This article presents the first part of a study devoted to Yury Kazakov’s short story “The Abyss.” Based on epistolary evidence, the author reconstructs the history of the work on the text and gives an overview is given of interpretations of “The Abyss” by Kazakov’s contemporaries and later researchers. Despite the loss of the final pages, the story has preserved its wholeness thanks to strong structural coherence. The spatial composition of the story is analyzed. The first space - the expedition - is built around the image of the journey, and within it two subspaces are distinguished, contrasted by their evaluation. The second space - Leningrad - is considered in the context of the Petersburg text of Russian literature. “The Abyss” shows the opposition of two main Petersburg myths - the founding and the destruction of the city. Depending on the relationship between chaos and cosmos (which reveal themselves in the system of leitmotifs, and in mythological and theatrical subtexts), the Leningrad space in “The Abyss” has three forms: “daytime” (Chapter 1: predominance of the cosmic), “nighttime” (Chapter 2: balance of cosmos and chaos), and “ghostly” (Chapter 3: predominance of the chaotic). The rural and Leningrad worlds are opposed “architecturally” - by the horizontal and vertical axes - and also on the level of mythological archetypes - as “this” world and the “other” world; at the same time, some of their features are aligned with each other. The dynamic interaction of the spaces and their variants becomes clear in the analysis of the plot structure, which will be the focus of the second part of the study.
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