The historical-existential chronotope of the cities of Cairo and Alexandria

the article examines the chronotope of the city in the novels of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, “Boarding House ‘Miramar’” (1967) and “Love in the Rain” (1973). Belonging to the same period in the author’s oeuvre, they reflect different stages in the history of Egypt in the 1960s – 70s, with the watershed marked by the war with Israel in June 1967. Its outcomes compelled a reappraisal of social transformations and of the contradictions of the country’s sociopolitical life. The emerging changes are reflected in the historical-existential chronotope of Mahfouz’s novels. Alexandria and Cairo as depicted by Mahfouz are not only geographical and social spaces but also reflections of Egypt’s cultural-historical processes: post?revolutionary renewal, disappointment, moral decay, and the search for identity. Through the dynamics of the urban environment, the writer lays bare the contradictions of the era, while the spaces themselves – the boarding house, caf?s, streets, and apartments – become key loci bearing semantic and plot?driving functions. The events unfold in cities that embody different temporal rhythms. The spatial–temporal characteristics of Alexandria and Cairo are analyzed as artistic loci of the metropolitan city and the province. In the quiet, cozy, provincial Alexandria, people “hide” from revolutionary events. Cairo symbolizes bustle, crowds, alienation, and at the same time the “fresh winds of a new life,” revolution, social upheavals, reforms, decrees, and so on. Urban space becomes a semantic structure that reflects the state of society and the inner world of the characters.

modern Arabic literature, Egyptian writer, the problem of time and space, novel, problematic