The article examines the 19th-century European perception of architecture – and architectural style – as an expression of history and culture that can only be fully explicated through a verbal, literary text. This concept was particularly active in discussions of national identity. Architecture was both reяective on a national culture and at the same time called upon to further reяect and express that culture. On this basis arose critical interpretations of eclectic, historicist architectural styles. The article discusses the origins of this historicist concept in Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris and its elaboration in the work of Nikolai Gogol, Fedor Dostoevsky and the Marquis de Custine.