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Abstract: 

Dickens's unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood is often referred to in Russia as a detective novel, the repu- tation it earned during The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, that is a few decades after the book's first publication. The Dickens schol- ars keep track of the history of the novel’s reception, of the shifting ideas concerning the work’s genre and the nature of the “mystery” of the title. It is known that, starting from 1870, Dickens's followers have been attempting to think up a continuation for the novel in various, and not just detective, modes. Among the employed forms and genre varieties one might mention the Victorian “triple decker”, a sensational narrative, a Christmas gothic story, a psychological narrative about the split personality of a criminal, a confession of a drug addict, various play trials, adaptations for the theater (starting in 1870) and for cinema (starting in 1909), post- modern interactive performances, etc. It is noteworthy that scholars manage to exhaustively describe the plethora of sequels to The Mystery of Edwin Drood with the help of traditional terminology, such as “continuation”, “version”, “imitation”, “adaptation”, etc. Up to the present, the scholarly discourse kept easily doing with- out the fan terminology, which is appearing within mass media culture (cf. spin-offs, parallelquels, reboots, crossovers, etc.), since it is hardly helpful in uncovering principally new perspectives on literary texts.