During Dostoyevsky’s time there were two significant and opposing directions in Russian literary criticism. One position maintained that art stood high above the present and the everyday, while the radical view maintained that art had a right to exist only if it found its sources in concrete reality, and, through the exposure distinction in principle between fantasy and reality, and reality was far more than the merely tangible.
The radical critics’ demand that reality be depicted “as it is” was meaningless for Dostoyevsky; reality was necessarily shaped by the person who experienced it: what may not be reality for you may be reality for me. The task of the writer was to explode the boundaries of the so-called real world. be so intimately bound up with the real that one almost believes in it.”
The radical critics’ insistence that art must serve a particular political view was for Dostoyevsky the equivalent of assigning to art “a shameful destiny.” A literary work must stand or fall on its “artistic merit,” he explained. The utilitarian claim that the formal aspects of a work were of secondary importance so has fully understood the author’s thoughts. Therefore, artistry is quite simply the ability to write well.”
The radical critics’ requirement that art must at all costs be “useful” to people and society seemed to Dostoyevsky unsatisfactory. How can we know what will show itself to be useful? Can we say with assurance how useful the Iliad has been to humankind? No, Dostoyevsky believed, when it comes to this purpose because we cannot see clearly what paths it may take to become useful.
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