The concept of the chronotope, which Bakhtin launches in the essay ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ (‘Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane’), pertains to historically developing spatio-temporal forms in the novel. Bakhtin describes the chronotope as expressing the inseparability of space and time (time being the fourth dimension of space):

In what follows, I explore and develop further the concept of the chronotope of the provincial town, which Bakhtin mentions in passing in the concluding remarks to his lengthy essay. Here Bakhtin takes up three of the most important spatio-temporal forms and their main representatives in nineteenth-century realistic literature: the chronotope of the provincial town (Flaubert), that of the threshold (Dostoevsky), and that of biographical time (Tolstoy) (Bakhtin 2008, 247–50). The provincial chronotope is characterized by themes of repetition and unchangeability; according to Bakhtin, provincial towns are the realms of cyclical everyday time, since ‘[h]ere there are no events, only “beings” that constantly repeat themselves’ (Bakhtin 2012, 493).