Genre as a Category of Poetics (Problems, Tendencies, Perspectives)

The article is focused on one of the key categories of historical and theoretical poetics — the category of genre. Until now, many issues related to genre and the genre analysis of a writing remain unsettled. The article considers the main problems of studying the category of genre, as well as different approaches: genetic, functional, systemic, typological ones. The emphasis is laid on the history of the study of the category “genre” by formal and sociological schools. A particular attention is paid to the contribution of P. N. Medvedev to the development of the genre as a category of poetics, as well as to the concepts of the genre by D. S. Likhachev, M. M. Bakhtin, G. N. Pospelov, V. V. Kozhinov, V. N. Zakharov, L. V. Chernets, N. L. Leiderman and others, some aspects of studying the category of genre in foreign literary criticism are considered. It is proved that, despite the idea of “atrophy”, the genre still remains significant both for the writer’s artistic thinking and for certain “expectations” of the reader from the text.