The article deals with one of the most important issues of current methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, and, on a larger scale, of teaching foreign languages, which is the problem of adapting a literary text. The study is relevant today because there is a need to introduce a scientific and theoretical approach to this problem, since the underdeveloped theoretical and practical system of tools complicate the adaptation of the original text, and, consequently, the reading and understanding of the adapted version of the text. The article describes the author’s long-standing experience and presents the results of the comparative analysis of authentic literary texts and their adapted versions taken from Russian textbooks for foreigners. The question is raised concerning the correlation between the concepts of a secondary text and an adapted text. The academic novelty of the research con- sists in formulating the concepts of linguistic and non-linguistic principles of adaptation. The non-linguistic principles (citation, deletion, reordering) relate to the structural changes in the work of fiction, while linguistic principles (replacement, reduction, addition, inversion) belong to the sphere of language. A definition is given to the concept of an adapted literary text. A classification is proposed for the types of adapted literary texts (fragment text, editing text, variation text).