The article reveals the peculiarities of the urban text in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories. The image of Odessa is analyzed as a poetological dominant of the cycle. The originality of the artistic image and the text of Odessa is considered as the relationship between the semantic setting in the social and cultural focus, the historical image of the city and its perception in the minds of townspeople. Thus, the author focuses on the space locus that serves as a marker of the Odessa text and identifies the city of Odessa (Moldavanka, Peresyp, Privoz), the images of the Odessa landscape in their symbolic interpretation and the image of Odessa man as closely related components of the artistic structure of the cycle and the Odessa text itself. Analysis of the stories distinguishes that the meaning‑forming and structure‑forming functions of the Odessa topoi are subordinated to a single goal – to create and typify the image of Odessa man. What is important is not the city itself as a socio‑cultural organism, but its perception in the urban consciousness. The key fact to reveal the specifics of the Odessa text and the Odessa consciousness is the idea of the decline – the collapse of the communal and tribal consciousness as the decline of the Odessa ethnos realized in the conflict of personal and social principles, the inverse comprehension of Rabelaisian corporality motif, the images of the sunset landscape and in the irony, which discredits as false both the gang life romance and the appearing concept of a new world. The city depicted by I. Babel on the threshold of the 1917 revolution is interpreted as a city at the decline of culture. The writer depicts the end or the decline of old Odessa through the end of Odessa man and the collapse of the Odessa ethnos. Thus, in I. Babel’s Odessa cycle, there is a transformation of the traditional image of sunny Odessa into the image of a city fallen into decline. The features of the image of Odessa man regarded as indications of the declining culture are determined in the article.