The article examines the Younger Symbolist mythopoetics of urban space. The deliberate cultivation of fear and aversion to the urban topos emerges as a strategy both for the discursive self-representation of the Younger Symbolists and for constructing the image of the Other. Through the phenomenological tradition of topoanalysis and developments in the semiotics of fear in the journalism of A. Bely and A. Blok, the research identifies topophobic elements, describes their constitutive functions, and reveals both the specificity of the semiosis of the “terrible” and the content of the images of the industrial city, the square, the house, the office, and the closet.
topophobia; phenomenology of space; topoanalysis; semiotics of fear; symbolism; Young Symbolism; modernism; industrial city; Russian religious philosophy; A. Bely; A. Blok