During Dostoyevsky’s time there were two significant and opposing directions in Russian literary criticism.
Topic
Dostoyevsky / role of art
Framework
Present Debate
Main Point
Dostoyevsky rejected thinking of art as high-minded transcendence or as a vehicle for explicitly combating injustice, favoring instead a notion of art as something coming from the artist's reality (including the artist's fantasies) and primarily focused on delivering artistic excellence, rather than on serving some useful societal message.
Summary
The first sentence alerts us that there are two significant and opposing directions in Russian literary criticism. Whenever we get two or more points of view that are not the author's, we start to think in Present Debate form, assuming that the big ideas to track in the passage are the various answers to some central question.
We can tell from the second sentence that the central question these two different school of thought are pondering is something like,
Position 1 - art stands high about the present and the every day (this position means very little to me when I first read about it. I end up understanding it more by defining it as the opposite of what we learn Position 2 is all about). Basically they think that art should be about transcendent realms of beauty / profound timeless stuff, not the muck and prosaic minutiae of everyday life.
Position 2 (radical critics) - art should depict reality as it is, in concrete reality, and expose suffering and injustice, so that it can be useful to the world.
Position 3 (Dostoyevsky) - art should pull from reality, but reality can include what we experience in real life within the sphere of the fantastic. And artists should worry most about communicating their vision well, not about how useful their vision is (who knows what art will prove to be useful).