An important aspect to remember about classic 19th century Russian literature is that even though much of it was produced by members of the upper class, those authors tended to be very critical of the social order of the time: Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of a group of cospirators, sentenced to death and exiled to Siberia after a stay in execution; Gogol was a Slavophile monarchist, but much of his work (like Dead Souls) lampooned tsarist society; Tolstoy was critical of the tsarist state and organized religion (not private religion), and opposed private land ownership; Chekov was harshly critical of conditions in penal colonies in Sakhalin; Chernyshevsky was a prominent member in the Nardonik movement and had a direct influence on Lenin.

None of which is to say that any of these authors identified with Marxism, let alone Bolshevism (most of them died before the latter became a political movement). But none of them were comfortable with or vocal supporters of the status quo, and would have regarded themselves as members of the intelligentsia, which is a group that saw itself as class apart, critical of society.

The concept of an intelligentsia carried forward into the Soviet period, despite it not really fitting into Marxist class analysis. The relationship between the intelligentsia and the Bolshevik/Communist party was a complicated and at times fraught one - at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, the party, including Lenin, often saw the intelligentsia as ineffective and about to be swept away, but by the 1930s (as Fitzpatrick notes), the party tried to more or less identify itself with the intelligentsia, to the point that prominent cultural figures relied on the patronage of major players in the Bolshevik party (and therefore had the unfortunate tendency to fall from grace and even face execution if their patrons were purged in the 1936-1938 period).

Another important aspect about classic Russian literature and the Soviet regime is that prior to the 1930s, there very much was a debate whether to accept or reject this older literature. The issue was that in this period (which roughly coincided with the New Economic Policy era) the Bolshevik Party didn't have an official policy on the matter yet, so it was largely left up to different groups of writers and educators to debate what literature was appropriate or not. The group that came together as the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was very much in favor of a new, revolutionary literature that would attack works and authors that it saw as being at odds with Bolshevik ideology - it was something like a literary paramilitary, if you will. However, this group (which operated between 1925 and 1932) was just one of many groups, another notable one being Proletkult, which was an independent artists' group funded by the state and which considered Anatolii Lunacharsky, the then Commissar of Education, as one of its patrons. This period of separate, somewhat independent unions of artists arguing for what was the proper use of art in the Soviet Union largely ended in 1931-1932, when these groups were merged into the Union of Soviet Writers, and the Stalinist line as to what was appropriate culture was enforced. A focus on classic Russian literature (especially as a sign of "culturedness") was acceptable: the USSR was promoting Socialism in one Country, after all, and Stalin was keen on demonstrating why Russian history made that country ready for such a unique experiment (although living authors were very much to focus on Socialist Realism in their work).