The research paper is on the problem of the genre originality of “Iron Woman” by N. Berberova, which the author defi ned as an infnovel. The key to understanding the art form of the work is the writer’s subtitle “life story” and A. Voznesensky’s definition “documentary life story”. The latter was the author of the book’s foreword. At the same time, another important object of the writer was depicting the historical background of the main character’s life journey, her epoch and the tragedy of a whole generation doomed to death. This adds certain features of memoirs to the fiction-documentary text. The synthesis of these two plans, the genre fusion leads to the emergence of an interesting transformation, which can be defined as “history within a biographical story”. Thus, the book under analysis is considered to be innovative in the context of the memoirs-biographical genre paradigm of the ХХth century.