Abstract: The subject of the study is the image of the city in small and medium prose by V.S. Tokareva. The author reveals the uniqueness of the artistic concept of the city in the work of Victoria Tokareva, which consists in a combination of the image of a generalized conditional space and recognizable spatial images that can be considered in the context of the poetics of local texts. Clarification of the characteristics of a generalized conditional city occurs through the analysis of a system of characters whose moral and philosophical paradigm is correlated with urban loci. Recognizable spatial images are correlated with the autobiographical context of the author's work and considered from the point of view of the author's contribution to the "Moscow" and "Petersburg" text of Russian literature. The author's main contribution to the study of the poetics of V.S. Tokareva's prose is to clarify the typology of images of short stories and novels and to identify "episodic heroes" - characters with an unformed moral and philosophical paradigm and a life position of non-participation in the destinies of other characters and their own fate. The poetics of the episode determines both the key characteristics of such characters and the properties of the urban loci associated with them. The main artistic techniques contributing to the identification of the characteristics of the characters of urban prose are V.S. Tokareva's precedent comparisons and details revealing the author's position. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that reading Tokareva's small and medium prose through the prism of the poetics of local texts makes it possible to clarify the originality of the author's interpretation of the images of the two capitals. Shifting the research focus to the generalized image of the city is productive from the point of view of clarifying the typological features of the character sphere and identifying relevant moral and philosophical issues.