Five Articles from Time (1861)

A chainsaw is great for felling trees.  It isn’t a great pillow.  Getting to know a chainsaw’s strengths and weaknesses can help me use it more effectively.  The same is true for fiction.  Dostoevsky explores what fiction does well in articles he wrote for his journal, Time.*  

What Fiction Does Well

1.  Creating an Impression

“Talent is given to a writer for the sole purpose of creating an impression.”

The impression the story leaves is what makes the story well written.  If it leaves the reader cold, the writing hasn’t been effective.  But the great storyteller brings dead facts to life—facts the reader may have encountered hundreds of times before but were transformed by the story’s telling.

2.  Arousing Sympathy

“The more sympathy a poet arouses in the masses, the more he justifies his appearance as a poet.”

In other words, the best fiction strikes a chord within its reader, addressing an intuitive need.  The reader may not even be aware of this need, but the fact that the story interests the reader signifies that it may be providing medication for an undiagnosed illness.  This is what Dostoevsky here means by “sympathy.”

3.  Entertaining

“The best book, whatever its subject, is always entertaining.”

Dostoevsky does not believe in separating art from entertainment.  Amusement is palatable to the reader partly because the reader feels respected by the writer, that the reader’s enjoyment is noticed.  Dostoevsky sees himself as the reader’s equal, wishing to render a service by giving the reader pleasure.  When he was in the military, he enjoyed reading adventure stories to the soldiers.  He sees the ideal writer as someone who craves to live among his readers and converse with them endlessly.

This is one of the reasons why Dostoevsky thought that stories often fail when their aim is to enlighten.  Readers hate to be looked down upon, and instruction embedded in storytelling often feels that way.  

4.  Providing an Approach to Reality

“Art is always true to reality to the highest degree.”

Dostoevsky sees fiction as an art that can explore reality, particularly the realties of human nature, in ways that philosophy and psychology can’t reach.  More rational disciplines have a tendency to distort reality in order to fit it into their systems, but fiction, unencumbered by constraints of theory, can feel out reality with all the versatility of experience.

5.  Evoking Beauty

“Beauty . . . is always useful.”

Fiction has this advantage over analytical writing: theories can be wrong.  And if they can be wrong, they can be harmful.  Mercury was once believed to cure yellow fever.  The theory was wrong, and many died from the treatment.

Great fiction, on the other hand, is always helpful.  Its guiding light is beauty, and people are regularly benefited by beauty in ways that theories can’t keep up with.  For example, I know that my life has benefited from reading The Brothers Karamazov, even though I can’t totally articulate how.

Dostoevsky sees art as having a life of its own, and for it to flourish, it can’t be dictated to, not even by the artists themselves.  He sees his creative spirit as existing separately from his own aims.  The greatest artists learn to ignore the demands of critics and the ridicule of fellow writers and learn to sacrifice even their own pre-made ideas in order to follow this spirit.  “Man’s creative ability,” he writes, “can have aspirations other than those to which the man himself aspires.”  

*Time Articles Referenced: “Introduction,” “Mr. —bov and the Question of Art,” “Pedantry and Literacy; First Article,” “Pedantry and Literacy; Second Article,” “The Latest Literary Controversies.”