Abstract: The author of the article analyzes the texts of Gaito Gazdanov recreating the picture of the life of Russian emigration in Constantinople. Gazdanov's "Constantinople" prose describes the border situation in which existential questions are especially acute: he reflects on the purpose of human existence, the boundaries of the individual "Self", the relationship between natural and cultural principles in human nature, the possibility of finding a foothold in a situation of total alienation. In the "Constantinople" fragment of the story "The Story of a Journey," the writer denies the possibility of building happiness rooted in external being. The feeling of happiness is extremely subjective and consists of individual spiritual experiences, momentary insights, the acuteness and intensity of which depend on the individual degree of sensitivity to beauty. In the story “Weak Heart”, the Gazdanov narrator is at first captured by the aesthetic charm of the city. However, his focus soon shifted: from the panoramic “sparkling view of the Bosporus and cool nights above the mosques” to close-up situations of domestic deprivation and psychological dramas of the Russian émigré, which lead him to existential generalizations about the essence of human existence in general. The article uses descriptive and biographical methods of research, as well as a comparative comparative method in the analysis of the prose of Gazdanov and J.P. Sartre. The author comes to the conclusion that the writer's observations of the hard life of the Russian emigration in Constantinople became the most important impetus for the formation of his existential views. The harsh Constantinople reality helped Gazdanov to discover that fatal “wormhole” of life, which, from his point of view, causes the inescapable tragedy of human life.