A drunken row over the merits of literary forms in Russia ended in a poetry-lover stabbing a champion of prose to death, investigators say.

A 53-year-old man in Irbit, a town in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals, has been charged with the murder of another man, 67, said to have been a friend.

They were drinking spirits in the friend's flat when he reportedly said only prose was "real literature".

The accused, a former teacher, allegedly stabbed him before fleeing.

Police found him hiding at an acquaintance's house in a nearby village.

According to a local police report, the accused has confessed to the murder and faces a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

The victim of the attack, which took place on 20 January, had had pieces of his own prose published in a local newspaper.

He was described as someone who had led an "anti-social lifestyle and abused spirits".

The alleged killer had apparently been lodging with him for several months before the fatal dispute.

In September, in the south Russian town of Rostov-on-Don, a reported argument about the philosopher Immanuel Kant ended in an air pistol being fired and one man being injured.

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