The article deals with problems of terminological unity, forms and boundaries of «memoir» genre in modern literary criticism on the example of F. M. Dostoevsky’s works. A lot of his letters, «Writer’s Diary», and also many fragments of his novels are closely related to memoir genre. Thus the laws of memoir narration are revealed in these parts of Dostoevsky’s literary heritage different in genre nature, but entering the original interaction with their own genre’s principles.