The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

A prominent artistic and literary movement of the 19th century, realism seeks to depict objective reality and describe people, events, and other subjects accurately, as they occur in real life. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work falls under this movement, and with a particular focus on the human experience, he portrays his characters through a psychological lens. As is the case with the narrator of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” psychological realism delves into the inner world of the character and portrays what they experience on the level of emotions, thoughts, and perspective, examining the wider concept of human condition through one character. Exploring the mental world of the character becomes therefore the central point of the story and the driving force of the plot.

Dostoevsky recognized his affinity with realism but added his own qualifier in a famous letter explaining his view: He called his approach “fantastic” realism. He claimed that the extreme, eccentric characters and events that appear in much of his fiction are fantastic when compared to most realist novels. This is necessarily the case, he said, because he is trying to describe a “higher” reality and thus to achieve a higher form of realism.