The article is devoted to the artistic and thematic features of the philosophical nov­el “Villa Belle-Letra” by the Ossetian Russian-language prose writer Alan Cherchesov, dedicated to the problem of writing. Exploring many facets of literary creativity, the au­thor touches upon the nature of literary skill, artistic language, literature as a universal phenomenon. An important motif is introduced about the continuity of literary calling, literary destiny, and writer’s mission. One of the through-line motifs of the novel is the correspondence of the existential essence and personality of the writer. The author searches for a kind of elixir of immortality in literature, the basis of which is artistic imagination, which allows leaving disappeared images in the constructive memory of the author. Liter­ature appears in the novel not only as a self-sufficient aesthetic phenomenon, represented by images of beautiful women, but also as a tool for fighting evil and, at the same time, as an important indicator of evil. In order to designate the property of the indefinability of good and evil as universal properties of the universe, Cherchesov turns to the intertext, which manifests itself in the novel primarily through quotations. In conclusion, it is noted that the author applies the conventional history of the symbolic island of fiction called Villa Belle-Letra to historical milestones and challenges, including fascism. The novel re­flects existential elements: loneliness, confusion before the future, the world and one’s own calling, melancholy, boredom, nausea. In the work of A. Cherchesov, we meet symbolic characters, some of whom have coded names. Thus, Lira von Rettau and Elit Turera seem to be different women, but soon there is no doubt that this is one and the same woman, since both names are an anagram of the lexeme literature, only in a different combination. Thus, Lira von Rettau and Elit Turera are an archetypal image of literature with infinitely diverse characteristics, some of which remain latent, since both heroines are almost always absent. The article uses the methods of comparative historical, structural, artistic literary analysis. The results obtained can be used to develop special courses, write a history of modern Russian-language North Caucasian literature, a multinational history of modern literature of the Russian Federation.