The problem of genre differentiation between povest’ and novel in polemics on Dostoevsky in the 1840s

The issue of differentiation between the povest’ and the novel is one of the most difficult problems in Russian criticism. To this day, critics and readers confuse these genres designating the same literary works both as novels and povest’. The discussions are becoming complicated by non-genre meanings of genre definitions. One of the few creators of the theory of the povest’ and the novel was Vissarion Belinsky. In his view, the povest’ is a middle genre: shorter than the novel, but longer than the short story, a kind of the novel (its episode). In his late criticism, he considered the novel and the povest’ a “sort of poetry”. This situation was reflected in the discussions of Dostoevsky’s novels and povest’ written in the 1840s. The majority of critics identified Poor Folk as a novel, few considered it a povest’, some of them wrote about the povest’ The Double as a novel. Dostoevsky himself occasionally used to label non-genre categories for his own literary pieces and works by other writers. In his opinion, the povest’ is not only a genre, but a type of narration, the content of a writing, a message, “a tale about the past” (Vladimir Dahl). Any epic work could be called a povest’. As often as not, a mixture of the povest’ and the novel was made intentionally. In the polemics regarding Dostoevsky’s debut, the whole range of genre and non-genre definitions can be found. Their consideration helps to solve the problem of differentiation between epic genres such as the povest’ and the novel.