The rulers have little time for literature. For them, poetry and fiction, as in the old reviewer's joke, "fills a much-needed gap". When American presidents are actually spotted with books, the things in question are usually garish bricks of pounding prose, with subtitles beginning "What" or "When" or "Why" ("Why America became the Greatest Power on Earth," and so on). The last politician who admitted to reading a novel was probably Chicago's Mayor Daley, and he famously only conceded to having "looked into" the work of that city's most famous son, Saul Bellow.

It is always hard to argue the political or ideological importance of literature with such people, and perhaps harder still during catastrophic times like ours. Many novelists, immediately after the events of September 11, said that they felt writing had become suddenly puny, irrelevant. But of course, literature had actually come into its own. For it had proved itself remarkably prescient. Don DeLillo, with his extraordinary ability to hold his novelist's finger to the breeze and sense a climatic turn, had already warned, in Mao II, that the terrorist had taken over from the novelist, and was now altering the "inner life of the culture". Long before him, Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent , portrayed the first suicide bomber. In that bitter depiction of London anarchists, a man known only as "The Professor" wanders the streets with a bomb and detonator strapped to his waist. He is, as Conrad puts it, "terrible in the simplicity of his idea". The Professor explains that this simplicity is the great advantage he possesses over his opponents. When the inspector from Scotland Yard comes looking for him, that stolid policeman is thinking of a hundred things - his promotion, the law courts, his wife, and so on. But the Professor is thinking of only one thing - the perfect detonator. Such people, explains the Professor contemptuously, "depend on life ... whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident."

It is impossible not to recall Conrad's prophetic powers whenever the mercenaries of no mercy are at work today. Conrad has been unwittingly quoted time and again in the last few years; the al-Quaida crowd are now quite fond of the Professor's life/death opposition. The Chechen rebels who took over the Moscow theatre delivered themselves of a statement that was a virtual replica of the Professor's disdainful arrogance.

Conrad was quite hostile to Dostoevsky, as a Pole might be expected to be of a Russian. But his hostility is proof of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," since no writer in English is more Dostoevskian than Conrad. And Dostoevsky has turned out to have great prophetic relevance for the troubles we find ourselves in. First of all, his work attracts lunatics, so that in any period Dostoevsky is always likely to appear, as it were, on the police blotter as "Exhibit A". The Unabomber was an avid reader of Dostoevsky. A copy of Crime and Punishment was found in Saddam Hussein's spider-hole when the Americans found him. And Laura Bush has said that her favourite piece of writing is the "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor", from The Brothers Karamazov, apparently unaware that this tremendous parable, although written by a fervent Christian, is taken by many to be the greatest piece of atheistical complaint ever mounted.

In The Possessed, Dostoevsky describes, with dripping contempt, a cadre of revolutionaries. They seem to quiver with ideology, but what really motivates them is a kind of murderous ravenousness that tears free of ideological accountability. Like Conrad's anarchists, they are feeble physical specimens, dwarves who plume themselves up with the thought of their private revenges. It is difficult to encounter the menacing, bullying Peter Verkhovensky and not feel that one has stumbled across a portrait of Lenin 50 years before his zenith. More relevant nowadays may be Dostoevsky's insight into the workings of bourgeois resentment, and his penetration of the wounded psychology of what he called the "underground" man - the apparently unimportant citizen who has been cast aside, who is not noticed by anyone, and whose dreams of revenge are in inverse proportion to his ability to enact them. The underground man, suggests Dostoevsky, is full of pride, a pride that is barely distinguishable from humility - because it is so full of anxiety, and is so little regarded by the larger society. Raskolnikov, who wants to be a Napoleon but who can only kill an old pawnbroker, is such a man. One way of reading the development of modern life, with its school shootings and serial killings and bling-infested billion-dollar rap artists, is to see it as a world in which bourgeois resentment has finally found the means to express itself: either because somebody hands the underground man a gun, or because somebody else hands him a blank cheque (and acres of willing newsprint). Terrorism, clearly enough, is the triumph of resentment (sometimes justified); and Dostoevsky's Russian revolutionaries are essentially terroristic. They dream of hard revenge on a society that seems too soft to deserve sparing.

Crime and Punishment has a peculiar vision near its end, as Raskolnikov, now in a Siberian prison camp, dreams of a terrible "plague that was spreading from the depths of Asia into Europe. Everyone was to perish, apart from a chosen few, a very few. Some new kind of trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in people's bodies ... Fires began, a famine broke out." It is an apocalyptic nightmare, not far from the "rapture" so beloved of American evangelists, in which Jesus will come again at the sound of the last trump and summon the faithful home. But we cannot read it now without thinking of Aids (or even of Asian bird flu). Connoisseurs of such moments in fiction will recall the end of Italo Svevo's funny, painful novel Confessions of Zeno , which seems to predict - in 1923 - atomic annihilation: "When all the poison gases are exhausted, a man, made like all other men of flesh and blood, will in the quiet of his room invent an explosive of such potency that all the explosives in existence will seem like harmless toys beside it. And another man, made in his image and in the image of all the rest, but a little weaker than them, will steal that explosive and crawl to the center of the earth with it, and place it just where he calculates it would have the maximum effect. There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the sky, free at last from parasites and disease."

Dostoevsky and Conrad, the analysts of rebellious impotence, would have appreciated Svevo's paradoxical comedy - the great annihilator, the ultimate terrorist, will look like the rest of us but be ... a little stronger than the rest of us? No, "a little weaker".