This paper (in Russian), delivered at the XII International Bakhtin Conference (Jyväskylä, Finland, July 2005), tries to apply the Bakhtinian concepts “chronotope” and “polyphony” on a very special case in the history of Swedish literature. At the beginning of the XX century five local authors of Västernorrland became nationally successful. It has never been noiced, that these the works of these authors are dominated by an estethic model that is common to all five of them: a small “toy town”, opening itself for the Great time (Bakhtin) in a feverish industrialization and internationalization process, exposing a social desorientation of the individual as far as value systems and social strategies are concerned. Most significiant in this model is its closeness to real life. Like in the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf we know what real people we meet in the streets – an we know in exactly which real streets we are, when we see them. This closeness to real life is decisive for the modernistic potential, and also offers an interesting opportunity to understand what is, usually, hardest to understand in “polyphony”: that the characters according to Bakhtin must be independent of the author. If they are entering the fiction from real life, as they often are in the works of the five authors, they really are not quite the author’s characters but independent in a very substantial way. closeness to