The article presents an analysis of two short stories by Shen Congwen (1902-1988), the foremost Chinese writer of the Republican period (1912-1949). The peculiar anti-idyllic quality of "Aboard and on Shore", a local-mood prose piece with marked autobiographical coloring, and "Sansan", an early example of the writer´s famous pastoral stories, is scrutinized using M. Bakhtin´s concept of "chronotop". Examination of the stories´ spatio-temporal layout reveals the presence of a shared semantic structure: the rise and subsequent demise of an idyllic space. The unstable chronology, a quality inherent not only to the two pieces under scruting but also to a series of Shen Congwen´s work from the late 1920s and early 1930s, is discussed as being possibly a product of the writer´s effort to express nostalgia.