ABSTRACT
In his classic study Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (1965), Donald Fanger places Fyodor Dostoevsky alongside Balzac, Dickens and George Sand (all of whom Dostoevsky read avidly) as realistic in their fictional approach to nineteenthcentury life, but Romantic in their interest in visions, mystery and sensations.1 As realists ‘in a higher sense’, these writers were at odds with the more cynical Flaubert, whose novels deflate Romantic expectations and explore the adverse consequences of chasing unrealizable ideals. Flaubert was much more interested in formal economy and much less charitable to human frailty than Dostoevsky, whose psychological novels reveal more compassion for his protagonists than the French writer.2 As we saw in the last chapter, Sand was critical of Flaubert’s satirical approach and his attempt to divorce personality from art, believing it could only produce a one-sided picture of reality. In their running debate as to the true purpose of the writer, Sand argued that ‘criticism and satire depict but one aspect of truth’, while the true ‘goal of art’ should be ‘to see man as he is. Not good or bad, but good and bad. But there’s something else about him too: nuance, subtlety, shade.’3 Dostoevsky also used fiction to explore moral character, which tempered the more satirical impulse he shared with Flaubert.4 Whereas moral character is nearly always suspect in Flaubert, often leading to vanity, egotism or stupidity, Sand and Dostoevsky suggest it may be possible to retain goodness despite social, environmental and hereditary pressures. As this chapter discusses, these moral possibilities are central both to Dostoevksy’s The Idiot (1868) and also to the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 adaptation of the novel.
