The article deals with the phenomenon of the final book (f.b.), which is investigated in the context of cultural memory. The genre syncretism of the f.b. expresses the desire of artists to create the “text of texts”, which accumulates the answers to all the aspects of the personal life and being. The poetics ofthe f.b. by Dostoevsky and Pasternak correlates with the genre intention of the European literature of the Middle ages and with the idea of creating a “Secular Holy Book”.

The article represents the mnemonic view of the poetics of the “final” novels by F.M. Dostoevsky and B.L. Pasternak. The processes of memory and forgetting are regarded in the aspect of interdependence of the vitalogic and thanatologic discourses that form the multilayer nature of the plots. The category of the “vital life” is opposed to the metaimage of the theatre which is formed by the semantics of the artificial, false, untrue.