Soviet Theory of Literature and the Struggle Around Dostoevsky in Recent Soviet Scholarship

The acceptance of prerevolutionary cultural values in the Soviet Union has been constrained by the development of official interpretation of Marxist-Leninist dogma and its application to the changing historical and political conditions and issues of the day. The evolution of the official Soviet approach to nineteenth-century Russian classical writers thus has been a process influenced by ideological and political considerations. At each stage of development of the Soviet state, Soviet officials devise the necessary literary policy and literary theory with which the values most pertinent to Soviet society at a given stage of its historical development can be extracted from a work of art created in a bourgeois society by an artist alien to the cause of the revolution.