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The article studies urban space as a text of culture, where various semiotic languages interact. With reference to this urban space can be perceived as a complex contexture of space, architecture, people, objects and names, as well as their interrelation in everyday life. The object of study in the article is a phenomenon of urban space landmarks and, on a large scale, the semiotics of landmarks as one of the codes which form and record the urban text. The author endeavors to interpret landmarks as a sign which constitutes a particular sign meta-system where a transmitted sign saves its appurtenance to its initial semiotics, but takes new features. This approach has enabled us to find out the changes in the pragmatics and semantics of signs and to characterize partly the specifics of the syntactics. The detection of semantically motivated correlation between this type of signs seems to contribute to the process of detection of new sense layers in urban texts and to result not only in the reinforcement of cultural memory, but also in the fulfillment of the creative function of the urban text.

The article considers the city as a text of culture which appears due to interaction of different semiotic codes in urban space. Due to this approach urban space can be regarded as the text which consolidates the results of historic and cultural life of the city with the help of architecture, toponymics, natural phenomena. With regard to multi-aspect nature of urban semiotics it seems reasonable to focus on the urban metaphor as a trope which conveys the main message as a figurative expression. The article studies the metaphor garden-city concept and its se- miotic modifications in XX–XXI centuries. The author attempts to analyze the transformation of this metaphor, which initiated the urban planning conception of E. Howard, into a dead metaphor which converted into a newspaper cliché and, as a result, lost its original semiotic sense. The ideological influence of new urbanism and the necessity of promotion of new housing complexes have stipulated the appearance of this modern variety of the concept: park-city concept. However, this fact allows to concentrate both on the change of approaches to urban planning and on the related changes in the urban text as a text of culture.

Studying the city as a text of culture on the material of literary works is usually associated with the identification of its “inner meaning”, “feeling” and / or the main “idea”. We proceed from understanding objectification as fixation of the author’s perception of urban space in a literary text which leads us to the question of the ways and linguistic means that allow turning the thoughtform into a holistic, visible, in some cases almost tangible image determining the possibility of transmitting the author’s vision of the city to the readership. “Tales of Old Vilnius” by Max Frei has been chosen as a source for the research because it can be regarded as one of the most interesting urban texts which have appeared in the 21st century, where the characteristics of the existing city are combined with the author’s fantasy, as a result of which there appears a literary version of urban space which differs greatly from its invariant. The methods of linguostylistic analysis (with elements of linguosemiotic analysis) have been chosen, which enable us to reveal not only verbal, but also visual ways and means of objectivization of the city in fiction. As the analysis has shown, the specifics of the Tales are stipulated by its composition and the combination of verbal and visual ways of author’s objectivisation: they are implemented with the help of linguistic means of different semiotics, however, they complement each other in the process of creating the image of the city, where the real and the imaginary are closely connected. As a result, it can be concluded that not only the urban supertext can be enriched by the creation of a new literary image of the city, but that the new fictional image as well has the potential to foster the real future development of urban space.