The publication aims at verification of a conventional in-terpretation of the Early Medieval Chinese literature traditional concept of wen as elegance in the modern literary studies. Treatise Wen xin diao long (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) by Liu Xie (ca. 460‒522) occupies an exceptional place among the sources for studies of traditional Chinese literature typology and, in particular, of its early me-dieval period. Conventionally, it is believed that in 20 chapters of the treatise, Liu Xie described his contemporaneous literature as an ordered system of genres. The aesthetic principles of elegance (wen) and plainness (bi) of literary works were used as the basis for a consistent representa-tion of genres. Each of the principles functioned as a genre-formative fea-ture, and literature writings were represented by Liu Xie as a two-component body of texts: the genres belonging to the wen category were described by him in chapters VI‒XV of the treatise, and the genres of the bi category ‒ in chapters XVI‒XXV. The differences in the genres of these two categories in the modern scholarly literature studies are interpreted in terms of their form. Wen are genres either specifically poetic, or with a rhymed form of speech, or with parallel construction of phrases, or deco-rated with figures of speech. Accordingly, bi genres are of prosaic speech without any such embellishment. The translation of the two chapters was done to verify this thesis, and the descriptions of the two dialogue genres in Wen xin diao long were compared. They are duiwen (answer to a question) in Ch. XIV “Za wen” (“Mixed Works”) allegedly belonging in category of “the elegant literature” (wen) and dui (examination answer to the question posed in a special imperial edict) in Ch. XXIV “Yi dui” (“Meeting and answer”) from the ordinary or plain literature (bi) cate-gory. Historical material and survived texts of the contemporary works were used to identify features of the genres. The analysis has proven that stylistic features of the works (rhyme, parallel phrases) were not essential for their attribution to one or another genre. Other significant genre fea-tures have been indicated. It was noticed that the shortcomings of the modern interpretation of some passages in Liu Xie’s text might either in-dicate inconsistency of the author’s approach, or imperfection of these passages translations into modern languages.