Treatment of the notion ‘world literature’ is complicated by the problematic character of its components. This fact, in turn, prompts the need to challenge the approaches to the study of world literature, e. g. whether it can be defined by poetics, and if so, in what way would the latter be special? The everpersistent attempts to define world literature as a subject of a special mode of reading (D. Damrosch) or through the concept of distant reading (F. Moretti) are a clear indication of the demand for poetics as an art of reading a text, replacing the hitherto dominating cultural studies on the scholarly agenda. Both historical and comparative poetics are considered in terms of their potential applicability and development. Today, scholars are increasingly interested in the concept of historical poetics, originating in A. Veselovsky’s works. To test the application of historical poetics, the author suggests his way of reading the main plot of E. Zamyatin’s oeuvre, from the story Alatyr , which mythologizes Russian reality, to the world-famous dystopia We [ My ] in a world literary context.