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PHILIP RAHV
certainly true of Dostoevsky, in whose sphere we have now
learned to move without undue strain but who shocked
his
contemporaries by his open and bold reliance on melodrama
and by the seeming fantasticality of his characters. The Russian
reader had learned by that time to identify the hurried, equable,
lifelike realism of writers like Turgenev, Goncharov and Tolstoy
with the higher norms of the novel; and what those writers
scrupulously avoided above all was the sensational and ex–
cessive. Dostoevsky was hard put to it to persuade the reader
that he too, despite his startling deviations from the newly–
established norms, was a realist. Hence while writing
Crime
and Punishment
he fretted over the thought that his story would
gain no credence from the public; and since he had long been
trying to defend himself against the charge of insufficient regard
for the real, he was pleased to note, shortly after the appearance
of the first installment of the novel, that a crime curiously
similar to the one he was describing had been committed by a
Moscow student and reported in the newspapers. He at once
seized upon this item as confirming his own "special view" of
the relation between
art
and actuality. "What the majority
call fantastic and exceptional," he wrote to the critic Strakhov,
"sometimes signifies to me the very essence of reality.... In
every issue of the newspapers you come upon accounts of the
most real facts and amazing coincidences. For our writers, who
are unconcerned with them, they are fantastic. But being facts
they are reality none the less."
But this appeal to actual life-formless, disorderly and
inconsequent life with its "most real facts and amazing co–
incidences"-is unworthy of the genius of Dostoevsky. In spite
of his opposition to such radical-minded simplifiers of the rela–
tion of art and life as Chernishevsky, Dobroliubov and Pisarev,
critics exceedingly influential in their time, he was himself far
from immune to the idea then prevailing in his intellectual
milieu that the work of art was useless and perhaps even im–
moral in its inutility unless directly v:alidated by life or "reality,"
