In this article, strategies and writing tricks (the trick of “defamiliarization”, imagery) which in Nabokov’s short story A Guide to Berlin serve to design the image of the city and simultaneously to explore the world of values (axiological map of Berlin/Eden) are being interpreted. The author of this article proves that the semantics of the title guide is connected with the strategy of transition from empirical observation and one “fragment of space” to expression of a situation in which the subject of speech has found himself. Moreover, it is shown that the subjectivity of the observer, his way of experiencing the world and his creative sensitivity seem crucial in the story, because he evaluates the surrounding reality and in the “act of individual creativity” builds upon it yet another space – an unusual, transformed one, close to the emigrant/the author of the guidebook. Attention is also paid to the differentiation of two ways of perceiving the world and two types of consciousness: the artist’s/narrator’s and his listener’s (“average consciousness”).

Taking as a starting point Vyacheslav Ivanov’s poem Eden – the epilogue of the 5th book of “metaphysical lyric poetry” Rosarium as well as his critical and philosophical works – the article proposes a culturological interpretation of the key topoi of the poet’s artistic thought: his poetic anthropology. The principal point in these considerations is conceptualisation of the category of paradise/Eden in Ivanov’s writings and the notion of happiness as “metaphysical and religious feeling” connected with a person’s spiritual life in its vertical dimension (relation man – three-personed God). Moreover, the article presents intertextual relationships between Ivanov’s poetry and cultural texts (St Augustine, Petrarch, and others) being the source of European understanding of the concepts: soul, memory, oblivion, paradise.