Literary forecast genre in modern criticism

The article deals with the problem of the genre, which is studied in the theoretical-critical and historical-literary aspects. The results of the comparative typological analysis of texts containing judgments about the future of literature give ground to talk about the literary forecast as an independent genre and thus update the existing classifications. The genre carriers are the topic, problems, tasks of the critic, as well as the structure of the text, the image of the literature. The future of literature as the main theme of forecasting determines the procedure for specific critical world modeling. Tasks of the critic are to offer scenarios for the development of literature; evaluate contemporary literature from the perspective of the future. The structure of literary forecasts includes reflection on the task; finding of a “fulcrum”, allowing to create the image of the future; a picture of the future (or the present in the future perspective); the ending. Critics verbalize fear of forecasting. The fears of critics are connected not only with the uncertainty of the future as a subject of comprehension, but with the unacceptability of the status of a prophet, which is being outlived at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries on the wave of postmodernism and the crisis of literary centrism. Creating images of the future, critics draw on the figure of the reader, their requests, life in its socio-cultural dynamics, unfinished tendencies. The genre analysis is supplemented by a study of the content of literary forecasts, which allows to get an idea of literary critical thinking at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries, the diagnoses which criticism gives to the modern literature. Criticism of the turn of the XX–XXI centuries demonstrates an enduring trauma from the loss of its former status (of both criticism and literature), from the loss of the position of intellectual prose and poetry. This perceived “lack” in the present defines the picture of the future.