The article proves the presence of two types of dystopian novel - a classic and an adventurous-philosophical. It compares two novels ( We by E. Zamyatin and Return from the Stars by S. Lem) based on Bakhtin‟s three-pronged genre model. The adven-turous-philosophical kind is formed by the transformation of the structure of the classical genre of dystopian novel. The principal difference between them is, first of all, in a different design of „meaningful boundaries‟ between the images in the work world and the world of the author and the reader. The classical variant is characterized by allegorical, satirical „familiar contact with the unfinished reality‟. Adventurous-philosophical kind experiments with the trends that are emerging only in modern empirical reality, or „eternal‟ philosophical questions. This difference leads to a change in the structure of the other aspects of the genre model. Classic dystopian novel reproduces philosophical satire code, another option is code of adventurous-philosophical fiction of the XXth century.