal and spatial organisation of the city in their respective literary texts.
A contemporary city, regardless however and from which standpoint it is presented (be it the parabolic and perceptive approach of Schulz or the constructivist approach of Vogel) is a temporal and spatial, philosophic and aesthetic, social and cultural unity. This is also an indivisible unity of the temporal rhythm and space wherein each component is independent and – at the same time – mutually dependent upon other components.
Bruno Schulz's city, read in such a manner, as an ecstatic project, goes way beyond its boundaries since it is revealed to the character and only in this way it becomes fulfilled and accomplished in a proper manner. The narrating character explores and creates the city not only during his strolls but first of all by way of putting together a map of objects which had been revealed and decoded during his wanderings. Such a city is in permanent struggle with time, as it attempts to overcome time in order to get back to the past, into the years of childhood, into the Epoque Geniale.
The cubist and structuralist creative heritage of Vogel is aimed at expression of the characteristics of the social and political situation of the new time which she calls a 'new legend' to the glorification of the technical development, the progress, the evolution, and dynamism. Those rapid civilisation shifts have led to the emergence of new spaces and places – and hence also led to the emergence of new senses and functions in addition to the existing ones. In this dialectics, one can clearly see the principal essence of Vogel's aesthetic theory, i.e., the dialectics of statics and dynamics.
A quest to find common places between the real space of the city and its artistic creation is at the same time its problematisation and anthropological perspective in the researches into urban quotidienness. In the course of the analysis and interpretation of Schulz's and Vogel's literary texts in the context of anthropology of the place and of the non-place as its antipode, heterotopy, and geopoetics, the author has highlighted not only the undoubtedly considerable input of the fiction literature into humanitarian researches into the urban space but also outlined and clarified the crucial importance of the urban themes in the interpretation of literary works, rooted both biographically and geographically.
