| Zusammenfassung: | In Mikhail Bakhtin's collected works (Moscow, 1996. Vol.5) some fragments, left out from his book on "Rabelais and the folk culture" (1965), were first published from the archive. Among them ten pages are directly devoted to Shakespeare. They are important for both Shakespeare and Bakhtin, whose carnivalesque theory works here within a complex structure of significance. Bakhtin draws on Shakespeare's tragedies to demonstrate how symbolic ritual dominates over two other planes—of history and the everyday, and how from the interplay of them Shakespeare's generic structure emerges. The fundamental belief shared by Russian theoreticians of literature, so different in many aspects as Bakhtin and the Formalists, is in the verbal nature of genre, not a prescribed pure form but a struggle of genres within every text. Generic approach based on these principles since the end of the nineteenth century has been known in Russia as historical poetics. In the present paper these generic ideas underlie the analysis of Shakespeare's last comedy Measure for Measure. The new reflexivity was under way and changed the concept of genre in Shakespeare's later period. Measure for Measure is a work of a mixed genre and cannot be otherwise with its plot based on the delegation of power; power being, since Aristotle, the most definitive generic criterion which signifies the status of a hero. In this ‘problem play’ the very idea of genre, presented as the play in its wholeness, is sliding down the scale of power.
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