The irony

Its ironic that Russia had the lowest literacy rate out of the Great European Powers, at only 5% in the 1860s yet that is when Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote their masterpieces

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1. Popular literacy only benefits midwits
2. Suffering builds character
There is no irony. You're just a smoothbrain.

I don't think you understand what irony means.

How is that a counterpoint?

Russians had very strict standards of literacy. A literate person was not one who knew how to read letters, but the one who actually understood short texts. Russian city dwellers and some peasants could read signs and tags alright, but they weren't considered literate if they couldn't fluently read the Bible or at least a newspaper from early XX century. Twitter shitposting was fully possible for them, make no mistake.
By the same standards, over 30% of modern people are illiterate.
Also, to this day the average IQ of a region today strongly correlated with its literacy rate in 1896 (the year of the last census, as far as I recall).

Neither does this influence the reading class. The only people who could allow themselves the leisure to read novels were literate and well-to-do in any society at that time.

dostovevsky was a hack and a fake christian

How is this ironic? Literature wasn't written for the masses it was written for the educated. Dosto and Tolstoy lived in a very interesting time in Russian history. When it gets written for the masses you get John Green garbage and similar shit.

And? Literacy gives nothing to high culture. Right now, most people watch such trash movie like Marvel and read YA shit. In the 60s, semi-literate commoners climbed into russian literature and brought nothing but dirt and garbage there. Literally before the beginning of the 20th century, russian literature was in crisis.

Dosotevsky and Tolstoy were members of the fucking nobility

And Dobrolyubov, Chirkashevsky, Levitov, Reshetnikov not from nobility. What's next?