The practice of literary criticism came to Russia in the eighteenth century as a part of the Westernizing reforms of Emperor Peter the Great and, Empress Catherine the Great. In the 1830s and 1840s, as literary criticism became a profession, literary discussion directed at a newly emerging reading public crucially contributed to a debate about national identity, which became known as the debate between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. Westernizers such as Ivan Turgenev, the critic Vissarion Belinsky and the reformist thinker Aleksandr Herzen wanted to follow the European trajectory laid out by Peter the Great towards a Europeanized, secular culture. The account of Russian literary criticism differs from Soviet-era accounts in its vocabulary and in its greater emphasis on cultural and intellectual networks of people and ideas. Belinsky's view of literature as the bearer of enlightened social consciousness intensified throughout the 1840s, after his break with conservative Hegelianism in 1841.

Debates about genre, like debates over Romanticism and Classicism, could have a political dimension. This sort of understanding about the nature of genre continues into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Surveying nineteenth-century Anglophone criticism in search of statements about genre, one finds mostly scattered comments in histories and assertions derived from Romantic thinkers. Historicism's struggle with psychology is an underlying dynamic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of literary kinds. Historical considerations helped the Romantics view genre as something that could perform philosophical and psychological work. Nineteenth-century Russian criticism, like Italian criticism, can be divided into liberal and conservative camps, though the Russian critics influenced by Vissarion Belinsky were more progressive in their politics than the Italians influenced by Francesco De Sanctis. Literary practice also helps place in perspective the fluctuation of generic hierarchies among nineteenth-century theorists.