Grad kao piščev identitet
The City As Writer’s Identity

Summary/Abstract: Literary work of many writers has been determined by a city in which they were born or choosed to live. In this text as the outstanding examples are taken Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), poet from Alexandria, and Orhan Pamuk (57), writer born in Istanbul and the 2006 Nobel Prize winner for literature. In his unvoluminous opus, Cavafy usually makes Alexandria the central topos of thinking and existence, sometimes turning to the Hellenic past, times of city’s foundation and its greatest glory. In his autobiografic novel, Istanbul: Memories and The City, Istanbul is central place of childhood and youth memories, with its quarters and districts, changes occuring in its long history, especially in the 20th century, when both the city and Turkey as a whole turned to the West. Both writers share the same strong urge to amalgamate achievements and cultures of East and West. The same urge is also evident in Orhan Pamuk’s novels My Name is Red and The Snow.The history of literature offers many examples of inseparable links of the fates of writers and the cities, so it could be said that there is no writer without the city: Aristophanes without Athens, Ovidius without Rome, Dante without Florence, Marcel Aimee without Paris, Sandor Marai without Budapest, etc. The city as part and parcel of writer’s identity is among the most distinctive characteristics of literature as a whole.

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