It is kind of like how modern art doesn't mean modern today. It means that time period where people called art "modern". Novel meant new as in "novel science results". It was used differentiate prose (the new style at the time) from epic poetry back in the 16 hundreds and stuck. How that translates to Russian IDK.
throwaway290|2 months ago
But "novella" (different genre) is a thing in russian.
WJW|2 months ago
Hypermodern openings emerged after world war 1.
One can only imagine what the old masters would call current chess theory.