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 of want and injustice, it contributed to the creation of a new society; literature, in other words, should be useful. Dostoyevsky took a third position. As a realist, he never doubted that reality was literature's crucial source. But his understanding of reality went deeper than the one prevailing among radical critics, since for Dostoyevsky there was no 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. Within perceptible "reality" exists another sphere, the fantastic, which is not in any way superfluous to a writer's concerns: "The fantastic must 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 long as its goal was good and its purpose clear struck Dostoyevsky as a contradiction in terms. Only fully realized artistic works could fulfill their goals. But what does it mean to say that a work is "artistic"? Dostoyevsky defined it thus: "To say that a novelist is `artistic' means that he possesses a talent to express his thoughts in characters and images so that when the reader has finished the novel, he 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 we encounter breadths that cannot be measured with any precision; sometimes a work of art may appear to deviate from reality and serve no useful purpose because we cannot see clearly what paths it may take to become useful.