Mikhail Bakthin, the great Russian theoretician of the novel, did not have the opportunity - for short-term reasons - to analyze in depth the work of Marcel Proust. In this article, written as a contribution to the colloquium “Bakhtine / Proust, glances crossed”, organized by Tatiana Victoroff and Luc Fraisse at the Gorky Institute of Moscow (October 2019), it is a question of this failure and its repercussions on the history of literature, especially for the evolution of literary genres between Dostoievsky’s polyphonic novel and the intertexte, post-novel genre whose development implies the recognition of In Search of Lost Time as an intermediate narrative genre, the autofiction.