Abstract

The article dwells on the origin of the dystopian genre in the Russian classical literature of the 19th century in M. Saltykov-Shchedrin and F. Dostoevsky’s creative work. It is shown that a new genre created in the authors’ polemics of "The History of a Town" and "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" with the utopian novel "What is to be done" by N. Chernyshevsky was finally completed in E. Zamyatin’s "We"