Review of the Book: The Topos of the City in Synchrony and Diachrony: The Literary Paradigm of Central and South-Eastern Europe.

The review regards a collective monography, edited by Modern Central and South-West Literature Department of Russian Academy of Science Slavonic Research Institute, concerning topoi imagery in Slavonic literatures. The main advantage of the book is its appeal to one of the topics in demand in modern literary criticism — the image of an event place. The thematic principle taken as a basis divided the book into three sections, each examining the image of the city from different points of view. Each chapter is furnished with brief summaries both in Russian and English providing its logical completeness and accessibility to the common reader. However, the publication fails to achieve full monographic integrity due to the extreme thematic and stylistic diversity of the material. Some chapters lack analytic approach suffering from the descriptive one. The absence of the closing observations collecting the chapters’ conclusions reveals a weakness of the study