Problem of Genre in Dostoievsky's the Diary of a Writer : Tracing the emergence of a new 'mongrel genre'

Genres are vague categories with no fixed boundaries, they are formed by sets of conventions, and many works cross into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. The Diary of a Writer is such, a unique enterprise, a felicitous combination of reminiscences, dramatic sketches, essays, short stories and opinion pieces that enabled Dostoievsky to enter into an informal dialogue with his readers that reached far beyond the scope of even the most controversial of his novels. In this light Dostoievsky's much noted and commonly tracked genre feuilletonist writings, allows for much freedom as far as its content, composition and style are concerned. The text, which presents the contents of a journal written, edited and published by Dostoievsky over a period of eight years, is a hybrid, which means that it makes use of different genre structures. It therefore becomes a central task of criticism.