Here's what's funny. You know what they used to call a book that foregrounded the soap opera elements you're talking about? A novel. That's why Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel. Now, if you go to Wikipedia, War and Peace is also categorized as a novel. What else could you call it? But it's funny to imagine a time when novel was a genre.
I think you mean romance? A romance used to be a Roman-style long narrative fictional work that described extraordinary deeds, soap opera plots. Novels were more concerned with realistic narratives describing the nitty gritty of everyday life.
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.
There is no "novel" (as like "new" thing) as genre in Russian lit. in russian things called "novel" in english are called a russian word that is a translation of "romance". and tbh "romance" makes tons more sense than "novel".
But "novella" (different genre) is a thing in russian.
I don't speak Russian, but whatever the Russian word is for "book." Or maybe others called it a novel but Tolstoy rejected the label. I'm not sure.
Either way, the word "novel" wasn't necessarily equivalent to how it is used today: any book length work of narrative fiction.
Though watch out, this is a rabbit hole. Just look up novel on wikipedia. You'll see a big orange message at the top which is the first sign there is a problem. And then the article is excessively long. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to define what a "novel" is.
