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Abstract: The article studies the image of Biysk in Russian works of fiction. The research methodology is based on works studying fiction texts about cities written by representatives of the Tartu-Moscow school and the geo-cultural and geo-poetical approaches. In general, the history of Biysk repeats the history of first Siberian cities. Initially, it was a fortress, fixing the shift of the borders of Russian territories to the East (since 1709). After 1846, the city ceased to be a military administrative center and became a place of political exile. At the same time, it turned into a commercial and industrial provincial city, lying on a strategically important trade route (Chuysky Tract). The analysis of fiction texts made it possible to identify and describe the main figurative models of the city: military prison, prison, city of mud, antithesis of the village, hell – paradise, and city-mediator. No single “core”, apart from the object of description, uniting this, rather small corpus of texts, has been found. Although zones of overlapping of semantic spheres have been outlined. A military jail and a mud city are equivalent as a battlefield of antagonistic forces. In a vulgarized form, this antithesis expresses the opposition between the city and the village. A fortress, being an embodiment of the border, is capable of both blocking contacts and ensuring them. Most of the works about Biysk belong to the genres that are closely related to extra-fiction reality, which indicates the similarity between the fiction image of Biysk and the real city. It is not possible to speak of the presence of the Biysk text in the sense that V. N. Toporov used with reference to the Petersburg text. Occasional semantic parameters of the city are transformed by the paradigms of territorial supertexts: the Siberian and the provincial ones. In addition, the basic structural-semiotic parameters of the city coincide with the model of any city of the “extraterritorial” (Yu. M. Lotman) type. The individual content generation of the invariant scheme occurs due to the geographical, historical, mythological, etc. specificity of Biysk.