The proposed report examines the main aspects that determine the relationship between memory and the everyday world of literary characters and form the overall literary space of the city (the “Viennese text”) in modern novel literature in Austria. The novels by R. Knapp “The Advice of Mr. Cookie” (Herrn Kukas Empfehlungen, 1999) and P. Rosei “Vienna. Metropolis” (Wien. Metropolis, 2005), E. Menasse “Vienna” (2005), V. Wertlieb “Stops on the Way” (“Zwischenstationen”, 1999), and E. Jelinek “In Front of a Closed Door” (“Die Ausgesperrten”, 1980). The characters of these works immerse themselves in the mundanity, evidence, and factuality of life practices localized in a certain ordered time and space. The urban space of this artistic world is built on the principles of everyday life, tradition, and conventionality. The “Vienna text”, which is built from novelistic works by Austrian authors, appears as a kind of cross-textual construction that combines various narrative lines of the “urban novel” and creates a multidimensional and multi-temporal portrait of the Austrian capital. At the same time, in the works of Austrian novelists, the city acts not only as a geographical space, the space of the characters' daily existence, but also as a space of memory that preserves the history of the past. In the everyday urban environment (in familiar place names, details of urban life, places of daily habitation of the characters, in the habits of their urban life, etc.), in this space of everyday life, Austrian writers discover traces of traumatic memory, traces of involvement of the protagonists in the “big history”, in the social, national, political and existential conflicts of the era.
Austrian literature; Viennese novel; urban text; memory; everyday life.