ABSTRACT
In any case the two bodies of work, thought and fiction, were interdependent and mutually enriching. Literary critics, such as Belinsky and Dobroliubov, or religious, social and political thinkers, such as Chaadaev and Chernyshevsky, exercised profound influence on the views of their contemporaries, including writers of fiction, and often conveyed their ideas through discussion of works of fiction. Conversely, when thinkers failed to exercise influence it was sometimes because their purview seemed too narrowly literary. This was the case with Druzhinin, a talented critic of the middle decades of the century, who insisted on treating a work of art as a thing in itself with no broader, extra-aesthetic implications that interested him. The novelists, for their part, often took up and developed themes addressed by contemporary thinkers, as did Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment
(Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866), which carries certain contemporary radical ideas to what Dostoevsky sees as their logical conclusion. Writers who ignored the demand for topical content of civic import and subscribed to the doctrine of art for art’s sake, like the poet Fet, risked marginalization. Often the examination of a subject by a thinker complements one or more literary studies of the same subject. Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letter (first published in French in 1836 as Lettre philosophique) and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (Evgenii Onegin, written in the period 1823-31) illustrate the point. Thinkers themselves resorted at times to overtly fictional genres in order to convey their ideas, as did Ivan Kireevsky in a fragmentary work of utopian literature, Island (Ostrov, 1838), Herzen in Who is to blame? (Kto vinovat?, 1845-6), and Chernyshevsky in What is to be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863).
